ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff I ****ed up big time...

Running it again now with SB range, gonna share results tomorrow probably but is so annoying after the effort I put on the write up to find out is all wrong . Guess there's something to be learned anyway, but yea, pretty ****ing tilting . Thanks for stopping by as always
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Day 16 - May 13 2020

Woke up 9.10am today after snoozing from 8.30 and catched up with strategy channels on the stable's server and watched a HH review on RIO + a video on the stable's website showing how to use Simple3way and going through some sims.

Wanted to use the software myself for a while but went to have lunch with a friend so that will probably happen either tomorrow after grinding or the day after since I'll take the day off too to have shabu lunch with my gf.

It was a productive day and all but have nothing to show for in terms of results/sims/summaries

No doubt that the best thing to share in here are HRC sims, which is what I used to do the most before the challenge and what I enjoy and learn the most from too. So more of that to come tomorrow most likely

Nice work here, Rama! Hell of a month last month (and '19). Stay hungry.

Hey bro, thanks for stopping by and thanks for your words . Im eternally grateful to you guys for trusting in me back in the day and for helping me grow so much as a poker player. For much more success to come in the future 🥂
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Day 17 - May 14 2020

Went over some marked hands from today. Let's look at one -somewhat- interesting mw ai spot and to the PIO sim from the other day that I ran again with SB range this time instead of BB's range

Hand 1


I dont know why I like to go over this mw spots in HRC more than HU spots. I think that if KTs makes it in, it would be bottom or close to bottom as I dont see K9s calling but I think KJs in this type of scenarios performs very well.

For BU shove, I have this:


I stripped down some marginal shoves that HRC was getting in always and I dont think pop is shoving. To be honest, I even think this can be too wide. Maybe is my experience of always calling and seeing a decent hand, or maybe is my own nitiness I project into other people's ranges as Boli said, but yea, think the bottom of this range could be stripped down even further, but lets go with this for now.

For SB rejam I have this:


Once again, is pop reshoving JTs here in SB's shoes knowing they're most likely an underdog (and having me to act yet?), what about K9o? HRC also wants to go with JTo (+0,17), Q8s (+0,19) or even K7o (+0,10) but I bet anything you want that pop is not rejamming this stuff even tho HRC is showing how profitable it is. I'd love to see some H2N work on this, but Im quite sure that most people at my stakes are playing way more snug in this spots.

With these ranges, we're making a decent profit with KTs and bottom of our range would be 33, A5/6s abd QJs that -surprisingly- is making less than A8o (I thought in this spots a suited hand with more chance of making nuts is better than a weak Axo but apparently nop):


Hand 2

This is the hand from other day, that Boli's pointed out I ran with BB range instead of SB range so I re-ran it yesterday with proper ranges

First difference is that since we're against a stronger range, we're not cbetting range but doing it at a 52% frequency:


On the turn, we can see that villain has to keep on barrelling 55 to a high frequency as I said in the other post and imo checking is leaving a lot of value in the table. In the case he checks back (which he should be doing about a quarter of the time in equilibrium), we should be always be putting a bet in with our exact hand, and checking back AJs if it's the heart combination:


The next mistake villain make is just calling our bet. Regardless to which sizing we choose, he has to be re-raising with his boat, calling is almost a 0% frequency play:


As I said in the other post, not quite sure whay villain was going for here as is not an intuitive land and doubt he was basing his decisions on PIO work (although you can never fully know ). This would only make some sense if he has a read on me going crazy vs perceived weakness and even then given the board runout and my range interaction with it, I think the only play in his shoes is to try to shove all the money in the pot himself by the river.
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This is all for today. Tomorrow plan to wake up early and re-watch a Buffyslayer coaching he did on our stable last month about pop exploits based on our combined databases and take a bunch of notes to share with our group. Unfortunatley, I wont be sharing this here as I feel is not fair for the bosses that paid him to do that kind of work with the group nor with him as he's charging for doing that kind of work and sharing it here for free is not right. I'll report here anyway for the sake of the challenge. Glgl ev1

Day 18 - May 15 2020

As I anticipated yesterday, started going over Buffyslayer's old coaching on population exploits and taking notes and copying some of the Hand2Note charts on a LibreOffice doc. Nevertheless, there were some technical issues with the video streaming so I could only peel through the first 45 minutes of the session or so. Will hopefully finish it within this next week.

Also watched latest Sam Grafton's video on RIO where he reviews a run made by him @ the Sunday Million. Most interesting spot came on the last hand of the video where he r/c QJs from the BU vs SB reshove for 26bbs. Shared the hand on the strat channel of the stable as I thought it was spewy/bad but I tend to give full credit to extremely good players and wanted to see what opinions from others were. Dont think anyone liked it and I even got some response along the lines: "HS crushers sometimes **** up the easiest spots" .

Sorry that I have nothing to show for today's session except that anecdote, hopefully more HRC spots or PIO stuff for tomorrow.

Day 19 - May 16 2020

Another somewhat productive study session but with nothing too interesting to show.

I started by running a PIO sim, not from a particular hand but just to check how to play one rainbow board I was not sure how to approach MP vs BU @ 45bbs.

While that sim was being solved, I kept on watching buffyslayer's session and taking notes. Feel this should be the way to watch any coaching session/RIO vid, taking a bunch of notes and watching it at least 2x, the problem is that there's so much content out there that is hard to do for every video, but this one feels like a good choice for doing that as is very data heavy.

It's been kinda annoying as the last couple times I visited the site where all this coaching sessions are hosted the video kept on stopping and playing at very low quality fps (480fps and less ). Not sure if the problem is on my end, with the website itself or with the video hosting service where all this sessions are uploaded to. Is a shame cuz under normal conditions I should've finished this already but it's gonna take a couple days more at least with this pace.

Finally after peeling through the sim I was ready to call it a day, but they posted an interesting vid BencB did with BBZ on the stable's discord server so I decided to watch it as it was only half an hour long. Since I was going to be doing that for a while more, ran the same sim but for a board with fd.


This way of running PIO sims is not optimal for sure, but my PC is not powerful enough to do an aggregation report so I have to do it this way. Guess is still better than no solver work at all. I been slacking with upgranding the RAM on my PC from 8 to 16 GB and right when I was ready to do it this coronashit hit so it'll have to wait a couple more weeks at least. Not even sure if this laptop has a free slot for more RAM nor if 16 GB is gonna be enough to run aggregation reports but I'll find out once Computer City reopens.

Going for dinner now and then watch a TV show and sleep. Tomorrow will grind in the morning as usual and will hit the gym in the afternoon as they were allowed to open after almost 2 months shut down. Was hoping for football fields to open before gyms but no luck so far.

Good luck all.

Day 19 - May 16 2020

We keep racking up uninteresting study sessions. This time it was just some random PIO stuff and three or four meh HRC spots. I'll share one just because...

Hand 1


ChipEV spot. I called here but it ended up being a fold. Shover is a good solid reg on the tighter side. This is what I gave him for shoving here:


I think that AA-QQ with this stack and from this position is always a MR to induce. Some of the bottom stuff can be too loose for a villain like him but still might jam it at some frequency. Against this, we call the following range:


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As said, quite an uninteresting spot/study session. If you want something more insightful check out this post in Swann97's blog, that's exactly what I'm trying to achieve in here.

Might watch a video or at least a part of it next, there's a new RIO coach I been wanting to check out for a while called Kyriakos Popadopoalous, always nice to see the insight of good MTTers.

I'll leave you with an album (and a band) I been digging lately, can't run bad this sunday with this kind of music:


Good luck everyone

Day 20 - May 17 2020

Played an 11h session today, from 4am to 3pm. It was pretty meh overall, ended up cashing in a decent tourney for $500+ and on the very last one of the day (and the culprit of the session being that long) ended up 2nd for $950 or so, so it was not the worst sunday. I played my first $109 in a while since I had table space and was feeling good to take a shot and obviously ended up how this shots normally end up: with me going out with a set of kings all in on the flop for a stack of almost 100bbs losing to A2dd on K85 with one diamond (no, you're not reading it wrong). And there's people that say there's no money to be made in poker anymore...

Anyway, super tired right now, just checked some marked hands from today and as it has been the last few days, nothing too interesting to share.

Was trying out Simple3way for the first time and after setting up the whole sim for over 20 min had some technical difficulties and it was all gone . Gonna try again tomorrow, not in the mood nor with enough energy to do anything else with that.

Will share this hand just to show you guys something, but is a dull spot that wanted to check just to make sure I was not too ool.

Hand 1


This is what BB should be calling in nash equilibrium:


And if he's calling that, then 62s is too wide to be shoved


Nevertheless, regardless of how good of a reg BB is, I really doubt he'll be calling the most marginal stuff. I dont even think that on a 25k regs will be calling stuff like 98o, Q3o or T6s in this spot. But even if they do, I doubt the average reg at these stakes/sites is calling all that. I think this is way more likely:


And against that we can shove any suited combo quite profitably and we're quite close to being able to jam ATC. So if the BB is a fish or even a tighter/weaker reg we can print with a shove:


I used to be quite tight on both ends of this spot for maaany years until not so long ago . Thought that this could help some other MTTer out there that still struggles with both clicking shoving or clicking the call button when a bully SB jams on them.

Day 21 and 22 - May 18, 19 2020

Yesterday at 11pm Thai time did a review with one of the backers of the stable, Brian (CrazyB15). Wanted to update the thread right after that but we finished almost at 1am and had to go to bed as I was waking up early today.

After a quick check of my stats on PT4 (nice to see Evbb/100 sitting at 11.82 for the year ) we filtered for OOP Cbet opportunity spots and went over some hands as is a difficult spot to approach for me.

Found it very insightful and the biggest takeaway I got is that equities run suuuuuper close (hard to see any range having more than 51% equity). Guess a good approach would be to play your hand most of the times and be very careful when running multi street bluffs as we cannot justify three barrels because "we have range advantage".

After that we drilled some HJ vs CO 30bbs spots on DTO. It was my first time using the program and Im very impressed by it, think I like it more than SimpleGTO and as Brian said it can possibly be a more effective way to study GTO than looking at PIO trees as is very easy to get lost in the minutiae for one particular hand which is not always the most effective use of our study time.

Today I woke up and kept watching the population exploits video by Buffyslayer and taking notes. This task is taking way more than I expected but Im transcribing many of the H2N charts to the .doc and that's quite time consuming. I think is gonna be worth it as Ill end up with a nice file with the most important data from the video summarized and processed for further consult.

I'll do a little bit more of this and then probably catch up with the strategy channels of the stable and watch a video from RIO, there's a bunch of good tournament reviews on there and they're by far the most entertaining/insightful content for me.

No sims today, so to not have such a dull post, let's finish with some Zambian prog Rock from the 70s . Good luck all

Day 23 - May 22 2019

Took yesterday off and today I didnt play and woke up straight for the study grind.

Had some hands marked for review, this one being the most interesting of them:

Hand 1

Question here is how to play this flop after BU opens 2x and calls our 4x 3b.


In game I went for big flop bet and all in ott but was not sure this was the best line. Check calling made some sense but it gets very dicey. Betting small was the least appealing option but after running it in PIO is the way to go apparently.

Ran it with solver ranges so they might be too wide for what population has in this spot but I think in this cases is best to go with that and adjust "manually" (or mentally) rather than go node locking. This had some interesting debate and POV's on the stable's strat channel.


Interesting to see we choose a smaller sizing with our hand along with AA-QQ and other combos with two overs to the board. It makes sense for JJ-88 to go bigger as they need more protection but still I would've imagined this board was played more polar, with big sizing or checking.

It was pointed out on the chat that IP continue range looks unrealistic for population and that could be making this 1/3 bet size a thing at all:


Besides some of the peels with overcards that might be hard to find for population, I think the most important discrepancy between this strat and what most people is doing, is that 55, 66, 77 and 89 are pure calls: I expect most of the regs at my stakes to be 2betting this trying to gii on the flop.

When checked to (which was the line I liked the most after betting big that is what I did in game), IP has a very stab small heavy strat as seen here:


Might run it node locked in the upcoming days, but happy with this answers for now and the debate it generated on the chat.

After running this in the morning watched Ryan Martin's latest RIO vid on his series "The Pursuit of Winrate". Great content over there, a little bit too dense at the end as he spent the whole video on one hand only, but still great content and a great use of the study time. If you have access to RIO, make sure to check out that series.

Day 24 - May 23 2020

Last couple times I checked for marked hands I only saw 4 or 5. Today I marked a couple and when I went to review them I saw the same 4 or 5 from yesterday. Then I realized I had a filter set up from my last coaching session and it was only showing hands where there was an opportunity to cbet. Once the filter was removed, I saw like 30 or 40 hands that were piled up all this past days

I had been grinding DTO a little bit and Im going to the gym after finishing this post so only ran the ICM spots.

Most interesting one (that is quite meh) is the following one:

Hand 1


Villain is a decent reg. He should be opening close to his std range here because with my stack (that he's obliged to call) and UTG stack, SB and BB can put some pressure on him by 3betting semi light as they cover him and busting for him here is terrible.

Nevertheless, I think he can still go a tad wider than what he normally would because blinds know he's commited to call my shove so he cant be super wide, and I wont be reshoving much either as BB is hitting UTG next hand so I have a good incentive not to bust this hand.

I was pretty sure AJo was a shove, along with KQs and something like 66+, but ATo feels like a fold. This is the range I gave CO for opening given previous considerations:


As expected, ATo is a fold, and in the pocket pair territory we're only shoving 88+:


Even if we think that CO can be wider like this for whatever reason...:


ATo still makes virtually no money, same as 77:

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If everything goes as planned tomorrow will be the last day of the challenge. Wont do anything crazy, since this thread was mostly HRC sims I'll stick to that probably (and I have a bunch of ChipEV spots to run that were hidden under that filter anyway ). So see you tomorrow for the wrap up of the A.C. challenge

Day 25 - May 25 2020

Yesterday ran a handful of HRC sims but didnt find anything too interesting to share so decided to wait until today to wrap up the challenge. Today didnt have any interesting either but I'll share one just to have something to show on the last entry.

Hand 1


Multiway HRC spots are so fun I dont know why but I love them. I folded this one and it was correct given the assumptions I made. Let's start with my opening range:


As you can see CO has only 4% 3bet, which is not extremely relevant as he's reshoving on a steal situation with 15bigs but can give us a lead of a tighter villain. Nevertheless, I gave him a somewhat standard reshove range, only slightly tighter than what HRC suggests to see if AQs makes it in:


And then we have BU 4bet rip range for 34 bbs which can't bee too loose as Im still uncapped. In my experience this can be even tighter than the range I assigned him (AJs and 77 are not a 4bet jam for most players in this spot) but once again I wanted to see if I can call with my hand here in a best case scenario and go from there:


And as I expected, we can only call AK, TT+:

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End of the Challenge

Well, as expected, I finished the challenge with no problem. This thread served its purpose of making me accountable for my study sessions and was helpful to gain more of them as I had to put in words some results and conclusions from sims that otherwise would've been processed without much attention.

I tried to make it as interesting and digestable as possible for readers but I always knew the main reasons for doing this was accountability for myself and sharing what I learned was just a plus. I thought that making this public on a platform such as 2+2 would push me to put in the sessions yes or yes, whereas if I did this on a more familiar enviroment like the stable's discord server or even on a excel spreadsheat just for myself, I could slack and dont do it on a timely manner.

Special thanks to Boliver for stopping by and adding value to the thread with his always sharp and detailed input. His voice (or writing in this case) has been a constant in my poker career for the past 4-5 years and is one of the main reasons of me being here today, along with Chance and BHo who took me in the group back in 2016 and helped improve my game so much.

Is a shame that more people didnt comment or shared their thoughts/critics/insights but I think is understandable. There are better "technical" threads in this forums and I think that most of the attentions in PG&C is drawn by more lifestyle blogs that offer a lot of entertainment value.
There was a thread asking about the state of the game nowadays and why 2+2 is not as active as it once was, and one of the responses was that people are moving their learning elswhere, to discord servers or private groups, and people that come here to the forums dont do it to learn or improve their game for the most part.

I wont close the thread but I'll let it get buried down in the forums. It'll be good to have it open as I might have something to say in the future and having an open channel in the forum can't be too bad.

So from this nice and chill room in Chiang Mai, sitting at 26°C under my now well amortized A.C. I say goodbye and thanks to all of you for following this challenge.

Good luck to everyone,

Rama

Just caught up, was interesting to follow!

Hi Rama

Just read through the thread now and think there was a lot of value so thanks for posting it publicly. One question that’s probably quite basic if you don’t mind, do you have a cut off point for making a play that’s plus chip EV if it’s quite marginal. For example in your last post you say you would shove 88+ but 88 is not making a huge amount so would you in practice only shove 99+ just in case you are slightly wrong with your ranges?

Thanks a lot for following! Glgl

Im happy that you found the thread valuable, giving back something to the community was one of the main reasons to do this besides holding me accountable for my study sessions.

With regards to your question, I think is a very good one and is something I always ask myself when running this kind of sims.

We have to differentiate first if the sim we're running is ChipEV (early in the tournament when we're just playing for chips and even though there's ICM from the very first hand technically, at this point in time we're not thinking about it) or if it's an ICM situation (final table, f2t) where every chip can be easily translated into a % of the prize pool or into money.

Second case (ICM situations) shows the results as a % of the prize pool won/lost. The hand you mention where 88 is barely making a profit, this result is expressed in % of the prize pool. I dont remember exactly how big the prizepool of that tournament was but 88 is making +0.04, so if it was a 5k GTD for example, getting 88 in makes us $2.

I think in this same thread Boliver (one of the backers/coaches at the stable Im at) says that when we're looking at ICM spots, we dont want to pass anything that makes at least +0.05%.

For ChipEV situations or even for ICM ones, after you get the output by HRC, there are other factors you can take into account.

For example, lets say that shoving with X hand on a chipEV situation is making you 5 chips and your stack is 10k: this gain is so minimal in relation to your stack, that passing this edge can be the best as you're risking 10.000 to win 5. Here is when you have to assess other factors: how much Im risking to win X? how though is the table? can I find better spots in the future? how is the stack situation around me?

If you have 15bbs and you have Apotheosis and imluckbox sitting to your immediate left with 100bb+ stacks, Id be more than happy to take my 5 chip profit by shoving, as finding a better opportunity to profit can be though . Now if im sitting at a table with two 15/12/4 and 12/10/3 nits to my left, then I might pass on the 5 chip edge as I may be able to steal some blinds since I expect them not to reshove on me so much, take down single raised pots with a 33% cbet, etc.

With all this said, I remember back when I attended some BBZ classes, that he would say that taking ANY spots regardless of how tiny the profit is, is the way to go, as if you fold you're losing the hand every single time, so if you're making even 1 chip on average that's a win.

Not that Id dare to question him but I think that approach might be sub-optimal for the stakes that I play and passing edges to take advantage of future situations that may come up on soft lineups might be the way to go.

You also ask if I might pass on an edge in case I gave him wrong ranges. Keep in mind that HRC solutions are just models that we can use to study certain game situations, but that same situation is probably never happening again in the future. So the biggest value there is when running this kind of sims is playing around with ranges and stack sizes and seeing how that affects the output, so when you face similar situations in game you have a better understanding of how the spot works.

As most times when it comes to poker, there's no final definitive answer , hope my response makes some sense and gives you some guidelines to think about this spots in the future. Dont hesitate to ask if I didnt make myself clear and good luck to you.

Thanks again Rama really appreciate the detailed response plenty for me to think about