Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDarkKnight
Maybe not at higher stakes where pots are usually heads up but when you’re constantly going multi-way to the flop, the PFR should be checking the flop A LOT. And if the PFR actually does check a good amount of the time then they need to be countered by donking into them.
In your experience, does the player pool check the flop a lot when checked to as the preflop raiser? That is certainly not my experience. Even at, say, 20/40, I think most players c-bet too much, both heads up and multiway. And that makes reflexively checking to the last preflop raiser a lot less bad, or sometimes even good, especially as compared to however the player in question might deploy a leading strategy.
That takes me to your point about how you check back 30 times and they still keep checking to you. Yeah, that means their strategy is not ideal. But how much EV are they losing from that strategy compared to whatever ridiculous and imbalance leading strategy they might try to deploy instead? They might be, intentionally or not, choosing the lesser of two bad strategies. Here's a thought experiment: if you took someone who never played poker before and they could either play only AA or they could play a totally GTO preflop range, what's going to be less -EV for them? I think its fairly obvious they're better off playing only AA because they're going to butcher all the other hands so badly that they're better off (from an immediate EV standpoint, not a long-term learning standpoint) choosing a worse preflop strategy. Same thing goes here, with less hyperbole. "Bad" players are sometimes better off following suboptimal heuristics.
Maybe it's because you're on that sick heater you posted about, and I don't mean to use this term in a way that is an attack on you, but your posts sound really judgmental. I think I really improved a lot as a poker player when I stopped labeling players or plays as "bad" and instead tried to focus on figuring out the reasoning behind the play and figuring out how my opponents thought about the game. Hell, a lot of what would have once been thought of as "god awful advice" on this forum has been vindicated by solvers, etc. And yeah, I know that the difference between "bad" and "suboptimal" or the like is mostly semantic, but, at least for me, that internal narrative/characterization really matters.