Agreed

Who the hell would want multiple callers when hold pocket aces pre? The entire objective with that hand is to have one or two callers. It is much easier to navigate. The more callers, the higher likelihood you get outdrawn. That's just lighting money on fire.

So let's leave it there for now rather than continuing to talk about a book where we posted the two most controversial plays and none of the chapters that contain logical counter strategies and thought processes that take best advantage of bad players while fully admitting that they would be poor strategies against good ones.

Depends how much they're calling his deep they are and how bad they are.

Think the why was clearly explained given size of pot and how much was left in effective stacks

That's fair, the thing with the AA hand is because the SPR is 4-5ish you could play a 2 street game like you did and it might work out to be higher EV but your audience doesn't know that is the reason and will start doing this regardless of SPR.

As a third example of an unusual play that we have a short chapter about despite the fact that it is clearly exploitable, is "pot sweeteners" pre flop. We say that if stacks are largish and there are several limpers for 3 in front of you, then making it six with hands that you would normally call with, basically doubles the positive EV that you presumably think you have if you just call. Obviously, the play is probably bad if one of the limpers reraises either because he was slowplaying or realizes he has a profitable bluff. (It may not be bad because you find out early about his strong hand when he is slowplaying). But in most small games the reraise is extremely rare. Of course, they will start doing it more often if you do this pot sweetener routinely. So even if conditions are right it can't be done a lot.

But we explain all that in the chapter.

Another play that works against some bad players is a monster size reraise preflop with aces or kings. That is easily exploitable by folding queens or worse. And that is what good players would do. But many small stakes players won't. Not until they have seen you make this big raise a few times.

The point is that as we point out in the book, a small stakes poker hustler is not like a pool or golf hustler. For the latter, the better they get and the more good players they surpass, the worse they will beat bad players. But that is not always true of poker.

Does the man still need to read Noam Brown’s research paper?

In your napkin analysis you totally ignore Equity Realization - the fact that only one of the four streets have been played and zero of the five community cards have been dealt. Aces is a hand whose equity is almost entirely distributed as being the best one pair. On a flop like 976 you will realize 0 equity five ways. This is great when stacks are shallow and becomes less and less good when stacks are deep. In this contrived case where you are playing only 80 bb deep for no reason, you can maybe argue that it's close. It certainly isn't "Not even close"

As for limp raising KK, that is completely indefensible. The only possible scenario that could be even considered is if you have steaming tilted aggro maniacs to your left who attack limps with any two but for some reason also never three bet a squeeze. This is probably the exact opposite of a standard live 1/3 game where people are limping behind you with JJ and AQs, an absolute disaster for KK.

Isnt it weird that everyone with some ridiculous mega-nit tight-passive 'system' can't crack 2/5? AKA senior citizens who double down on poker theory which predates the internet

Seems like the strategy is tackling a table with a bunch of loose passive players. I think you will make more money by raising KK than limping. Limping it may make you feel clever when it pays off, but I believe you are leaving money on the table in the long run.

Is everyone's typical LLSNL passive preflop? The last time I did a small sample size test on this (admittedly 2017), I found that about 2/3rds of hands were raised preflop at my 10 handed table. You don't need a tilted aggrotard monkey to your left to defend this play, only a reasonable assumption that the hand will be raised more often than not. And in LLSNL, which features lol huge raise sizes and lol multiple overcallers, limp/reraising from lots of different positions can easily print.

Gnothatin',justsayin'G

Link? Noam Brown has a lot of research papers - his google scholar is loaded with what appear to be excellent reads. What paper are you specifically talking about?

Our company has published other books addressing the fundamentals.

Mason

Old school live players usually excel at exploits and come to an impasse on GTO fundamentals. Ironically, online players are usually the exact opposite.

I'm assuming Mason and David have not traversed the solver landscape in depth and I think reading this paper would help them understand how solvers arrive at their solutions.

Link is here.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay2400

Understanding fundamentals is not synonymous with understanding ranges, it's a common mistake to group those two concepts together.

We can take you as an example, you are an expert in No Limit Hold Em fundamentals correct? Okay, then you should be able to sit down at any 5knl table on the internet and hold your own.

But what would happen, is you would sit down, and you would lose over 10bb/100 and possibly more. Why? Because you don't understand ranges on a deep level (solvers let us do this and only by studying solvers can you achieve this mastery).

Ranges give fundamentals direction, the fundamentals are over arching concepts but the ranges give context and meaning to the individual hands we play.

and where did I say this?

And what does this have to do with this book?

Not sure if anyone who could beat 5/10 NL has written a book on 1/3 NL etc. Definitely mostly amateurs and hard to make that much per hour, but clearly beatable.

Pot sweeteners are interesting, but I would go bigger than 6. Maybe 8 for an open raise and 10 or 12 at limpers if you want everyone to call. It exploits that people will call and not 3!.

You can exploit bad play without making highly exploitative sizing. You can exploit how opponents play face up without playing too face up yourself.

There are some things I observed at 1/3NL while waiting for a game. One is the minraise, which is often the nuts.

For example, there were 3 limpers and I limped on BTN with 87s. Flopped a flush draw. Check to me, and I bet. Got 2 callers. Maybe shouldn't bet the draw. Turned the flush, checked to me, I bet and got one caller. River was a relative blank, checked to me, I bet 50 and got x/red to 100. I called getting 5-1and got shown ATs for the nut flush. I may not have played it well, and it shows the hazards of suited connectors multiway, but villain's trappy play was very lol.

Another time, I limped 44 UTG, a raise to 15, a cold call, and a 3-bet to 30. All called. Flop comes 864, r. I knew the 3!er likely had AA/KK, and stacked him, made about 550 on the hand. Obviously huge leak to telegraph his hand while only sweetening the pot.

Do you realize that if you got shown the nuts there 82% of the time the guy would be overbluffing? Also if you limp cc a 3! with 44 utg then I can guarantee you are not beating whatever game you are waiting for while playing 1/3, probably breakeven at the 1/3 game itself if I had to guess.

I probably shouldn't have called the river to the miniraise getting 5-1, as it is almost always the nuts. I didn't say I played the hand well at all. Not sure what you mean about overbluffing. He doesn't have to get through a raise often for it to be profitable. The play is sort of ridiculous though, and is rarely a bluff or overplay.


I didn't say I played any of it well. However, limp/calling 30 4-ways with 44, knowing the mini-3-bettor often has AA/KK is clearly the correct play, assuming you limped. I don't like playing NLHE and it probably wouldn't be the correct play at 5/10NL. You might open fold pps in higher stakes. Limp/calling a 3! with 44 might be really bad to largish 3! HU or even 3-ways. It also might make you sort of face up in a tough game. However, folding preflop to this action would be a huge mistake unless you or the 3-bettor was really shallow. You could also raise 44 UTG, maybe smallish. However, open folding a pp in a 1/3 and probably a 2/5 game in generally a big mistake. Obviously, you don't play 5/10NL the same way as 1/3NL. I was obviously adjusting to the play.

People should realize that the three plays I mentioned were simply examples of general ideas that might apply to a specific situation. The general idea of contemplating a check rather than a bet, or a call rather than a raise when players to your left are rambunctious. The general idea that two aces are, with medium stacks, on average, glad that they are not all in, especially against weaker players. The general idea that if you make money by calling after other callers you will probably make even more money if a raise will be called (but not reraised) by everybody and stacks are large enough so that future bets will simply be larger at the approximately same ratio as the initial raise.

Don't you think there are some people who aren't trying to play poker professionally but would still like to play better? So they could maybe go from a small loser to a small winner while enjoying their hobby?

It has already been clarified that this book is intended for people who play live games with a lot of really bad players. Your last sentence is completely irrelevant.

Maybe they will know that after reading the book?

David and Mason:

These days, the way to construct exploitative lines against bad players is to use a solver, and feed it assumptions about how your oppponents play. It can be tedious work with lots of tweaking, but that's how you get to know the max profit answers. There even exists solvers that have built-in opponent models to do most of the modeling work for you.

So I really don't think you can get away with pen-and-paper math and simple assumptions anymore, if you want the book to sell well. While a simple approach will beat soft live games, you will do much better if informed by proper quantitative models from solvers. That sounds much more complicated for the reader, but it isn't. Once exploiattive models are made, they are for the most part easy to understand, execute, and teach, even if the work to produce them can be complex.

I would think that an exploitative solver-based book, with opponent assumptions from veteran live players such as yourselves, would be very interesting. Making good assumptions about your opponents is the art here. Crunching out the best counter strategies with a solver is trivial after that. Hire a nerd.

If you need to know whether AA should be played against one or many, you find the answer with a solver, instead of wasting time guessing with other posters on a forum. It is literally one study session's worth of work if you know how to use the software.

At the levels of play the book is aimed at, how many typical opponents are capable of knowing that a sizing is apparently exploitable and/or are capable of doing it?