As an online Mid stakes has been, and now occasional 10/20 live recreational player, I like coming back on and reading your input,,def one of the posters i respect the most in this forum

That said,,this post comes across as a bit lol

lol. I'm a flawed human being. I can't help it. You guys can either berate me or accept me for who I am I guess.

I mostly try to be helpful and usually try to give good advice with no nonsense, but at the same time I get attacked constantly. I'm not the type of person to back down when someone attacks me. I'm very confrontational.

lol, marshall ur advice is obviously good. your "holier than thou" act however, especially after having played with you on and off over a few years (ur not THAT great tbh) does grate a little though.

Read this and it thought it was 'YourDoom' posting!

Yeah, he might not have been saying this and I certainly wasn't. I for one am very glad you post alot and very thoughtfully in these forums. I think you're an asset to the MSNL forums. No need for the major self defence, sell yourself post. Thought you might have figured by the at the end of my post, that a serious response was not necessary.

The ego is a sickness of the human mind when left unobserved. You absolutely can help it, simply by being alert and aware of it's uncomfortable psychic invasion. It cannot survive if you are aware of it. Only when you are truly unconscious and lack presence in the moment does the ego overtake you. It's like an unrelenting entity that pretends to be you and will fight vehemently to defend itself in any way possible so it can survive.

You mention that you are constantly being attacked. That is your ego being attacked and fueled by other egos. It's like a feeding process. Nobody is attacking the true 'you'. They are feeling a deep and unsettling aggitation with your constant need to brag, prove, belittle others and of course, defend your position as if your very life depended on it. You awaken the worst in others when you let this happen. If you make a conscious effort to observe your feelings and not take thought so seriously you'll be astonished at how much happiness and inner-peace you'll discover. You will also notice a significant shift in perception and in how others act toward you.

Did you copy paste that from an Eckhart Tolle book?

I didn't see a need to brag. I don't think I almost ever just come out with a brag. That's not my style at all. If I am going to be challenged I don't see how suggesting that they are wrong and providing evidence of such constitutes me having a "holier than thou" attitude or some subconscious desire to want to create agitation.

Yes I will mix it up and I will defend my beliefs and I will make statements when I believe them to be true, but it's not like I just arrived here one day and said "I own all of you, you are idiots, listen to me because I am the master" or something equally ******ed to that. I am usually trying to help, and if you go back and look at the majority of my posts (of course not all of them, I know there are some f'ed up examples out there of when I've acted very poorly), I'm pretty sure for the most part, you will find me being quite helpful.

It doesn't lead to anything other than you likely being exploited. It leads to confusion because you don't control the frequency in a situation where you'll be getting fantastic pot odds with a decent hand.

I'm mostly saying that the prospect of bet/3-betting is easier to balance and you're able to include bluffs; whereas, bet/calling turns your hand face up and you won't know what to do on the river against a good player since he'll have some likely close to optimal chosen bluffing frequency.

Chill out Marshall.

Well if he reads it as "a very likely river call" then he will probably try to play exploitably and not bluff very often, which would make this a good situation to call turn and fold river. But if he does in fact bluff pretty optimally then it is a complicated situation. The problem I have with shoving is that he has so few worse value hands. That means that in order to make shoving correct he has to have a ton of bluffing hands. He might very well have that, but wouldn't that still make it better to call and bluffcatch river?

Its a pretty gross spot and incredibly read/flow dependent almost to the point that it is hard to comment on. But that being said, in general when we bet/call the turn here aren't we almost always huge(Like qq probably near bottom of our range) so much so that I think that we dont have to worry about being bluffed on the river all that much given it looks like we probably aren't folding almost ever when we bet call the turn, and we can still be nutted.

I mostly try to be helpful and usually try to give good advice with no nonsense, but at the same time it feels like i get attacked constantly

mb marshall took a couple pills too many again.

Meh it's just amusing to have big egos and different styles in here and you're all making this forum better for it. People seem to forget there are many different styles that still win at a good clip at msnl when executed properly. The day every poster in here will go "I see a lot of merit for options X, Y and Z" instead of blindly fighting for one of them is when I will start to worry about the quality of the games

I think there's a good reason a Phil Galfond video runs at 1/10th the speed of that of a random msnl winner.

I'd almost never be 3betting turn. Can't see what good comes from jamming when villain is polarizing his range this hard.

Clearly I was emotional and over-reacting yesterday. dunno why.

ifs, completely understandable. =p

When I read posts like urs, I just cant help but be massively confused. It defies my whole understanding of the game, because on the one hand, getting in QQ vs Jx on the turn at 150bb deep sounds like something ud see from two 5NL donks, yet on the other hand, I know you are one of the best midstakes regs of all time, so there must be a serious deficiency in how I am thinking.

My main point of confusion is ur use of the word 'control'. In normal senses of the word (at least, insofar as is relevant to poker*) it indicates an information asymmetry, however I fail to see how there is any in the case where Hero flats the turn raise. Both Hero and Villain know what Hero has, so really Hero's faceup-ness is irrelevant for the porpoises of control.** Villain (ostensibly, and this is rather debatable^) knows his own bluffing frequency. Hero knows his own calling frequency. Both should be ignorant of the other. If Hero is calling less often than GTO than Villain should be bluffing 100%, if Hero is calling more often than GTO then Villain should be bluffing never, and if Hero is calling the magic GTO number then Villain should be bluffing some other magic GTO number. So Villain is just as 'lost' as Hero, because since he has no idea the % chance Hero is calling too much or folding too much in this spot, he has no means of determining that fabled optimal bluffing frequency vs Hero, the same way Hero cant determine an optimal calling frequency vs Villain (assuming Villian is competent enough to put such frequency into practice^).

So I just dont see where Villain's edge is coming from (if Hero flatted the turnraise). It seems to me that if Hero thinks he is stronger at poker in general, he should be giving Villain 2 opportunities to bluff an incorrect % of the time, with more money total, as opposed to 1 opportunity to do so with less money total.

* Imo even if person A has a gun pointed at person B, its arguable that he isnt truly any more in 'control' of the situation... there are chemicals at play, so B can talk him out of it etc. Whereas if B is ignorant of A's presence, I think even the determinist would admit that A has a control or edge of some form. Since there are surely some determinists who play poker, this would seem to suggest that factors which are common knowledge to two optimally playing poker players are irrelevant to one having an edge over the other in a given spot. This just seems very intuitive to me. Am I wrong?

** Inspired by ur comment I made another thread in this forum about the HU toy problem where Hero is dealt AA face up every hand. I think this variant is far from trivial.

^ Given you bothered to mention the case that Villain is 'bad' and always has a monster here, I think its worth considering the much more common case where Villain is good but not good enough to know and 'control' his exact bluffing frequencies. Against such a Villain, Hero should actually have an information edge, since for me at least, controlling calling frequency is a good deal easier, and regs who can control the calling% a good deal more common, than those who can control their bluffing%.

BTW the reason for balancing ur 3bet bluffs, I completely understand and agree with, its just is that really that much of a factor in practice, at least enough to overcome Hero's potential edge in getting Villain to bluff an incorrect % of the time on turn + river. Thanks.

Bump!

You need to get the f off w/e script drugs ur on, cos they r ***** you up. You can't be as big an azzhole as you come acrosss in your posts, your clearly fked from some other influence. just my ''good advice'' to you.

yep, i came off pretty bad in that post. no denying that.

Folding here...😒

Without history, I highly doubt that if you're shoving that you'll be called with worse almost ever, beyond the occasional draw with a lot of equity, like 97, even then you probably will just be shoved on by players who don't care to balance bet sizing.

Now, on the surface this seems to argue for a call on the turn, and if we were deeper I would certainly agree that a turn call with a much wider range makes much more sense. Here, we have to reconcile the value of calling the turn and potentially making a river mistake if Villain shoves with the value of shoving the turn ourselves. I definitely have played against players when any turn play besides folding is clearly incorrect and against players for whom shoving the turn is a close to break even or a winning proposition.

If you're against a guy who will never bluff here of if you're playing 50NL and just 'know' that people have it here 80%+, then you can probably find a fold. In higher stakes games, almost every single action a player will take will be balanced. Strong hands would like your semi-bluffs on this board to continue to bluff and weak hands probably won't be raising the turn to induce for reasons everyone in the thread has corroborated.

From the way villain is playing his range, we may conclude that our opponent is a bad player or that he is making some sort of exploitable type play, a play that is tough to balanced or simply not balanced, in order to take a particular action a very large amount of the time (e.g. always shoving T9 or always folding QQ). Absent of any additional information, we should view our opponent as a subset of our population of opponents.

We have also concluded that if we call turn that our opponent will play near perfectly on the river, unless we're able to counter-exploit his likely exploitive range by folding or calling correctly, meaning that we need a great handle on his turn range. If we have a great handle on his turn range, then we shouldn't be calling to call river because he will likely rarely continue with bluffs. There are definitely people out there who would bluff, but without information, it's optimistic to assume this villain will keep bluffing, just so I'm clear.

Therefore, I'm purporting that the best course of action is to shove in what little remains of stacks after we would be calling, for the combination of reasons of being unable to make more money on the river, being able to 'charge' his draws and floats (to deny him equity for the future street on which he plays perfectly, and to protect our over-all game plan and range for betting the turn in this spot. If he has 87s, then great for him. He barely stacks QQ+ and clearly could get more money from your range by playing his hand differently on really any other street. Because your range for stacking off is clearly so narrow here, you probably shouldn't start out by folding it, especially if your opponent is the type of player to be creative enough to make a move like this but not necessarily a player with a holistic view of the play and it's implications.

What you're saying about GTO play and the river are definitely correct, I just think that the other factors outweigh the likely small edge (or loss) we get by calling the turn to soul read the river. What you're saying about the river isn't taking into account what's happening on the turn, which is certainly the crux of the hand if we can agree that villain plays the river in a way that will never give us a huge edge (or if we are unable to determine the exploitive manner in which he's playing the river). The entire hand relies on a very difficult to estimate factor of how often villain is bluffing the turn with his flop calling range.

To be clear, if Villain is (almost never) calling with worse, then the value of shoving the turn comes from protecting against FDs correct?

What Im basically arguing, is that there is no value from protecting against being bluffed on the river... The way to combat being bluffed on the river would seem to simply call more on the river.

I wouldnt consider folding here vs an unknown either.

Sorry could you please explain again, I thought you just said that most players at this steak are balanced ? Did you mean to say we should conclude he is not a bad opponent and not making an exploitable play?

No I dont think he will play near perfectly at all. What I was saying is that its just as difficult for him to know whether bluffing river is +EV, as it is for us to know whether calling river is +EV, given we are both unknown to each other. He is just as much in the dark about our turn calling range (if not more so due to sample size of the situation having arose vs the subset of the population hero represents) as we are in the dark about his turn raising/river shoving range. Are you arguing that the latter range is higher variance?

Now Im the one whose lost completely. I thought you wanted to assume that villain is to be taken as a representative of the mid steaks population, almost every single action of which should be balanced?

Well of course if he / the average over the subset of the player pool he represents is shoving river with a perfect $900/$2900 = 31% bluff frequency then we are unable to make money. We are hoping that the player pool of splashy capable 30/25s even at 1000NL is somewhere north or south of 31% in this spot. In which case calling or folding respectively make money in direct proportion to how far off they are. So are you basically saying that they are so closely honed in on 31% that there is more money saved by making sure a draw doesnt roll off? Lets try to estimate how much money that actually is?



/tldr math. Cliffs: even if the river goes as badly as possible for us and
(a) when river is scary he continues all his bluffs and semibluffs and we always fold
(b) when river is blank he bets only value
(c) we call all blank rivers (and only ever get owned)

we still find EV(shoving into air/draw) = $875, EV(calling down air/draw) = .2 * -$245 + .8 * $875 = $650, EV(shoving into trips) = -$1145, EV(calling down trips) = .2 * -$245 + .8 * -$1145 = -$965, thus he needs to have air or draw almost half the time on the turn for EV(shoving overall) > EV(calling overall). A more likely scenario where he bluffs a blank river with some missed draws and air, and we call half the time, requires him to have the draw or air 2/3rds of the time in order it be less EV than shoving.

(Some simplifying assumptions above include not giving us the EV of rivering a 8 or Q, not giving villain the EV of hitting a gutter or overcard, him betting a significantly smaller size on the river, him calling off a shove with 67cc or 79cc, checking a flush river that also pairs his air, all occurrences on the order of a few percent frequency that hopefully are minor enough to cancel each other out)

Balancing 3bet bluffs does seem theoretically legit to me but in reality both players are unknown have no history - does the gain in metagame really compensate for the dozens of BBs burned this one hand by shoving rather than calling?

Sorry I don`t understand this paragraph

Like I said, it'll never give him a huge edge either since hes equally unable to determine the exploitive manner in which we're soul reading.

It is difficult to estimate I thought thats why poker is hard.... otherwise its just a giant math problem

Thanks for engaging... You are a great poster