Hi, background on me: been playing as a recreational player mostly on Stars US for 3 years now. Managed to be winning at 100NL for a small amount, and just crossed 100k hands at 200NL as a slight loser. My overall goal here is to become a 6bb+ winner at 200NL and then eventually move to start playing 500NL by the end of the year.

100NL Graph

Overall Stats

Stats by Position

200NL Graph

Overall Stats

Stats by Position


It's pretty clear my redline has always been a major leak. After reading and watching countless videos over the past few months on how to improve this, I've been trying to implement things into my game to reduce how much it's losing (using overbets, check raising more flops/turns, bluff raising river with blockers, 3bet/4bet more, 5bet bluff jam, raising for thin value on river), but overall It still declines too much.

After each session, I'll upload my hands into GTO wizard and review a couple of hands. Overall, I have an average EV loss of 0.03 and make wrong plays about 5.5% of the time. This is partly from me trying to adjust to the player pool who IMO plays tighter ranges and doesn't find as many bluffs as GTOW. I've interpreted this as me playing fairly solid and fundamental, but it's clear that my current strat won't be enough to win against the regs in this pool.

With that being said, can anyone with a decent redline/win rate share any thoughts on what I might be doing wrong? I feel like my approach to how I think about redline is just incorrect and it turns into leaks in my game. Would be great to hear from anyone who has gone through this same path of fixing their redline and hear your "Aha" moments. If there are any other PT4 filters/stats that you think would be helpful for me to look at, I'm all ears as well. Thanks in advance!

You might notice something if you isolate each street and compare to a player with a positive redline.

so:
didn't see flop
saw flop but not turn
saw turn but not river
saw river

Thanks for the advice. I had a long post drafted up but then it all got deleted so I'll post this in parts. First, I don't have more than 25k hands with any specific villain so filtering for those with decent red lines basically just leaves me with these 2:

Villain 1 (Breakeven EV but I think he's actually good? Have seen him play at 1k and at least he has a winning redline):

Villain 2:

Preflop

Me:

Villain 1:

Villain 2:

Stats



Clearly seems I'm leaking a lot of bb here. I think in theory winning players should have a positive win rate here right? Even though you lose from the blinds, you should defend them enough and raise from other positions enough to win, but someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here.

Flop

Me:

Villain 1:

Villain 2:

We're all breakeven/losing redline here. Looking through my DB, I'm only losing from BB, and this appears to be because we're defending BB and then forced to fold.


Turn

Me:

Villain 1:

Villain 2:



This seems to be my biggest redline leak spot, and I've always had a suspicion that I'm most lost on turn. The biggest gap here is turn cbetting. In general, I thought GTO approach checked turn quite frequently after betting flop as aggressor in SRP and 3bet pots. I think even Uri Peleg emphasizes turn checking in taking a bet-check-bet line to increase redline, but I didn't buy the course so I'm not sure of the nuances here. In general, I've been trying to check turn on bad cards for my range as flop aggressor, like middle card pairing, flush draws completing, more 2pairs in villains range. This results in checking on a bunch of turns. Any thoughts here?

River

Me:

Villain 1:

Villain 2:

This seems ok, I think I've managed to turn things around a bit by value betting more thin and probing wide when turn checks through, but my thought here is that this doesn't need to be winning a bunch if I'm playing more blue line style. Looks like this is where villain 1 is getting additional juice to be a redline warrior.

Also want to mention that villain 2's sample is still so small that I have them winning from the small blind. Not to say that's impossible, but I've also had thousands of hands where I was winning from one or both of the blinds and had a flat or winning redline. My thought is that it's just more likely that villain 2 has a slightly lower redline over the long run, but seems like they know what they're doing regardless.

bet turns more lol

river call efficiency indicates you are just not calling enough, preflop seems too tight as well, raise and bet a little more everywhere and stop folding, people do overbluff in many many nodes

Thanks to everyone who responded. I'm taking time to review hands where I didn't bet turn and should have. Also re-reviewing hands in GTOW to fine tune what board textures and turns I can barrel more on as aggressor/defender.

lol this, the best approach might just be "when in doubt, bet turn"

We'll see how much turning up the aggression here helps. Will post an update at end of Feb or sooner once I have a decent sample size.

Fair, I thought I have enough stats/reads on most of the regs in the pool and I generally will lean toward making river folds against the nittier ones (inb4 me). Basically the guys with <20 vpip, 46ish WWSF type. But against regs who are more aggressive, I don't think I have a problem calling for stacks. Could just be my own personal bias though.

Out of curiosity, what nodes do you think people are overbluffing at this stake? For example, I've seen that the SRP, XR Flop Triple Barrel is underbluffed, any triple barrel in general, and most river bets as well. Also, preflop 4bet and 5 bet are underbluffed too in my experience. Maybe flop cbet and any turn/river when checked to are overbluffed?

How has nobody suggested "use search on red line, understand it's meant to go down" yet

It depends who you are playing against not looking at your red line. Your problem isn't being more aggressive but understanding how to play vs different types of opponent and also what their ranges are in a given situation.

The redline is not ment to go up or down. Certain spots we are going to lose money and certain spots we make money. When we are in the BB we are going to lose its that simple. Some lose more then others but we are going to lose there is no way around it.

I am talking overall

Overall, I'm not sure this is true. I think this is what's most common, but there are many cases where players employ a strategy that has a breakeven or winning redline. It's just a different style of poker and it's definitely one that I want to understand better here. Even if I don't end up playing this way, understanding this means understanding the game and exploits better.



Typically I would agree that it's not about looking at red line. If the whole pool was full of players who always bet and never fold, I would have a terrible redline, but I wouldn't care as long as I have a high winrate. For the topic of this thread, I chose the redline because that seems to be a good starting point to study my leaks. Also like most players, I seem to already have more of an intuition for how to win with blue.

So far, through the advice from people like TripleBerryJam and XenoBlade, I'm able to have a better sense of what I need to review and improve. FWIW, it does seem that at least part of the problem is I'm not being aggressive enough in some spots.

When it comes to "understanding how to play vs different opponents and what their ranges are," where could I choose a starting point to review and study to get better at this if not by first looking at my redline and then drilling down further into the different stats and nodes that drive it? The issue isn't necessarily that it's losing, but that it's losing enough to kill any profits from blue