21% increase week over week? God damnit. I just wanna play poker like back in the good ol' days where we swapped chips and then touched our faces. I was serious for a second but your commentary regarding COVID-19 has me doing google searches for different topics than airfare meow

Again, trying very hard not to politard here, but here was a big indoor event in Henderson two weeks ago, and not many of the attendees were wearing masks.

Yeah and a few prominent attendees got the COVID not much after.

HUDs

Some of you may be interested in HUDs and how they work. This is my HUD from Pokertracker 4. Here we are 400 hands into a tournament, as called out by the magenta-colored 400 in parentheses on the top line of the numbered stats cluster below my seat.



Stats: Some players have fewer stats on their HUDs; others have quite a few more than me--stats like Raise Flop C-Bet, or 4-Bet pre, or Float Flop, or stats broken down by position. I try to balance having just enough stats to give me a good idea of the type of player I'm up against without also overloading myself with information. If I really need more info on a player, I can click on their HUD number cluster and call up a whole sheet full of supplemental stats.

Colors: I've set the color parameters based upon poker coach Peter Clarke's standards for evaluating six-max cash player's HUD stats in The Grinder's Manual. I used a bit of my own experience to adjust them slightly to better match full ring tournament games.

Green = tight and/or passive
Yellow = TAG stats
Red = loose and/or aggressive
Purple = fish or whale stats (i.e. very loose and/or aggressive)

The exception to the color scale is the # of hands tracker in parenthesis. In that case, teal/green is not very many hands at all, light yellow is a few hands, orange/red is a few more, and purple/magenta is enough to start drawing some firmer conclusions about certain HUD figures which take a lot of hands to become relevant.

Line 1: Partial Player Screename/Number of Hands Seen/VPIP/PFR/Aggression Factor

VPIP is the percentage of hands in which the player voluntarily puts money into the pot. Posted blinds do not count towards this percentage, as they are involuntary; however, if the player completes the small blind, then they're putting some money in on their own, and that counts.

PFR is the percentage of hands the player raises preflop. The gap between VPIP and PFR represents the times when the player just open limps, limps along, or flat calls raises. The wider the gap between VPIP and PFR, the more passive the player is preflop. These stats are usually the first ones to become relevant. After just 30 or so hands, they can start to give you an idea of what kind of player you're up against.

AF is aggression factor. I'm not sure how this stat is calculated. All I know is the higher the number, the more aggressive the player behaves postflop. This stat starts to become relevant around 50 or so hands.

Line 2:

Attempt to Steal/Fold to Steal/3-Bet/Fold to 3-Bet/Donk Bet Flop

Attempt to Steal is the percentage of time which the player opens the pot for a raise in late position or the small blind.

Fold to Steal is the percentage of time which the player folds in the blinds to a late position or small blind open.

The steal stats do not start to become relevant until around 150 hands in.

3-Bet is how often the player 3-bets pre.

Fold to 3-Bet is how often they open the pot pre and then fold to a 3-Bet from another player.

The 3-Bet stats don't start to become relevant until around 200 hands in.

Donk Bet Flop is the percentage of time the player leads into the preflop raiser on the flop. In many spots this is considered to be an amateurish play, but it has its places--up to somewhere around 25% of the time is considered to be okay. This stat takes around 100 hands to become relevant.

Line 3:

Flop C-Bet/Fold to Flop C-Bet/Turn C-Bet/Fold to Turn C-Bet

These are pretty self-explanatory. A C-bet is simply a continuation bet from the preflop raiser, either on the flop, the turn or the river. When the preflop caller folds to these it generates the fold stats.

Now, a lot of regs C-bet too often then give up on the turn unimproved after they're called. Likewise, a lot of passive players will peel on the flop very lightly, then give up on the turn if they don't improve.

These sorts of behaviors can be spotted and then exploited by comparing percentage of C-bets or folds to C-bets between the flop and the turn. Unfortunately, turn C-bet spots come up uncommonly in tournaments, and it takes at least 500 hands--sometimes many more--for these stats to become actionable.

If you play tournaments one one site only semi-regularly like I do, it takes a long time to get a statistically relevant number of hands on other players, but there is a sort of shortcut that you can use: mainly, if almost all of a player's stats fall within a certain narrow color range after 30 or 40 hands, you can begin to draw some hypotheses about them.

Taking a look at say, the player Gloves in the screenshot and judging by the predominance of reds and purples, we can guess that he/she might be inclined more towards the loose/aggressive side, even after just 34 hands.

Moving over to the player krushed, after 168 hands we can posit that he/she is a rather straightforward TAG who doesn't like to 3-bet light, who doesn't like to call 3-bets, and who doesn't like to call preflop steals from the blinds, but who will open widely and properly in late position. And we also see a gap between flop C-bets and turn C-bets which might become relevant within the next few hundred hands, but which we might be able to guess at even now, given his/her other stats and what we know about the straightforward TAG player pool at low/mid-stakes tournaments.

Finally, when we look at a player like bearski and his/her mixed stats, we should conclude that we're going to need a lot more than 33 hands on him or her before we draw any conclusions.

Can we talk more about football, specifically the Pats and Cam. Thought maybe Cam wasn’t going to Cam but than he caught COVID. Glad the Pats brought in Cam.

I'm glad they postponed the game. They would have almost certainly lost to the Chiefs without Newton. It'll be hard enough to beat them when he's healthy.

Edit: Ah shitcakes, they're playing it tomorrow.

An uncharacteristically tough lineup at Red Rock today for whatever reason: two OMCs, two good LAGs and three TAG regs, and everyone appeared to be settled in at the table for the afternoon.

I played for an hour then ordered a goodbye double Chivas and cashed out a comp for some Fatburger.

Red Rock Station: 1 hour:
+$41

What, no single malt?

Seems like a good time to request a table change.

There's a fatburger at Red Rock?

I'm a Philistine who likes the blended stuff. I'm fine with Chivas and Johnny Walker.

I was 3rd in line for a table change.

Yes, but the whole food court seems about 40% overpriced compared to average franchise locations.

You can be a Philistine with a palate and drink straight bourbon if you don’t want single malt. Highly superior to the Chivas or Johnny.

Do any of the sites have problems with you using Pokertracker?

Eh, I like the blended. To quote Bart Simpson: The heart wants what it wants. And I'll add the palate to that cart.

I use it on Ignition (Bovada Network), Carbon (Merge Network) and ACR (WPN Network) and none of them have a problem with it. I believe that a few American sites ban them.

We discussed volunteering to poll work. Just saw something g that they actually get paid. I think anywhere from $10-$17 an hour.

Might cover a few buyins.

Not bad, considering that I've let my bankroll run down out of laziness and procrastination. I am playing cards this week; any downswing at this point will find me looking for a job.

Here’s a good temporary one to look into. Not sure what the pay is if any specifically for Nevada. Also not sure if there’s early voting in Nevada.

Interesting spot at Red Rock yesterday between two villains. The button straddles for $5. Folds around to MP, who has let his stack dwindle down to $55. MP calls the $5. Folds to the cutoff who raises to $25. BTN and the blinds fold and it's back to the shortstacked MP with some dead money in the pot.

Two players, one left to act: (Pot $38) - Effective stack $50.

MP tanks for a few seconds and then CU--who may have thought he took down the pot preflop--tables QQ. The hand is still live. MP looks at CU's QQ and folds.

I think this was a big mistake. Let's look at it. And let's ignore the fact that most of us wouldn't be sitting at $1/$2 with $55, never mind open/limping the straddle with it.

Now, MP's limping range equity is around 23% against QQ, and he would need around 42% equity to just ship in his remaining $50 preflop with essentially zero fold equity, so that would be a spew.

However, with perfect information on our opponent's hand, we should be taking a flop for $20 and then either continuing when we're ahead of QQ, or bluffing our remaining $30 into a $58 pot if the flop comes A or K high.

Obviously, CU isn't going to fold very often in the latter case, but will he fold say...25% of the time?

I'm not entirely sure how to approach this question properly, but that's never stopped me before, so let's gooooo.



As I mentioned, Equilab gives MP's limping range 23% equity vs QQ if the hand goes to the river. Does that mean that MP would be winning roughly 23% of the time if the hand was somehow stopped on the flop? I would think so. Certainly, I could be wrong, but let's run with it...say MP is beating QQ on the flop 23% of the time. Therefore he's folding 77% of the time and losing his $20 investment.

Not so fast, because MP is bluffing A or K high flops. How often do those show up? According to a Poker News article, the flop comes A or K high 41% of the time when you're holding QQ. (For now, let's not count blockers if MP is holding an A or K, because then he's betting for value, and that instance will fall into another section further below.)

So, instead of folding 77% of the time, MP is only folding 45% of the time and then losing his $20 investment on the flop. The rest of the time, he's either bluffing or value betting. So when he folds it's 45% times a $20 loss which equals (-$9.00) in EV.

With 45% of instances covered by folding, that leaves us 55% of instances to go. If MP is ahead on the flop 23% of the time, that means he's bluffing 32% of the time, as these two figures add up to the remaining 55%.

Now, sometimes MP is going to suck out after bluffing on the flop and getting snapped off, and sometimes QQ is going to suck out when it's behind and MP was value betting on the flop. Let's just take those two instances and say that they roughly cancel each other out, and give them a 0 EV overall.

Granted, QQ is much better than MPs range, but it's also harder for pairs to suck out when they're behind on the flop, as they often only have two outs to a set or some unlikely four straight or four flush outs (or counterfeiting board pairings with overpairs vs lower two pairs.) But we'll call it even and move on.

We'll break down the bluffing next. MP bluffs 32% of the time, during which he gets snapped off 3/4 of the time and gets a fold 1/4 of the time. That means he gets snapped off in 24% of total instances and loses his $50 for a (-$12.00) EV loss. He gets a fold 8% of total instances and wins $88 for +$7.04 EV gain.

Finally, MP actually wins the full $118 pot 23% of the time for a +$27.14 EV gain.

Eh, not so fast...because QQ is going to be either folding or checking down some of the time, particularly when an A or K flops. We'll give MP his full $118 win 3/4 of the time and only the $58 in the pot on the flop 1/4 of the time...well no, that's not right either, because even on bad runouts, MP might still be able to fish another $10 or $15 out of QQ on the turn, and then QQ will be almost obligated to call off another $15 or $20 into a roughly $100 pot on the river.

So, let's say out of the 23% of value spots, MP wins the full $118 in 20% of total instances for a +$23.60 EV gain, and wins $58 in 3% of total instances for a +$1.74 EV gain.

The final tally, then, is:

(-$9.00) + (-$12.00) + $7.04 + +$23.60 + +$1.74 =

+$11.38 in EV.

Now, some of you may have noticed that MP appears to have lost EV overall from bluffing, so what happens if MP never bluffs?

In that case, he folds 77% of the time and loses his $20 for a (-$15.40) in EV.

For the remaining 23% of value, it's the same as the top equation: +$23.60 + +$1.74.

This gives MP a total EV of +$9.94, less than if he had used a bluffing range. So what happened here? If my math is right, MP loses less money bluffing than he does folding. I know that folding is supposed to be 0 EV, but here we're accounting for the $20 MP put in on the flop...so it's the EV of call/fold, call/bluff, or call/value bet.

So does that mean MP should always bluff? Probably not, because QQ may never fold on a flop that doesn't have an A or K, so that brings the overall fold equity way below 25%.

I'll mention here that I left out MP semi-bluffing flopped draws on non-A or K high flops. If anyone can think of some math to work that out, then cheers to you, it would be great to see it. I'll venture again that for all types of bluffs we'll have to assume very low fold equity on non-A or K high flops.

What interests me most about this hand is thinking about how I would play this if we both had $300 stacks, instead of the dinky $55 effective.

I would think that the bluffs would have to be bigger and across multiple streets to maximize EV. Could we ever bluff a low scary runout? What about check/shipping an A or K high flop for maximum fold equity? Is it too much of a risk, or do we risk actually ruining our fold equity with a suspiciously huge bet on the flop, and if so, then what about shoving the flop for value?

I think I'm going to cross post this one over at LLSNL. Might be fun.

Before you cross-post, you might want to fix the Cutoff/BTN mix-up early in your description. You say cutoff raises and BTN folds, but then the rest of the description uses BTN as the raiser.

Thanks dedmau5! I think it's fixed.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

Yesterday I played pretty well, but I did not run very well. I can only hope that this will change, and very soon, but that's not up to me in the short term. I did have one bit of luck where I was able to save $65 on a third barrel with complete air after believing that the villain in the BB had checked to me, when in fact he had not.

I was cutting out what likely would have been a hopeless $65 bet on the river when I saw that Villain was actually leading $40 into the $90 pot, and I insta-mucked. It's possible that Villain thought I was attempting a fake tell by grabbing chips, but I was cutting them out in earnest, and I subsequently fitted them right back into my stack.

$40 looks like a bit of a block bet; could I have re-popped him for a big bluff? Maybe, but I was a bit discombobulated by my mistake and I didn't trust myself to pull off any subsequent maneuvers in a convincing fashion.

Red Rock Station: 4 hours:
(-$83)

And the corollary to Napoleon's old chestnut is "Always interrupt your friends when they are making a mistake." So if you see anything off about the exposed hand analysis, be like Deadmau5 and let me know before I take it over to LLSNL.

With these pot odds, I don't see villain (CO) folding nearly 25% of the time on the flop. Even on an AKx flop, he would sometime spite call imo.

I think it might be player dependent. The embarrassment of exposing your hand seems like a variance enhancing spot in terms of player behavior.

The table was nice and soft today, with most of the players weighing heavily towards weak/loose preflop and weak/tight postflop. Some players complain about nit-filled tables, but an astute player can collect plenty of low variance value from them. At one point I had forty $1 chips in my stack, garnered mainly from raising limps and getting folds preflop--and when there's no flop, there's no rake.

The seat to my left opened up twice during the session, and both times it was filled in by clean-cut, backpack toting kids in their twenties, and both times I figured that my stint as table captain was over, but both of the kids open/limped twice in their first three hands, and they both ended up playing just as weak as all the OMCs at the table.

Red Rock Station: 3.5 hours:
+$157