5-5, BTN straddle, 650 deep

SB folds. BB calls. TAG pro in CO thinks about raising but calls. I raise BTN to 45 with Ac Ah 7h 5d.

Flop Qc 5s 3s

He checks. I bet 60. He calls.

Turn Jc

We both check. (Am I supposed to bet?)

River 9d

He pots for 225. Hero?

Check turn fold river.

If you have an RNG on your phone, announce that you're going to call the river if you score 95 or higher, or thereabouts, or maybe if you flip a coin and it comes heads 4 in a row

Can I shove river if the second-hand on my watch is between 55 and 0?

I'd sometimes stab the turn with nut club blocker and a board pair but check is ok.

As played fairly normal fold on the river.

I'd only shove river if the second hand is above 60.

Not sure why we bet like 35% on flop, feel like when we bet that small opponents going to peel super wide so need to fire turn?

I prefer much bigger flop bet.

We unblock spades, all the flop straight draws bricked too although I recognise we block some of those.

I’m hero calling this river a bunch vs a pro tbh. He’s repping at least KQTx that he limped in CO, I’m not buying that **** 100% of the time.

In before random ssKT, yeah yeah, but honestly feels like a great hero spot? Discuss please.

I think you've read the hh wrong, not that OP made it easy, and the pot was ~$100 preflop

Ran this through flop hero - had to make some abstractions for the straddle but quick summary of its actions.

It would checkback the flop.

As played it checks back the turn.

On river it folds 2/3 of the time to pot sized bet and re-raises the other 1/3 of time. Note the re-raise is not a pure bluff since worse 1p hands may call.


Nootabos one of the fascinating things I learned from studying GTO is that even in spots where it feels like we are getting exploited by following GTO strategy, its normally not by much - it does a very good job of identifying villain potential for strong hands in range. I have grown so much more confident in my checks as a result and was able to really cut back on being overagressive in too many marginal spots.

Yes - a pro could be easily overbluffing river on this action but its still fairly hard to exploit him by calling and the better exploit is most likely raising the river at a higher frequency or taking alternative lines on a previous street.

I'm sorry, what did you say?

What you quoted is correct. Worse 1-pair hands may call when AA repots river.

A solver is of course calling this raise lighter than its normal human counterparts but it seems somewhat intuitive that various hands, including kkxx and qx hands may call the bluff-raise, depending on the sidecards.

Solver is confirmed a fish then

I’ve trained 4 out of 5 difficulty levels on my solver. 40k hands so far. It was also frequently doing insane stuff like this that you never see in live play. For my last 10k hands of training, I’m just going to skip the hardest level and drop back down to the easiest.

Ah, thanks I thought BB called too.

@moni thanks for great post, if our experience tells us a spot is worth calling but solver folds a lot or RAISES in spots where we would almost never. How do we adopt the most profitable parts of the solvers strats? This is actually hard for me to articulate but you guys are smart so I hope you understand what I’m saying.

@wazz agree some of the solvers lines/moves feel spaz vs general population of players, but experience is a powerful teacher and I wonder sometimes if my experience has taught me some things incorrectly, hence me getting so involved with you guys lately, quest to be an end boss etc.

@bigoil thanks for input, do you mean hyper aggro? Hyper aggression can result in crazy game dynamics and because as you move up stakes aggression levels go through the roof it makes sense to me to turn it up a ton, the problem I face is as you move up at what levels do you introduce these macro adjustments.

Hope this makes sense to someone else.

It's hard to know the best way to start incorporating more solver strategy into your game, I think just experiment in some spots where solver plays more agressive than your default strategy and see how it works out.

For me there are a few areas I consistently work on with solvers with PLO.

First - I really like some of the range visualization tools solvers offer - this gives me a much better idea of what both hero and villain range should look like on turn and river in many interesting spots.

Second - solver constantly reminds me of spots where I need to bluff more agressively. Even if we bluff a lot less agressively than solver, recognizing more opportunities for profitable bluffs is always valuable for poker players (and to avoid being exploited bu strong players).

Finally, I like to review solver sizing preferences. As a predominantly live player with many quirky sizing patterns and exploitative tendencies, its very useful to compare my lines against some GTO standard lines. Actually this point is more relevant to NL than PLO, as many PLO sizing decisions are simpler.

There seems to be a lot of faith going towards the solvers.

I'm sure (I'm obviously not) the people who make them are exclusively well-intentioned, but when a solver is suggesting that it's unexploitable to get in 1 pair on this board, I have to question whether these solvers have been fully tested to verify that they do what they say they're doing. Because it totally fails the common sense test, let alone the 'bit of solver strategy that we can apply to our own game' test. How do we know that this is GTO? Do we ever get it's workings? In chess, when a position looks lost but the engine says 'actually you're winning here', we can play out the line it suggests and see how and why it wins. What equivalent do we have in poker gto?

Yes, my solver seems to be hyper aggro. It raise-bluffs A LOT on the river.

Even before throwing this hand into solver, I suspected this was a spot where I could be exploitable if I always fold AAxx on the river. The pro villain could profitably bet his entire range—including a ton of bluffs—and there's almost nothing I could do about it.

Calling isn't good. But what about raising sometimes? (The solution I got was fold 50%, call 6%, raise 44%.)

I've seen solver make this raise-bluff frequently after playing against it for 40k hands. I would've never known that I could do that had I not trained on solver.

It's comforting to know that I can play at a higher level against a pro crusher. Solver won't help me make more money where I need to be making money—against fish.

But I'm new to PLO, so it's helped me quickly figure out some big leaks. It's also helped me play in my live game fearlessly—I don't get thrown off my game when a pro crusher sits down.

When something goes so clearly against common sense, and we can't see the inner workings to see why it's supposedly unexploitable, the least we can do is verify this result against the other solvers. What do pio and monker say about this spot?

The reason it fails common sense is because it's using kettle logic (i return the kettle i borrowed from my neighbour, and when he sees it's got a hole in it, i say 'no, i returned the kettle undamaged, it was already damaged when i got it, and i never borrowed it from you in the first place, i.e. the components of my argument undermine each other). If our opponent is bluffing with one pair, then we can call; if he is value-betting with one pair but will call a raise anyway, we can still call; if he's value-betting two pair or better, then he will never fold those hands to a raise, so our raise is a bluff that won't work unless he's got a bad one pair hand, in which case we can just call anyway. Obviously this linear logic can have issues in terms of blockers, but in this spot we unblock the hand we want him to have anyway i.e. nfd. There are clearly spots where we have a weak bluffcatcher and raise > call, because we get to fold out a bunch of thin valuebets alongside all his bluffs, including some of his bluffs that beat us currently, but this isn't one of this spots. Or is it? It doesn't seem to me like it can be if solver wants him to call our jam with worse 1 pair hands.

Someone cleverer than me please explain this.

you are arguing to argue I think.

I am not sure what monikrazy used to generate his sim, as this is a tough spot to simulate due to the straddle and limper (solver don't limp). I did a sim with CO open BTN 3bet 150bb stacks and we get similar pot size. It aggrees we are checking back flop and then it's a different hand. Let's say hero bets 1/2 pot (only option I can check) villain calls, turn checks through, villain bets pot on river now I get a different result where solver is folding 75%, calling 16, raising 8 of range. But now I see, Monikrazy is looking at the specific hand within the strategy after taking this line (which solver couldn't get there with) and now yes, it wants to fold 75% and raise 25%, but it is not expecting to get called by worse one pair hands at all. This is a bluff raise with a negative EV. Solver is not calling with worse one pair hands. It is folding 55% to our all in and calling 45% and the percentages make sense because when it bets pot it was polarized between mostly nuts and bluffs. For instance it's folding almost all AQT8ss hands on the river (bottom straight).I can't find a single example of a one pair hand that he would call our raise with. He is calling with the nuts, and very rarely with very specific combinations of T8.

I am absolutely not arguing for the sake of arguing, I am arguing because I.... disagree.

Surely it should be fairly easy to compare outputs? All you need to do is establish the inputs he used, and if you use the same and they come out with different answers, beyond what should be a fairly small margin for error, well, what does that say about them?

I am not against the solver. I am against how it is commonly used. In my mind, the way to use the solver is to have it show its working, and then we use that working to guide our own ideas as to how to play. This is not what is being done by most, it seems, who just want a simple answer to the question: is this a +ev play or not? If we could extrapolate the rules for why the solver does or doesn't like certain plays, we could improve our games. That we (I'm sure some do do this) don't have verification that different solvers agree is fairly worrying. I see a huge number of people accepting solver outputs as gospel, and then bashing people who question the answers. What if they're wrong? They could be, right? How do we know they're not? Wouldn't it be disastrous if we took a play that's +ev against all human populations and replaced it with an unexploitable (i.e. breakeven) play against bots? Where's the protection against that possibility? History is full of tech advances that make our lives better, but 100x as many techs fail, and we ignore that history at our peril.

Anyone want to buy my collection of NFTs?

Disagree with what? Disagree with solvers? /shrug - ok

In this case we would get the same answer as we are using the same solver (FlopHero). I don't have access to monker and pio doesn't do omaha. It's not trivial to compare solvers unless you have access to many solvers and people here do not.

I agree with understanding the ideas more than treating the outputs as gospel, but I don't understand what you are saying because I'm on here and I don't see a "huge number of people accepting solver outputs as gospel". Maybe you are on a different forum where that is true, but definitely not on Omaha @ 2+2. I'd say it's the opposite.

GTO is not breakeven. This is a completely wrong interpretation of the strategy. Every play made is the highest EV play vs an opponent playing the same optimal strategy. The game is break even but the player in position is +EV on any given hand, and each hand has a specific EV with a specific strategy. Certain boards will favor certain ranges, not every situation is breakeven.

I'm probably exaggerating about the numbers of people that talk about it like that.

I disagree with the given result that jamming is better than calling. When you shrug at my having the temerity to disagree, you are explicitly placing the solver output as unquestionable.

GTO is breakeven against itself; are you aware that it's fairly easy to come up with a situation where the NE results in the minimum payouts? In the travelers dilemma, the NE is to lowball, maximizing the chances that we get the minimum payout. This cannot be the correct solution to the question of what strategy to employ to maximise our payout. This is a fairly big flaw in GTO, and while I'm not up to date on current GTO community trends, a lot of specialists cling to the result despite it being obviously wrong, because NE must equal the right answer. This is having a shiny new hammer and thinking everything is a nail. If it fails the common sense test, and we don't know why, it could very easily be a losing play.

The problem I see with calling on the river is that he's going to have a lot of two pair hands he's betting for value because the turn went check-check. If we're not abusing our raise-bluff frequency on the river, I think we should be able to fold out everything but KTxx, T8xx, and maybe sets with straight blockers.

I think calling is better than shoving only if his pot-sized bet means he's polarized and never has two pair or sets.

While the solver might account well for this being a backdoor draw that completed and thus bet sets for value, and find some mergey bluffs with 2p as well, irl people tend not to valuebet sets for pot when there's a straight out there, so I would suspect that population is indeed pretty polarized here