300/600/600, about 75 minutes to go in day 1 of the main, awful table draw considering that its day 1 of the main, I've ground my 60k start stack up to 89k and like the idea of treading water and starting fresh day 2 with a better table draw.

V1(UTG) = 50ish white guy, 2nd weakest player at a table of sharks, not a fish but don't think he's capable of making too many moves. Has about 35k

Hero(UTG+1) = early 30s white guy, has been playing on the solid side but probably not viewed as that big a nit, covers the other players

V2(UTG+2) = Late 30s white guy, his 2nd hand at the table, looks pretty Euro-ish, has about 65k

Preflop: Hero in the 1 seat mistakenly thinks he's UTG and makes it 1500 with QQ. Sadly V1 in the 9 seat is actually UTG. He makes it 1500, hero calls, V2 calls, and everyone else folds

Flop (6000): KQ5r. V1 checks, hero 1800, V2 calls, V1 folds.

Turn(10600): Tc bringing a flush draw. Hero 5k, V2 18k (with 43k behind).

4 nut, dynamic board and position? Call and evaluate river. I don't know how to interpret the preflop lead after you acted out of turn, was he hoping you raise? Or was he such a rec that he did not know a call would have given him the option to check raise?

This is an excellent question. I'd love to hear thoughts on what people think villain does with AA in this situation.

So you acted out-of-order pre? What are the rules about how action before you changes your out-of-order action? Like if V limped does your raise stand? Does his raise allow you to take your chips back and fold? Do you have the option to reraise?

Happy to exploitatively 3b/f pre if UTG repops it and reeval if someone else if the 4bettor, and I go to sleep that night 100% thinking I'm maximizing my EV that way.

I think you'd be pretty surprised to see how tight a GTO 4b range is, and I'm also willing to bet people are way underbluffing with a 4b (and also likely overcalling) hence I'm happy to 3b and really don't think it's a tragedy if we have to fold to a 4b.

I agree to try to get a 3b in pre and just fold to a 4b from an utg opener that might be tight.

I think that if utg limps, the heros raise is binding. You would think a smart opponent would limp with AA/KK and just put in a re-raise over open but utg+1 (hero) in this spot. This doesn’t happen too often in live mtts but def can profit from someone acting out of turn.

Btw I’m sure I’ll receice flak for this but why not just open to 1800 in spot like this? You have 100bbs. I don’t see point of going under 3x as a standard open when stacks are so deep. If you had 100bbs bad the average was say 40-50bbs, I can get behind going much smaller but I don’t see point of going 2.5x so deep

I assume your plans have changed and you are now playing for stacks unless an A,J, or club comes? I think i am more concerned about the 30bb cr than the .5bb raise suggestion. i think you have to call a shove on a river blank...

Yes, yes, yes and yes but more importantly, if utg called the 600 bb, he would have been last to act and could cr the 1500 raise by hero.

I like check on turn for pot control/set up a larger river v-bet if checked behind on turn. I wouldn't hate check/call then lead dry rivers either. imo if you bet 30% pot here 3 way on KQ4r any A,9,10, or J is going to be tough to play on the turn and you are most likely behind when you get raised on those turns. People seemed like they were always nutted on day 1 of the main.

The theorizing I've done on open sizing has led me to adopt a 100% minopen strategy. Not saying it's correct, but here's my logic:

I don't open every hand in my opening range 100%, but I do try to stretch my overall opening frequencies from each position to the absolute max which would imply I want to open as small as possible. I can definitely buy the argument that if we're playing in a super loose, fishy game where the focus is on fat value and minimizing our bluffing that we should go bigger. Like have you ever played in a crazy home game where people open 10x as a default?

But I think when you also factor in that uncertainty is at it's highest preflop (more players remaining in the hand and only 2/7 cards have been revealed; once flop peels fewer players remain and 5/7 cards are revealed so there's a highly non-linear relationship between being preflop and postflop and the amount of uncertainty) if we had a multiway GTO solver dream machine my hypothesis is it would always prefer minopening except in certain spots like BvB where there's a little less uncertainty because so few players remain in the hand--we can afford to go bigger in a BvB spot because we lose those opening chips so much less frequently by virtue of being heads-up.

I think the later and later we open, the MORE likely we are to see bigger opens be the equilibrium, but then again the later and later we open the wider and wider our open range becomes which would tend to drive down the open sizing so the push-pull dynamic that sets an equilibrium I think still, regardless of opening position (except for SBvBB), is gonna set the equilibrium sizing to be minopen.

I just don't see why we'd every prefer going bigger than 2x, absent some exploitative read. The argument that it makes it easier to get stacks in when we're deep doesn't actually hold water when you consider how infrequently we make a hand that's truly an unimpeachable GII (we make the nuts so, so infrequently), and that becomes truer the deeper we get.

I think the only argument that makes sense for going bigger is equity denial, but we deny so much less equity preflop than at any point in the hand (that's related to uncertainty--uncertainty basically just translates to equities being at their most diffuse, most evenly divided between players) I don't really think that argument holds water either. Plus, at least online, minopens even at level 1 (with antes!) still often get the pot heads up, if not win the pot outright because BB doesn't defend often enough vs minopens.

I personally think going bigger than 2x is highly exploitative and should be used accordingly. But then again, BB defense in particular vs a minopen seems to be done highly suboptimally (not enough defends) so maybe minopening is the exploitative play???

I think what constitutes optimal open sizing is one of the great unsolved poker problems.

That's what I thought the rule is, that hero's raise is binding if UTG limps. So I do think he would limp AA, KK here if he were astute.


__________________

OP, AP:

Since you could pull your chips back and reset once UTG opens I'm just gonna assume you and IP player have similar ranges because you essentially both flatted an UTG open, you probably have somewhat similar flatting ranges in this spot.

Therefore you don't wanna be doing much leading here.

I think that Tc is a pretty good card for your range so you wanna be barreling often here but that implies you want small sizing so I think 5k is way, way, way too big.

Checking is good too.

AP call the raise and decide OTR. If V bets big it's not a 100% snap, in fact if he's totally nutted here it's a fold OTR.

Thanks for the analysis as always EMB.

Could you elaborate a bit on why I should be betting smaller on turn? This is super counterintuitive to me, in fact I expected to get feedback on this hand that 45% pot on turn was too small, not too large.

I think I'm jamming turn here and I don't think it's particularly close.

I just don't think that AJ or J9 are peeling the flop very often at all even for that small of a bet. I think it's much more likely that he has a KJ/QJ/JT type hand that turns more equity, he turns it into a semibluff hoping to fold out AK/AQ type hands but still has a chance to make the nuts if called on the turn, and can also potentially bluff clubs if he doesn't have a club draw to go with it.

He also could very easily have TT in which case just get it in.

I think there are a ton of bad rivers to play OOP if we just call, we aren't playing this hand to catch 2 street bluffs. I'd just take the odds that I'm rarely behind here, the times I'm behind I still have 10 outs (don't think he has KK here like almost ever), and jamming turn just simplifies things so much because we don't have to worry about what to do if the river is an A, K, J, 9, club.

At one of the WSOP mains back around 2008-09, I remember an internet kid who insisted he had legitimately reraised from the sb when he threw an oversized chip without any verbal. It was in a pot where an UTG player who had not played a hand for the entire time i was at the table opened and was called by a similarly tight pro. After the floor explained the oversized chip rule and the hand was over, kid shows ajo. This was a hand where if you were paying a modicum of attention, you would never be raising aj oop against the opener and pro.

Which brings me back to the preflop open - what kind of hand would a guy, if paying attention, would raise the same amount as you from UTG? I would have to believe an idiot with a big ace. Do idiots think aj is a big ace? Absolutely. So ak, aq, aj are all in his likely range. If he had aa or kk is he third, fourth leveling you by betting into you? Did you have any kind of read on this guys preflop action?

Why didnt you raise him pre? I assume 2.5 was standard table open? I think the other club card, the k,q, or 5 becomes important to know as well. He could have KQcc for two pair and a draw, etc...

I dont see any point in jamming turn as you have position.... if a scare card comes on river and it goes check check, its still a 33% increase in your stack as is at the end of day one.

jjjou hero is OOP now, the opener x/f the flop (seriously what could he have had here??? JJ or TT? Any "big ace" is at least a pair or a bwy draw)

JoeC I'd have to go back and look at the tree I ran but I'm assuming that smaller sizing is good bc since you guys have similar ranges, that Tc is good for V too so we have a spot where we wanna barrel a lot, but we're barreling into what should be a pretty strong range, which means our bluffs dont wanna go too big, whivh means our value hands need to come down in sizing to protect our bluffs. Think its purely a function of the width of your barrel range

My tree has the turn equilibrium strategt be mixed barrel 10% of the pot (!) and x

I know you don't run sims but here's the tree config:

#TreeBuilding#V2
#Range0#AA:0.015472293,KK:0.012596011,QQ:0.2890623 81,JJ:0.940246582,TT,99:0.988945007,88:0.959869385 ,77:0.98008728,66,55:0.906860352,44:0.836557007,33 :0.1,22:0.1,AKs:0.003578067,AKo:0.47998035,AQs:0.8 91967773,AQo:0.635009766,AJs:0.908752441,AJo:0.937 530518,ATs:0.838867188,ATo:0.85,A9s:0.812988281,A9 o:0.1,A8s:0.836425781,A8o:0.1,A7s:0.675927734,A6s: 0.33,A5s:0.629418945,A4s:0.62734375,A3s:0.22636230 5,KQs:0.727539062,KQo:0.871704102,KJs:0.87890625,K Jo:0.33,KTs:0.698876953,KTo:0.1,K9s:0.096113281,K8 s:0.0398803711,QJs:0.828622437,QJo:0.1,QTs:0.80440 6738,Q9s:0.1,Q8s:0.1,JTs:0.751977539,J9s:0.0138793 945,J8s:0.1,T9s:0.168745117,98s:0.249555664,97s:0. 1,87s:0.0549560547
#Range1#AA:0.015472293,KK:0.012596011,QQ:0.2890623 81,JJ:0.940246582,TT,99:0.988945007,88:0.959869385 ,77:0.98008728,66,55:0.906860352,44:0.836557007,33 :0.1,22:0.1,AKs:0.003578067,AKo:0.47998035,AQs:0.8 91967773,AQo:0.635009766,AJs:0.908752441,AJo:0.937 530518,ATs:0.838867188,ATo:0.85,A9s:0.812988281,A9 o:0.1,A8s:0.836425781,A8o:0.1,A7s:0.675927734,A6s: 0.33,A5s:0.629418945,A4s:0.62734375,A3s:0.22636230 5,KQs:0.727539062,KQo:0.871704102,KJs:0.87890625,K Jo:0.33,KTs:0.698876953,KTo:0.1,K9s:0.096113281,K8 s:0.0398803711,QJs:0.828622437,QJo:0.1,QTs:0.80440 6738,Q9s:0.1,Q8s:0.1,JTs:0.751977539,J9s:0.0138793 945,J8s:0.1,T9s:0.168745117,98s:0.249555664,97s:0. 1,87s:0.0549560547
#Board#Kd Qc 5h
#Pot#6000
#EffectiveStacks#63500
#AllinThreshold#67
#AddAllinOnlyIfLessThanThisTimesThePot#500
#MinimumBetsize#100
#FlopConfig.BetSize#10, 30, 66, 100, 150
#FlopConfig.RaiseSize#50, 100
#TurnConfig.BetSize#10, 33, 47 66, 100, 150
#TurnConfig.RaiseSize#50, 100, 3.6x
#TurnConfig.DonkBetSize#10, 33, 66, 100, 15010, 33, 66, 100, 150
#RiverConfig.BetSize#10, 33, 66, 100, 150
#RiverConfig.RaiseSize#50, 100
#RiverConfig.DonkBetSize#10, 33, 66, 100, 150
#FlopConfigIP.BetSize#10, 33, 66, 100, 150
#FlopConfigIP.RaiseSize#50, 100
#TurnConfigIP.BetSize#10, 33, 66, 100, 150
#TurnConfigIP.RaiseSize#50, 100
#RiverConfigIP.BetSize#10, 33, 66, 100, 150
#RiverConfigIP.RaiseSize#50, 100
____________________________

Here's the turn strat:



AJ can go bigger since it's the nuts and we can primarily balance it with your best bluff(s) (this is an example of a FatValue/BestBluff node) which are mainly JTs and A5 and Ac2c-Ac4c (stronger AcXc have more SDV on the flop and thus prefer checking over these weaker Ax combos, which are therefore better flop bets--meaning you have less say Ac7c in your turn range than say Ac3c). JTs is a bluff (one of your best) because w can get folds from AT (which V has a lot of) and also some Kx and Qx will need to fold too:

Notice how tight his turn raising range is? Think V's will be underbluffing here, but perhaps overraising TT. Then again, the tendency may be to overfold TT OTF (a big mistake IMO) while still continuing with the AJ-type bwy draws (and folding AJ OTF is terrible btw if you're in V's shoes), in which case V will be unbalanced to AJ to begin with, which means when he does raise...






For you, 55 can go larger occasionally because those unblock Kx and Qx--V's continue-with-worse range. QQ heavily blocks that range and thus never wants to go larger than 10% pot.

But most of your range simply isn't comfortable going that big and you do have a range advantage here which means you wanna be barreling frequently so the way to reconcile that is to mostly barrel tiny.

Dont mind my lack of reading skills.....

Sorry about dumbing up the thread, I had v1 and v2 switched....oop i would shove turn.

FWIW this is pretty close to my thought process; I do think AJ peels the flop if he can have it, but a lot of players are (correctly IMO) folding AJo preflop here, so while I have AJs squarely in V2's range I don't think I'm dodging a full 16 combos of AJ.

TT would be a pretty loose flop peel, I mostly discount villain having that, though who knows with all the randoms playing the main.

Agree were pretty much never seeing KK.

I'll post results tomorrow. Thanks all for the feedback!

If he doesn't have AJo, then he shouldn't have J9s. There's no logical reason to not have the former but to have the latter besides "It was suited". AJo is an objectively better hand than J9s.

TT are about 65th percentile of V's range so they're really not a loose flop peel. Think about how much money you can print if you lead 22 here and V folds TT. You can lead your entire range here in fact if V folds TT. So TT should absolutely still be in V's range.

BUT, the tendency clearly is to overfold TT OTF, he prob also overfolds JJ (one of his best bluff combos) OTF too, he may be raising KQ (which you heavily block) but then again I think 2pr mostly just calls here (As it should).

So I think his raising range is gonna be exploitably strong compared to your hand (not enough worse hands relative to equilibrium) and you have no incentive to jam into an exploitably strong range heavily blocking his call-with-worse range.

This seems like wishful thinking. He's not capable of floating a small flop lead with a draw to the nuts, but he is capable of turning top pair into a semibluff after that flop leader barrels on a card that's really good for flop leader's range?

He's gonna bluff clubs without a blocker to clubs? Would be pretty spewy.


Definitely not a valid reason to jam.

But these are definitely reasons to go smaller OTT.


Results?

I’m reading V for AJ J9s calling the raise and reeval river. Fits action perfectly. Not his entire range but too much of it to call all in on river

Also agree smaller pre 1300 but w/e
Also would like to know rules about pre action at wsop me but assume bet stands unless UTG raises to more than 1500 in which case all options are returned to H?

Entire hand depends on ability of V to make moves here. I’m a little confused as to which V has raised but believe it’s the straightforward V1? If so, then has AJ.

Villain is the 40ish euro looking white guy who just sat down. I have no reads.

I want to make sure I understand these ranges correctly as I don't know how Pio inputs work. It seems like each hand has a weight... ex: AA .015 vs JJ .940. Those particular figures make sense; seems like we're saying we almost never have AA because we want to run a mixed strategy that almost never flats, and we can very frequently have JJ because we run a mixed strategy that almost always flats. I agree.

The problem is that it looks like we're including a lot of hands that simply never get played vs a UTG raise. Hands like ATo/KQo/44 are (correctly IMO; pretty sure others will agree with me) instamucks from EP vs a UTG raise for most people. More relevant to this hand, a lot of the field including me is mucking AJo.

I'm also not sure what you've done to account for the flop action? I know pio can't account for multiway spots and this is a pretty tricky one. Both me and UTG+2 are forced to play tighter than usual on the flop because we have another live hand out there, and he still has a pretty strong range even after the flop check. BTW this is why I mentioned UTG+2 should muck TT OTF, and though I'm not as confident in this anymore, I still think it's really close. You just don't have to defend as much in multiway pots, other people do that for you (while beating the hands you would otherwise defend with).

Appreciate the sim running as always! I just wanted to point out some worries I had about the assumptions, especially as someone who's probably going to start working in solvers soon.

BTW result was that I jammed, villain snapped with AJo and I couldn't suck out

Couple things:

-IDK what your range is, so sure it's certainly possible some of these hands aren't in your range. This is a model, a simplification of reality. You've gotta account for "fuzziness" somehow because you probably also don't know your full range here (99.99% of players don't know what their range is)

-It's not a multiway solution, but the principles for which hands are good flop leads and which are checks are the same. I said you should rarely be leading here, if you have no AJo you should be leading even less because AJo is a particularly good flop lead blocking AK, AQ and having a draw to the nuts

-What's more important is the intuition behind the solution, not the solution itself. So, for example, how does your flop leading strategy change without AJo? How about V's strategy? Etc. What about your turn strategy? (If you have no AJo, you have even fewer hands that can be thrown into a larger-sizing node, therefore sounds like in reality you should be EVEN MORE willing to x or go tiny OTT)

Notice that despite it's limitations:

-AJo is still squarely in V's range (Good)
-V's turn raising range is tight and AJ is heavily represented (Good)

So despite it's limitations, the solution is pretty a good approximation to reality.

Now do me and OldSilver win prizes for getting the right anwser (smaller turn, AP call turn eval river)?

Are you not allowed to re-raise pre? You should.

Much larger on flop.

You invited the pain.

Ha, beer on me if you're ever at Bay101.

Just want to point out that you might be underestimating how much the ranges affect the solver outputs, in fact I suspect they do so profoundly. In particular, the solver here thinks I can have a bunch of 1 pair hands like AQ/KJ/JJ whereas in reality I can never have these since they never bet the flop. Even AK probably wants to do more checking than betting OTF. This would explain why the solver wants to go so small on the turn; it thinks I'm condensed when in reality I'm pretty polarized.