rly cool blog - booked!

Yeah but if they itch 50-75% more than usual after having unprotected seks, there's a chance you have the herp, esp if you have flu-like symptoms.

Basically the above

Thanks I'm a little busto atm but when I have more monies I might contact you for life coaching. I've been thinking of getting some life GTO coaching recently.

Really enjoying your blog, Simon. Your writing style + sarcasm: deluxin' it. Btw, did u read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (referring to Midas from your name)?

Liked the Volume/BRM/Theory approach for rating urself. So if a player is not a winning / breakeven player it makes sense to focus more on theory until he can win at ~2-3bb/100, right?

As you can tell, I am considering the possibility I am in the above category. What would u rather recommend for theory, Math of poker or Applications of NLHE? Or neither?

Thanks, good luck and run better!

And oh yeah, FatCat ur cool too (no h.omo)

You do not misplay a hand. You make a couple of good clicks. And you make one click that you shouldn't have made. The goal is to find that one click..



I found this hand to be really interesting.
Naturally, i didn't feel great about it. But my bigger problem was that i didn't know which click cost me money there.

1) The call of the 3bet?
2) The call of the clickback?
3) The call of the pot-reraise?

Additionally, we have a main pot and a side pot.
Give it a shot. What's my mistake, and why?

4 cards yolo allin imo

2) because that 'll inevitably lead to 3) and MP has a lot of hands that hurt our equity vs SB's AA$ss+

I am by no mean a PLO expert, but I do not call the 3 bet here with the bet still open... you always play this deep? You must have quite the edge to play 580bbs deep...

Interesting question. This is my last year in PLO w decent stack size.



Looks good, i couldn't have told you before checking though.

Destroyer of worlds

Seems like calling the 115 has to be the biggest mistake given it's clear what's happening at that point.

I don't think we can ever fold to the 3b given how frequently the action just goes sqz/call/call and we do super well.


That being said, I don't think it's even THAT big of a mistake. We have 43ish% and our hand flops quite well (and we're exactly sure of what he's got).

Which means we put in 1k and get to decide when the extra 1500 goes in.

I am not sure you know what the word exactly means. It seems to me he will have a range of hands in this spot, not just AAxx, assuming that is what you meant.

maybe saying 'we are kinda sure what he probably has' would be a more accurate way to say it.

2) The call of the clickback

since they see that you are not excited to GII so they will try to get you out of the pot and pick up dead money.

what has to no be cosidered to be the OP of this thread spotted. promptly gave him the fishtag too

Yeah, but Im a professional poker player, not a streamer, content creator, poker coach etc nor do I want to shift into that. All I would get is losing 150k/year to get some points in a system where I would not be at the top because only the people at the top would make money, ike/jungle/etc and I would have 0 piece of it.

So, i was looking for a certain kind of inspiration. Inspiration is something that
you get through coaching (expensive) or in real life (generally cheap).
The next morning, I found this paragraph in the local newspaper:

LAUGH ABOUT YOUR LIFE!

We are a dedicated group of individuals ("I am not an individual" - Life of Brian)
who meet once per week to laugh about each other.

COME JOIN US! (WEDNESDAY AT 19 P.M.)
MEETINGS GENERALLY TAKE 30-60 MINUTES. NO FEE!

First thing i thought about was Fight Club.
I actually started browsing through the newspaper for
breast cancer groups, but then i figured that that'd be a pretty cheap joke (also
i absolutely hate pulling stunts that aren't my idea).
As you can imagine, next wednesday at 7 o'clock, i was at the PLACE of the MEETING.

Turned out the guy who organized it all was named Brian, and Brian was full of
"Life of Brian" quotes. Uber full, to be exact. Ultra full.
You could say that he enjoyed Life of Brian to the fullest (his quote, not mine).
There was also Sara, who was devoid of any quotes whatsoever, but full of laughter.
The nastiest laughter that i've ever heard, in fact.
And Jim, who was kinda mousy and quiet (I suspected him to
be a psychopath looking for prey), until he started laughing, and he had the BIGGEST
laugh that i had EVER heard. and i am talking BIG, here.
And me. I kinda laugh sometimes, not too loud, don't wanna annoy people.
Bit loud tho, don't wanna seem like i am not having fun, or that i care about what
people think of me. A well modulated laugh, that just kinda works out.
It's supposed to be smart, attractive and full of subtle humour (Haven't put
much thought into any of this though).

So what do we do?
Essentially, one guy (or girl) starts. He (or she) tells a story out of his daily
life (or daily grind, as they call it, which really made me laugh).
The story doesn't have to be anything special. Can just be like "Today,
i woke up, and felt like i needed coffee to make it through the day".
At which point everybody starts laughing. They usually start slowly, and most of
the time the person who told the story starts. Then, somebody points out what's so
hilarious about it ("Need coffee to keep going!"), at which point the laughter definitely
picks up speed. Next quote, "coffee, heroine, it's all the same, right?",
next big wave. "You got all the world around you, but you just wanna focus on yourself,
don't you? Always focus on yourself, ladies and gentlemen!"
This isn't funny, but people start laughing more and more.
"I mean, why enjoy the sun when you can pity yourself for being tired!"
Big wave.
"Oh my god, i am tired. If the world ended today it really couldn't get any worse!"
Biiig wave.
"Man i am so tired, today something bad is gonna happen."
One peak, but it dies down overall. There's some suspense here.
"I can't make it through the day. It's so tough. Coffee."
Still nothing.
"This is the day where they find something. Something bad."
People get the drift now and start chuckling.
"Like my wife probably has cancer. What am i gonna say?"
And now people THROW THEMSELVES OFF OF THEIR CHAIRS with laughter.
"I am too tired! What am i gonna say?"
People laugh and laugh and choke and go absolutely nuts.
"Man, cancer today would be the worst!"
This is unreal.
"Really the WORST day for it!"
And they just keep going.

Turns out the meeting only took about 30 minutes.
I told a story about how it annoyed me that my girlfriend touched my glasses with her
nose when she gave me a kiss, and people were close to suffocating from that one.
At one point i noticed that my laugh had turned from the well modulated, attractive
kind to the insane type, like an animal. Like i was being exorcised.

I'll probably go again.

quality

you can't make this stuff up

Beside good laugh, is there something else you enjoyed or liked about that meeting?

because i got into the habit of doing that, and it's alright. I am also pretty sure that i just had an abysmal session of poker, and that's not fun.

A bad session of poker isn't good. We'll have to focus on poker. We'll do something that is gonna make our games better:

Folding Ranges

We'll analyze how folding ranges affect our decisions.
When you're in the Big Blind, then the chance that somebody has already folded a 2 is higher than 66%. The chance that somebody has folded an ace is only around 30%.
The chance that just UTG and MP folded a card between 2 and 8 is already 30%.
Also, the chance that the first 3 positions folded a 2 is roughly the same as the chance that they folded a 7. Around 43%.
Essentially, if you open the button with any card between 2 and 7 in your hand, then the chance that you pair that card is 43%/4 lower than if you had opened that same hand in a "clean" scenario. That's almost 11%.

The solution

We inject those cards back into the deck after the preflop action is over. For example, if it's folded to the button, who open raises, then we'd have to add 11% of a 2, 11% of a 3, 11% of a 4, and so on.

In order to inject the precise amount of cards back into the deck, we'd have to be 100% sure which hands every player opens from every position.
The pokersites will need to develop a preflop tool that opens the right hands for everybody, but that shouldn't be a problem.
I believe this is the only way that we can ever get a clean poker experience, and i fear that we've played a tainted game for many years.

Thank god i figured this out. Until you guys have read this, this knowledge gives me a unique edge over my competition, so i'll go back to grinding.

**** me this thread gets better every Time. And Iam german, my english sux and i only understand half of it. Go on my dear friend

Players should also have to rate their favorite suit, so you can weight folding ranges accordingly.
Everybody loves is a solid population read. But clubs? What about spades? Would someone open 42 in EP because they were in the armed forces? Holy ****! We need to know people's jobs!
That chinese flower shop assistant opens 52 from MP because the digit sum is 7 which is the lucky number for relationships, meaning poker feng shui pretty much dictates good vibes for a suited hand. The clover leafs on both cards also add up to 6, pretty good for business! How could you fold such a good karma hand?!
We need more information. And we need it fast.

Hey guys, long time no see.

Sorry for the lack of updates, I've been pretty busy grinding and wakeboarding recently. Also had a few friends over for a few days so took a few days off. I also got into some legal trouble with the government again, I'll get into that later.

Anyway this month has been pretty swingy. I had my worst session in over a year, -9k (about 10bi) so that was quite tough. Luckily I've almost recovered from that and only down 2k or so for the month. Mostly because I ran so **** bad on the arab site. I lost about 10bi in in 600-700 hands there which is pretty insane. The last time that happened to me was 2 years ago when jinmay and his russian friends godmoded at a 10/20 session on a Tuesday afternoon. I lost 20k that day in about 1000 hands.

Anyway I have the sh.its again and some fever, probably the herp again so that kinda sucks. Although the timing is OK since I wanted to take a break from poker again today. I've been kind of stressed these last 4 weeks as I started playing slightly higher steaks than usual. I need to think about how it's affecting my life. I'm actually considering playing lower steaks and making a bit less money, but being able to live with less stress. I've realised that being a professional poker isn't about making the max amount of money, but just about being the happiest you can be. I'm not sure the extra stress is worth the 25-35% extra or whatever I can make playing higher games. It's an interesting thing to think about.

So yeah, legal troubles. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the swedish government has been crawling up my ass about unpaid taxes etc... and they've been sending me letters asking me to pay them some monies. I just ignored the first few but then a big swedish dude with a red beard came knocking on my door really loudly. I was pretty ****ing scared because he looked like a character from Games of Thrones and he proceeded to tell me the swedish king (who apparently goes to strip-clubs on a regular basis so kind of a bro) wants me to pay my taxes and that if I haven't payed 30k USD (they use some weird type of monopoly money here, like Krona or something, which means "crown") by the 15th of July, they will send me to a swedish jail for 3 months and force me to eat IKEA meatballs with some weird marmalade which is rumoured to have camel ass hair grease in it.

Since the above doesn't sound very appealing to me, I will be moving to Bangkok at the end of June. I'm actually going there next week to scope out the place and meet some friends who are travelling. Anyway I'm pretty pumped for bkk as I've heard a lot of good things and seems like a fun place to go. If any of you guys are there and wanna meet to talk about poker strat or life strat or whatever let me know.

Bangkok seems like a trade-off between legal trouble vs. dick trouble. Most GTO thing might be to move to a country that has no extradition treaty with vikingstan, solid amount of sunshine and less herpes. That is what Saul says. Considering blocking backdoors might help too overall.

[x] the s.hits
[x] the herp
[x] the government
[x] somebody crawling up somebody's ass

Fatcat. We've had all this before. It's boring.
Also, instead of letting people digest this amazing piece of information that i posted (about folding ranges. Yea, that one out of all the amazing pieces), you derail the thread to talk about your bs again. Sigh.

Let's get back to the poker. Somebody recently asked me to look over some of his 3betting ranges, and i realized that the way i was trying to give him input was very new to him. For that reason i'll give all you non-pro's some piece of info that could end up making your games better.

A comprehensive intro to building 3betting ranges - Part 1

Terminology:

3bet - Re-raising against a preflop raise
EV - expected value. The value (compared to folding) that a decision has.
Equity - The chance of winning a hand with no further action
Fold to 3bet % - How often somebody folds to your 3bets. You should be able to find this stat somewhere in your tracker/hud.
Fold Equity or FEQ - The chance (typically as a percentage, but is equivalent to a BB/hand or share of the pot / hand winrate) of getting a fold
Value range - The hand range that 3bets for value, meaning that your expected EV is bigger than half the pot + Fold Equity for every single hand.
Bluff range - The hand range that 3bets as a bluff, generally simply meaning that your EV is higher than 0.

So, let's say you're in the BB, and you want to create a 3betting range against the player on the button. There's loads of things that we don't know:

1) How does the player on the button play?
2) How would we find our value hands?
3) How could we find our bluff hands?

We'll start by thinking about a very simple idea:
Betting or raising in poker creates a trade-off between equity and fold equity.

We'll think about the validity of this by assuming that there was no trade-off, meaning that your equity would stay the same no matter how much fold equity you generate.

Before, our expected value was equity * pot.

Now, our expected value is fold * pot + call * equity * pot.

Essentially, we add a case where we have 100% equity (we always win the pot) to the case where we have the same equity as before. The result must be a bigger number than before.
We would always bet or raise if we put in any chips.

In reality, things look a bit differently:

equity * pot (as before) compared to FEQ * pot + (equity-x*FEQ) * pot. So now, for every bit of FEQ that we generate, we take away some of our equity (that's what the "x*FEQ" means). This makes sense. Now it's our goal to find the spots where the trade-off is advantageous, and that's what we'll do next.

Our approach is the following:

1) Find out how much equity we need in order to consider bluffing
2) Based on that, find hands that could 3bet bluff
3) Out of those hands, find the hands with the best FEQ-equity trade-off

1) How much equity do we need?

fold * pot - 4bet * 3bet-amount + call * (equity * (pot) + (1-equity) * -3bet-amount) = 0

We either get a fold, a 4bet, or a call. If we get a fold, then we win the pot. If we get 4bet, then we fold our bluff and lose our 3bet-amount. If we get called, then our equity determines how often we win or lose the pot.

In order to solve that formula for the needed equity, we need 2 numbers and one range:

calling range - What does the player on the button call with?
We'll need this range in order to look at the equities of different hands. Before we can do this, we'll find all the other numbers first.

fold - How often does the player on the button fold? You'll find this number by feel, or by looking at your HUD. For this example, we'll simply assume 55%.

4bet - How often does the player on the button 4bet? Again, you'll have to estimate, or look up.

The way we'll find this number right now is pretty simple:

[TT-AA,AK] / 1326 combos = 46/1326 = 3.5%

This is the 4bet value range. You can simply adjust it if you think people 4bet tighter, or looser for value.
Now, generally somebody should 4bet bluff around half the time, which would be another 3.5% range. However, i would assume that people at small stakes don't 4bet bluff enough.

[bluff range] < 3.5% = 2.5%

Entire 4bet range = 6%

So, this Button player folds 55%, and 4bets a 6% range. In order to continue, we'll have to estimate how often he raises the button in the first place. I'll simply assume 50%.

This means that he 4bets 6/50, or 12% of the time.

fold = 55%
4bet = 12%
call = 100% - 55% - 12% = 33%

We can solve for the equity now:

55% * pot - 12% * 3bet-amount + 33% * (equity * (pot) + (1-equity) * -3bet-amount) = 0

OK, not quite. We also need to think about the betting and raising amounts.
Let's assume the following:

The player on the button opens to 2.5 Big Blinds, and we 3bet to 8.5 Big Blinds. This means that we risk 7.5 BB's for our 3bet.

55% * (SB+BB+2.5BB's) - 12% * 7.5BB's + 33% * (equity * (8.5BB's+SB+BB) + (1-equity) * -7.5BB's) = 0

_______
Aight, solve that formula for the needed equity, and you'll get Part 2.