Geez, I would love a stud resurgence. I say that as someone who isn't even very good at stud. I am probably average and could ramp up quickly, but certainly not an expert.

That said, stud can be a very fun game to play.

Unfortunately one of the reasons it isn't more widely played is the pool of current players. It is really unfortunate, but everytime I have attempted to play stud, it seems like every other player is an old man who has nothing to do but complain. I really believe the current pool of stud players does more to turn off potential future stud players than they do to attract stud players.

Put better, I would live to find a nice NLHE home game filled with fun players and introduce stud to them. Even if I wasn't advantaged in the game, I think it would be a great/fun game to play.

It may just be pay per view, so I am not sure if I can post the link. I think you are referring to the hand in the in the 2024 WSOP $250K buyin with 6 players left. Tolerene, the chip leader with almost half the chips who is raising a lot, raises with JTo. Von Krienegsbergh, the 2nd biggest stack, flats on the button with KK. Flop comes K36,r. Turn a 9 and river a Q for the gutshot straight. Button flats the flop and turn and raises the river, and busts out. Supposedly they were all playing perfect GTO. Not sure if button was playing badly or unlucky. The set of kings was still the 2nd nuts on the river. Not sure what it has with this book, as play for a limp reraise is not slow playing.

I don't think stud is coming back. At high stakes, amateurs don't want to play robot-like GTO players, so the big games are mostly PLO and mixed games now.

Stud was a very good game. Also, all this GTO analysis would go away.

The great thing about GTO is you can justify any proÂ’s play and criticize any amateurÂ’s play. I wish it had been the final hand of the ME.

I know it has nothing to do with the book—if anything it has plenty to do with Super/System—which is why I said it reminded me of this thread, not the book itself. I own the book, am almost finished with my first reading of it, but am only a third through the thread.

I know studÂ’s not coming back, but I was talking about 5-10 (hopefully with $1 ante & $2 BI), not high stakes.

ThereÂ’s GTO for stud ring games? I guess if youÂ’re playing online with a solver open?

Amen. And yes, in my experience with midstakes “pros”, the stud players were far worse than the HE & Omaha ones, especially the razz players. I played some 10-20 LHE with an elderly vet of the old 150-300 Vegas Razz games named Ron.

He could scarcely bear to fold rags preflop five hands in a row. Never seen anyone look more miserable in a poker game. Near tears of rage & frustration folding JJ on an acehigh flop, muttering and glaring skyward. Eruption and storming out if TPTK lost to an OESF draw. Nice guy away from the table; handsome, rich, beautiful wife; but he never lasted more than an hour in the game.

I once read a column on the WSOP side action: “…and then off in a corner 150-300 Razz, with ONeil Longson, JC Pearson & Sam Grizzle pushing the chips back & forth, waiting for the stupidest person in the world to sit down.”

ItÂ’s probably fun having a 10-15 hour per week hobby that pays $8-12K a year taxfree cash on the barrelhead.

Yup, pretty much this. For the record, 6186 hours of 1/3 NL since 2010 (with 1/3 NL being the only game that runs in the room 99% of the time). Works out to a single ~8 hour session a week, which I currently do as two ~4 hour sessions per week, nowadays averaging a little over ~400 hours per year.

GcluelessrecreationalhobbynoobG

Still waiting for a response to this as promised by the authors.

Y’all said if I bought your book you’d go over it with me


Let’s go over it

And he’s made $100K+ cash, tax-free, with little stress/volatility over that period. If you live in a major city, how much have you spent attending sporting events & concerts in the last 15 years?

very little.

The two things you brought up are common knowledge.

It would be very helpful IMO to know how this pot got to $80 in a (presumed) 1-3 game, though I do understand the concepts the problem is trying to illuminate.

Could get to a lot more than that. limp, limp, raise to 20, 4 callers. 98 to the flop after blinds and rake. Bet of 50 and one caller. Even without a raise, it is about 200. Do you play much live 1/3?

Yes. IÂ’ve seen $500+ pots preflop.

I guess I should’ve said “helpful to know what the previous action was”. Did V UTG raise to 41, H call on button, everybody else fold, check-check on flop? Did everybody limp preflop, check to H on flop who bets 30 and only V calls? Or something in between?

If I were $250K ahead at SSNLHE I wouldn’t spend much time arguing online about a book I was never going to read.

For more clarification, this is from page 35:

If somebody has already limped in front of you it’s still okay to sometimes limp with your monsters, especially if the players behind you raise a lot. But it may be better to just raise yourself (to about four big blinds) since you’ll have position on one player who you expect to call. And even if no one has limped-in before you act, you should sometimes raise with your best hands — AA, KK, QQ, AKs, AKo, and maybe AQs, just to mix up your play. (You should also sometimes just call a raise after you limped with one of these hands especially if you’re heads-up against an aggressive player who almost always makes a continuation bet.)

David, you once succinctly distilled your poker wisdom for me even further. After watching me play $1-3 NLHE for a while, you dryly remarked, "You know you don't have to play EVERY hand".

Raising to 4xBB after a limper with QQ+/AK in a 1/3 game is awful.

RE: changing play after seeing an insignificant number of hands, of course we should?

E.g. suppose you raise UTG, BB calls, flop is AK3r, you cbet 1/3, they x/r, you call. Turn is 2, they bet pot, you call. River is a 8, they bet pot, you call. They show K4o.

Are you going to play GTO against this player? I know I'm adjusting after seeing this many blunders in 1 hand.

Especially at low stakes, we can adjust without seeing ANY hands. What's V look like (age/race/gender/attire/etc)? Sure, it's not 100% reliable, but poker is all about making decisions under uncertainty. If I can determine that V is 20% more likely to overbluff because of these types of variables then I'm adjusting before I even see a single hand, let alone a significant sample.

I agree for the most part. My only qualifier would be the stakes. If I am playing in the WSOP Main Event and I am new to a table and as I am sitting down I see a hand that is being played crazy, I would be slower to adjust simply because I might not know the background and the stakes are high.

If I am sitting at a $1/$3 table and I see some crazy stuff, I am much quicker to adjust because I know crazy stuff is much more common at that level and the cost of a premature adjustment is much lower.

That's fair, and I agree with using a bayesian-ish approach of "how likely is it that these stakes have such and such player types so that if I see this mistake I can peg them in this way"

Even in something like main event event there are some adjustments we can make based on a single hand, especially if the adjustment is reducing our risk. E.g. BB gets to river 17bb effective with A5o against BTN open when ICM is small. I'm not sizing up my cbet and applying tons of pressure on A-high flops against this player the way I'm supposed to in GTO.

Hi Mason & David .....when explained like this it surely makes sense on surface that there is a lot of EV to be captured by slow playing.

However, for simplicity sake lets assume he bets $50 on every single river card, and we have to fold unimproved, 2 aces and 3 kings left in deck and 9 flush outs to hit river, so 14 outs total or ~28% to hit river. So in this very specific example assuming these fixed circumstances-> about 72% of time we will fold the river to his $50 bet with the best hand 94% of time (since 2 rivers he is technically value betting).

The point is there are plenty of times you are going to miss completely and be folding best hand if given the fixed assumption he barrels off. In no way am I advocating a postflop fold, I am just stating why preflop is often considered a mandatory 3bet. You must acknowledge a full range of outcomes instead of focusing purely on what happened in this instance to draw meaningful conclusions.

The examples in this introduction were written to create interest in the book and to show how extreme exploitation may make it correct to play a hand differently than what is generally accepted. You'll have to read the book to see exactly when it might be correct to play a hand as described in these examples.

If possible can you humor me and expand just a bit on this one specific example? Hopefully you touched upon some of my counter points in this book otherwise you are not giving an accurate viewpoint on the downside of such extreme exploits.

I'd buy the book and not think twice if I was grinding live small stakes but I am not doing that and have no immediate plans to do that, however this specific example did attract my interest. If can not expand on above its understandable for whatever reason its okay and have a nice day.

If you took top 5 best nl players in world right now and showed them this specific example, went thru your logic (that I am missing since I didnt read book) ....I still truly believe this extreme exploit would just be -EV compared to the alternative to 3betting // squeezing it preflop.

Sorry, but i recently had wrist surgery and it's hard for me to type.

I can definitely agree with this. I deal, so I regularly see stuff that would result in an instant adjustment if I was playing, even at a high level. It should also be noted that I personally adjust faster than most. I have occasionally made crazy adjustments based off of one hand. I get it.

To mimic a famous quote (while stripping out the politics), "When someone shows you who they are, believe them".