Your section "clearing up some confusion" confused me

Earlier in the book you talk about making a bet on the turn that doesn't have immediate +ev, but can set up great river situations. Great, I'm all on board.

The confusion comes in on page 161 where it seems like you're saying the opposite about a preflop bet setting up a profitable flop situation.

Are you saying it's better to set up a river bet with a turn bet, than it is to set up a flop bet with a pre flop bet?

I've made many, many raises with trash hands, perfectly happy to get called and play a pot in position.

Thanks a lot! And thanks for the books! And for taking the time to answer all these questions!

Minor error report:


I know that GTO play involves mixed strategies, but shoving and folding simultaneously is something I'm keen to learn more about.

You have to use quantum physics.

Either I'm brain farting (very possible), or I don't see how this is suggesting you can both fold and jam at the same time?

Looks to me like it's just explaining why a big bet is often problematic with a small stack

Don't have the book in front of me, but when you RFI you'll always have the advantage post-flop against a BB caller (the person overwhelmingly most likely to call at a table of strong opponents).

This is true if you open to 3BB, 2.5BB, or 2BB.

You may have more fold equity post-flop if you open to 2BB rather than 3BB, since your opponent will call with a much weaker range against a 2BB open than 3BB. But, the pot will also be smaller and you'll just automatically win the pot less pre-flop. However, you'll also be less vulnerable to 3-betting (as you've invested less money in pre-flop). So there are pros and cons of raises of different sizes.

Whether or not a 3BB or 2BB open is best will depend on what hand you are opening with and use tons and tons and tons of mixed strategies. It'll also change based on stack depth.

I'm not sure if this answered your question since I don't have the book in front of me, but if it didn't just let me know and I'll look at the page you mentioned when I get home.

4-bet fold all-in?

Damn it and I read it aloud like 5 times.

Yup, typo.

I think it's one of those weird ones where a linguistic blind spot means our eyes skip straight past short words when we already know how the sentence ends. (e.g. "Paris in the the spring"). I didn't notice the typo on first read through.

Yeah, that's interesting. I had the same thing happen once before in the Applications thread where I read something many, many times and could not read what others were seeing until someone spoon fed it to me like you just did. Weird.

Quantum universe, Clearly! Mandela in full flow 😂

Is this book considered a follow on from your first, or a revised version? (Is it worth reading if the first has already been read)

Thanks

I think it's basically 'Applications for Dummies'.

No, it's not. That's a daft statement.

Not even close.

Don't know if you guys ever read a 'For Dummies' book, but the ones I've read were quite good. Didn't mean it as criticism, I already recommended the book somewhere else in the thread.

Before read your book I read another one "The Grinder's Manual", there the author spent an entire chapter building unexploitable preflop 3bet ranges, I think you know pretty well how he might did so I skip the process which is pretty precise. In your book you are saying the entire process isn't valuable. Can you give me some clarifications?



Is this related to the board we are considering? I mean, if we bet on a KK2r flop, on a offsuit 3 we have a blank but is it a good card to overbet? The Villan’s calling range should remain the same on the turn…


In the hand example section, hand # 2
Don’t you think we gotta bet at some point in the hand? Also if we don’t bet we don’t have QQ+ in our range and imho we are going to get owned at very high frenquency


If you 3bet to 16 you are investing 15, so shouldn’t be 15+8=23$?




Don’t you think many other factors are involved in these spots? If Villain is a maniac preflop but pretty nitty post flop, we are getting owned and we won’t recover the loss when we call a 3bet. So IMHO tendencies matter a lot. I dig in my database and I found that when I have 77-22 I open and got 3bet I folded


Which is a lot but it is ok with my poker knowledge ie calling vs others and folding vs others due to different tendencies, but I might be dead wrong. Do I overvalue tendecies? Am I a huge nit folding that often?

I also filter some spots but I don’t know how to interpret them

RFI and called the 3bet with 55-22


RFI and called the 3bet with 66-22


RFI and called the 3bet with 77-22


The amt stat show how BBs we invested preflop, so if we fold 100% of the times we would get that line (obv reversed).

My results and the overall trend is clear, EV call the 3bet >> EV fold vs 3bet. Looking at these results - Should I lower my fold to 3bet close to 0%?
- Can the results above influenced by the fact I’m cherrypicking vs who I setmine?

New book or follow-up from the first book.

I think it's worth reading if you've already read the first book.

I don't think anyone can build truly "unexploitable 3-bet ranges" and I think so many of the debatable 3-bet spots are in theory mixed strats that I wouldn't worry too much about it. Just have a sense of what hands should always be 3-bet (these are usually pretty easy) and then have a sense of what hands are likely mixed strats, then 3-bet based on your opponent's tendencies/game dynamic/fullness of the moon etc.

No, and I believe this example is discussed explicitly at least a couple times in the book. In spots where it's trivially easy to slowplay the nuts or near nuts on the flop, you probably don't want to overbet the turn.

I'm not sure what hand example section you're talking about. The detailed hand analysis section where there's 10 hands total or something else?

Well, we've still invested the dead money into the pot, or $16 total.


Of course, but I think we're going to be left with a pretty crappy book if every time we discuss a spot I go off on a tangent of "Well, keep in mind villains tendencies matter a lot. If villain were a total nit, I'd _________. If villain were a total maniac, I'd ________ instead." We can just go on forever about how to adjust if villains are playing far from GTO. The goal of my books has always been to make sure people understand difficult or commonly confused concepts, so I don't really spend too much time on very beginner concepts (unless Mason thinks it's needed for the book) as I know they're already covered in a ton of poker literature. So definitely don't stop taking exploitative lines after reading my book, as that's how you'll make most of your money vs weak opponents.

Fold 55% to 3-bet is very high, but it might not be that big of a deal for the games you're playing.

Put it this way, maybe you should in theory be only folding 40% of the time, but you're folding 55% instead. So long as you're mostly folding the hands that are mixed strategies between calling and folding (many hands you should only call against 3-bets some of the time with), or you're making correct tight folds that are exploiting your opponents, then it's totally fine/good. It's not like you're going to get exploited by most players if you always fold 86 when a GTO player would call 50% and fold 50% in that given spot.

In reality, my guess is you're probably folding a bit too much, but you're passing up on spots that are only marginally +EV so they're not really crippling your bottom line. Just make an effort to slowly widen your calling range when appropriate and don't make any drastic adjustments. That's how you should go about fixing your "leaks" and the better you get the smaller and smaller your fixable "leaks" are going to get over time.

Ty for your replies....
Regarding what I've quoted, yes I'm referring to the AK on the T62 flop, part 12

A couple of weeks ago, I purchased the hardcopy book through Amazon.
Is it too late for me to also get the Kindle Matchbook version for $2.99?

I spent some time on Amazon, but I couldn't see how to get the Kindle Matchbook book?

Thanks

It's not available anymore.

Mason

Is there any rule of thumb for when we can fold more than 1-A?

• When villain has to use a few bluffs that are able to check and win at showdown some of the time (bluffs have showdown equity and bluff needs to work more often than 1-A to be better than check back).

• When best case scenario is that your weakest calls are close to 0EV and good chance they're very -EV calls (close to no bluffs in villains range and he value bet thinly, play vs river probe when draws hit and villain only uses 2/3 pot+ sizes).

• When you're better of folding more now than get into later streets with a very weak range in a big pot and not being able to win often enough (typically spots villain has a large range advantage on the flop).

Hi. I'm a microstakes player (€10/€25 SNG, 10NL cash, some qualifiers to live events) and play some low-buy-in live events (£220), and I really enjoyed the book. It might be useful to post my review here, for similar players who are wondering if this book might be helpful for them.

If I were to summarize the aim of this book into one phrase, it would be that it aims to teach the reader the correct thought process to think about poker decisions (or at least what is currently thought to be correct). It is a thought process that is in line with, and can make sense of, decisions calculated by advanced tools like PokerSnowie and PioSolver. The book covers all aspect of a pokerhand, from preflop ranges to river decisions, and also includes some chapters on shortstack play. The concepts are applicable both in cashgames and in tournaments. Don't expect overviews of what to do in every possible situation. Although there are a lot of examples which cover a lot of common spots, and these include a lot of interesting information about what tools like Snowie and Pio think about these spots, the main aim of them is to teach the underlying though process, to allow you to adapt the same thinking in other spots. And I must say it does a really good job at that. Compared to Janda's previous book 'Applications of No-Limit Hold'em', this book contains less abstract mathematics, is more focused on practical thinking during a hand, and has already had an immediate impact on the way I play and think about hands. Furthermore, given the advanced concepts it addresses, it does a remarkebly good job of keeping it easily digestible and very well readable. That makes it both the most useful and the best written pokerbook in my collection.

The subtitle 'Emphasis on Tough Games' is kind of misleading, because the thought process the book teaches you is applicable to both GTO and exploitative decision making, and will just as well elevate your game in a €10 SNG as it would in a 400NL cashgame. I would advise this book to anyone who is familiar with ABC poker and wants to take their game to the next level, regardless of the stakes you play.

When the turn or river card puts many more combos of nutted hands into villain's range and those combos aren't in yours, such that he has a clear range advantage.
Some runouts are just hideous for one player's range, so he has to fold at a high frequency.
e.g. Suppose you opened UTG and got flatted by BTN, and you bet 1/4p on the flop and potted the turn, and you get this awful river. You check most of your range (missed BDFDs, random overcards, JJ/AT etc) and villain makes a 1/2p bet. He doesn't bet JTs, and doesn't have many bluffs. He has a bunch of nines that made the straight. I think you have to fold pretty much your entire range.


P.S. Nice review, Mathrim. I agree with all of that.