AJ and KQ aren't necessarily standard 3bets. The game flow will dictate whether I flat or 3bet those.

Generally if I'm 3betting them for value it's because I don't think my opponent will fold hands I dominate. If it's as a bluff, I understand that the times I do make top pair, I am going to occasionally be dominated. The way that I avoid losing stacks in these types of spots is by playing the hand a bit more passively and not including it in my value 3 barrel all in range. If I 3bet AJo as a bluff and the flop comes AdTd4c I might do something like check flop then bet turn and river if it checks through. Or I might bet flop then c/c turn and usually also c/c river depending on the runout and what I think of my opponent.

I wouldn't be too concerned about flop bet sizing against anyone. If you make it at least 3/4 pot you will always be doing fine. Personally, I will bet a little less on dry boards and a little more on draw heavy boards, but it's really not a huge deal.

Guys that are playing 25/9 or 24/12 are basically tight passive fish, so against someone with that mind frame I'm going to make my bluffs in general very large and my value bets quite small. I'll often bet like less than half pot on a lot of rivers against them with most of my value range in order to elicit light calls because ... well .. they are tight. They don't want to risk a lot of money unless they have a strong hand (indicated by their generally low PFR%).

Yeah it's generally going to be considered a bluff catcher against an unknown who 3 barrels all in in a 3bet pot. Potentially you could be up against KQ but that's the only value hand you can beat. Obviously I'm going to be more likely to call down on certain runouts and more likely to fold on others (say if a bdfd fell, I'd be more likely to fold than if it missed).

I don't have a super strong reason for why I would call down but equally I don't really have that much reason to fold. Stated differently, most people would say "well you don't have enough information to call this river shove", and my response would be "well you don't really have enough information to fold either".

I hate saying this kind of thing because it has drastically reduced my winrate, but when some of the better pros started saying "when you are at the top of your range it's a good idea to use that hand as your randomization for calling down in spots where you aren't sure". I used to get away with murder before lots of pros started giving that advice in videos. It's just very good advice because of the informational advantage I used to gain so often against players who would call flop call turn fold river. It allowed me to understand their stack off thresholds, and it kept them in the dark as to what I was 3 barreling. But when you randomize by calling down with the top of your range, I don't get those advantages.

I like to 4bet a lot against guys who will fold to 4bets. If they have any kind of reasonable 5b bluffing hands in their 3b range this strategy usually sucks nowadays though. Back in 2009 I used to 4bet like a maniac because people didn't yet understand how to 5b bluff.

Against good players it's almost impossible to flat 3bets out of position and profit. If a guy is 3betting me a lot in position I would just severely tighten my opening range and then start widening my 4b value range. If I were playing 200nl and under I'd do some flatting OOP though because I don't think players are good enough to take advantage of me.

The strategy I was discussing previously for flatting 3bets was specifically meant for spots where I am in position and the 3bettor is in the blinds.

Am I stupid if I never fold tptk in a 3bet pot early in history? Seems like easy way to find out what is going on is to stack off. If they have me beat, good for them, I got a hand that does decently at showdown and I need to find out information ASAP. A possibly losing call that will hopefully allow me to play better than my opponent in the future.

I rarely fold TPTK in a 3bet pot as the caller against an unknown. The board would have to run out pretty nasty for me to want to toss it.

What do you think separates the guys that crush 400nl+ whilst playing a ton of tables like nanonoko, tim0thee, drgiggy, pobolero etc (to name a few)

nice thread

I don't ever remember Pobolero being a tough player to beat. Maybe he improved since I was last on PS? I know I sure have improved a lot since then.

timothee, I think he's a very tough player and a long term winner in some very big games (10/20+). I didn't know he had anything to do with mass multitabling.

drgiggy, While I think he is an excellent player as well, I haven't heard of him doing any mass multi tabling. I feel like he might be the type of person who would struggle with mass multitabling because I think he thinks about things simillarly to myself. AND I KNOW THERE'S NO WAY I'LL MASS MULTITABLE! I suppose I could learn to do it if I really wanted to, but that would take any fun I ever had playing the game out of it, and would leave me to many sessions of tense button pressing over and over and over. My brain was not built to do it, even average salesmen on the street are often able to talk circles around me, the thing is though, once I get a chance to really sink my teeth into it, I understand it inside and out.

These other guys you mentioned, they may be mass multi tabling, but they aren't doing what Nanonoko is doing. Those other guys are trying to create a strategy closest to GTO as possible and they want to standardize the majority of their decisions so as not to waste too much time on one spot. They weren't born with the ability Nano has to store all of that information for quick access and to be able to process information and make decisions as quickly as Nano can. He's a freak. I'd say he was literally born to grind.

If I were to speculate, and yeah, I have speculated on this before, LOL. There has to be something about the way his brain processes information, it must be so much more efficient than a normal person like yours or mines ability.

In the course of a poker session, which apparently is 24 games at the same time, on top of all of the normal things you might need to do when say 4 tabling , you need to have this massive database in your head which recognizes and tracks the game flow at each table, and you have to remember where that table is. Other things you would need to remember: Tiny adjustments like shifting your value range against 1 specific player in certain spots. If Nanonoko is doing this for every table and all of this is somehow stored in his head he needs to be able to remember how often his opponents have been opening from certain spots on each table, it just seems so far out of reach for anything I could do, as is the case, I start to be -EV somewhere between 8-10 tables playing 5/10. Think of all the variables to consider about changing game dynamic and old players leaving the game and new players arriving, he needs to build some kind of a database to store additional info he picks up from playing hands against them.
Then as that player leaves and another one joins, I don't know if he has the capacity to store that player profile and just to like set it aside for the moment somewhere in his mind and just pick it up at any point. If he's able to do that then it does make a lot of this other stuff a lot easier.

But clearly you get the point, Nanonoko is not playing the same game as us. I've only heard of three poker players who are able to do this, Nano was one, bfl4me was another, and I can't remember the 3rd guys name, but he was a 3/6 FR NLHE grinder on stars.

Anyway, after explaining that it shouldn't be a surprise that I think I'm a better poker player, we aren't even playing the same game. He's good on average at reading game flow and making proper adjustments, but he has to do it on 6x the amount of tables I do, and he has to make every decision in like 2 seconds.

Maybe he can play really well just 4 or 6 tabling, I don't know if that's the case, I remember nutsinho backing up nano saying he thought he had skill.

Mostly what I meant is when he's 24 tabling, he will lose to me. But who cares if you are losing a little bit to one guy when you are crushing most of the other regs and also allow yourself a seat at all tables up to 24 with a fish.

Great response

I understand what you are saying, but nanonoko has averaged over 3BB/100 at 5/10 in 1.2 million hands so i find it interesting and maybe a little bit confusing that you believe you have an edge against him.

Nice work, much respect and thanks for doing this.

Oh and i guess when i mentioned timothee and giggy etc, they are the 12 tabling type , not quite 'mass' multitabling but still a lot

He said he has an edge over him when he is playing 24 tables while Marsh is playing like 4-6. He isn't even remotely implying he is any better than nano.

I think it's fair to assume anyone crushing 5-10+, playing on 1 table, would be better than Phil Ivey multitabling 24-tables.

Like he stated, i'd obviously take the 24-tabling 3ptbb/100 skill, lose a bit to the top regs, but make up for it big time because of volume.


And yeah, Marsh, thx a lot for this, has been inspiring especially since i moved to 400NL recently and still hope to aim for 1KNL some day

It's impossible to know your actual winrate unless you are nanonoko. The rest of us take so much longer to get to the long run that the game evolves quicker than the long run can ever reach. All I mean is that by the time you play a million hands, you will have vastly improved as a player and thus would be no where near the level of player you were when you started that million (given you were paying attention and trying to improve your play). So that sample you have will not actually be representative of you at that point.

All it is, is a guess, and I very well could have overestimated the difficulty of the stars games and I could have underestimated my edge in them. Also, when I played stars, I was a much much weaker player than I am now, so the characterization of the difficulty of those games is coming from Marshall from 2007 and 2008.

I've implied this before and had people try to give me crap about it. When that happened I logged onto PS 5/10 and sat HU with him at 2 6max tables. We played like 30 minutes and I got the money in good against him 3 times in non cooler spots. I think he sucked out once or twice.

BTW Judging by your post I don't think you fully understood what I was saying at all.


One thing I want to add though as this is a common misconception poker players make when categorizing their opponents. Often when thinking about a certain players game you end up judging them based off seeing them play at their worst. For example, if i was tilted and you saw me spew off a stack in a spot it was really clear my opponent wasn't folding, you might think im a bad player based on a small sample and you'd be very wrong. maybe it's the case that this is what has happened when i played nano (or maybe it was me that caused him to play that way) or i suppose it could have been me making this misconception.

@beHypE - nanonoko has averaged over 3BB/100 over 1.2m hands at 1k NL whilst playing 24 tables at the same time and 3.66BB at 400nl over the same amount of hands (still playing 24 tables simultaneously). So can you understand why i would be slightly interested/confused as to how marshall has an edge over nanonoko, given that marshall said in the post that i quoted he would probably win at less than 2BB/100 at 5/10? Anyway, none of this matters because 2BB is still obviously amazing at 1k NL and as marshall just stated these numbers are from a couple of years ago.

Bringing up ivey playing 24 tables vs a single tabling 1k NL reg is just idiotic and doesnt come even remotely close to what i was talking about.

@marshall - good points and i never said who i thought was the better player nor does it matter or do i really care. I was just going off the winrates from PTR and the ones you told us here. I know you know this but i thought i would clear it up for beHypE because i think he completely missed the point.

thanks again marshall

I'm either dumb or I didn't understand something, but just to clarify something, having x ptbb/100 doesn't mean you're better against a player who has y ptbb/100 just because x > y. Nano might just be better @exploiting fish than Marsh, but Marsh might be slightly better overall against Nano (not implying any of this is the case, it's just an example).

But given even Marsh told me I didn't quite understand what he was implying I guess i'm wrong somewhere lol

But reading this : really lets me understand that nano will lose to Marsh because of the fact that he plays 24 tables @ a time and thus can't play as perfectly as possible against Marsh, whereas Marsh can focus more on "exploiting" nano because he plays only 4 tables (or whatever).

But anyways it's not like it does matter

lol @ better @ exploiting fish at 5/10 NL over 1.2mil hands

Marshall, do you often play without a HUD? It seems a lot of your game is based on feel/gameflow rather than statistics.

I find I have conflicts with my HUD and gameflow. For example, there's a certain reg who 3-bets 15%-20% from the blinds and has a low fold to 4-bet, so I tend to 4-bet/call AQ and 99 vs him from late position. However he always seems to show up with a monster. I can't tell if this is variance and I'm just running into the top of his range, or whether he's made a specific adjustment to me. Any advice for these kinds of situations?

Thanks for doing this Marshall.

You talked about reducing your opening range to around 25% otb when facing 12-14% 3bets from the blinds. If you were in the CO what 3bet % from the button would result in you reducing your CO opening range and what would your reduced range roughly be? And same question except with the blinds forcing you to be reducing your range?

Assuming there isn't a reg 3betting you lots what is the widest range you would open from EP/MP with a fish a) In position on you, and b) OOP vs you? If this is too vague could you give examples for 30/10 and 60/20 type stats?

Marshall,
Love of the game or love of the money?

Ty for your last answer, but id still be very intrested in your responce to those situations as well :P

thanks for doing this

1. can you give an example of a situation where it's better to c/r a flop than c-betting as the PFR? (the more common the situation is the better obviously )

2. you open KQ in the cutoff and total unknown calls otb (blinds fold), flop is J22r, you cbet 1/2 pot or whatever your size is for this board and he raises to 3x, do you just give up, and if not how do you continue? what if he minraises?

i ask because w/KQ i usually just reraise bluff if i think my opponent is unsophisticated (which i assume is the case if they're raising this flop), w/AK i usually flat flop and re-evaluate turn, but i'm wondering if just folding is better with either hand :S

lets say you open CO and a decent reg flats from the BTN. its folded around, and youre HU on flop.

how do you approach playing extremely dry flops? 442r, etc.

this is awesome.

in general, what's your take on barreling (bluffing in general) with zero-equity hands vs regs?

I recently watched a video where the guy pretty much implied that this should basically never be done

but I just think like meh, if the spot (the specific turn or river runout) is perfect then I'll bomb, most of the time he folds anyway and if I get caught I just won't do that again vs him

another question:
what's your standard deviation that comes with your 4BB winrate, and how often do you experience 10BI swings, 20BI swings? (by that I mean dropping that amount in a session, or like within 3k hands, in a day or whatever.. maybe you could tell us about your grinding routine while we're at it?)

I'm not going to respond to any more questions about specific in game adjustments and strategy for a number of obvious reasons. People will pay for the information, so it seems silly to me to keep giving it away for free.

I'll leave you with this though:

There is a reason I don't mind giving some of this information away for free. Even if you understand what I'm saying and can correctly implement it, all that changes is you now are utilizing a different strategy. That strategy will have a different counter strategy for me to formulate, and I will come to that conclusion and adapt my play faster than you can recognize that I'm doing it and in that way I will still profit.

Clearly if I did it just for the money I'd never be here giving away advice.

If I played for the love of money I'd be a HS bumhunter.

I'm 90% sure that you aren't running into the top of his range.