Interesting, thanks for that

I agree with that. Vs EP opens i mostly refrain from 3betting from the blinds w hands like A5s, maybe AJo, etc bc of the limited fold equity.

Wanted to post this November graph yesterday but PC keeps crashing, motherboard shorting. Anyway, results aren't amazing, basically -1bb/100 AIEV for the month



And overall:



Pretty happy that I'm not getting absolutely crushed in my first month and a half back, it is only 10nl blitz but I hadn't studied since like 10 years ago. Still a lot to work on, feeling like I'm not as booked up on BB defense vs. IP cbets as I could be. Positional wr there over 10k hands is like -49bb/100 AIEV.

Ignition players: Do you guys see people intentionally time out to try to catch their opponents betting quickly to steal the pot? I saw someone time out on the turn OOP in a hand against me and his timer immediately turned red and started counting down, similarly to what happens when people disconnect. I ended up checking back and as soon as I checked his timer went back to normal and started counting down his action for the river. I'm assuming that (1) if I'd bet on the turn, he wouldn't have had his hand killed or anything and his action clock would've started as normal; and (2) he was planning to jam the turn if I snapbet 1 bb or something. He had a combo draw and I'm guessing that -- if my assumptions here are correct -- he was trying to angle me by seeing if I'd give off some obvious tell.


Ignition - $1 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

UTG: 404.28 BB
MP: 101.28 BB
CO: 67.7 BB
Hero (BTN): 124.08 BB
SB: 133.57 BB
BB: 100.95 BB

SB posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.5 BB) Hero has T T

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.5 BB) BB has 5 J

fold, fold, fold, Hero raises to 2.75 BB, fold, BB raises to 13 BB, Hero calls 10.25 BB

Flop: (26.5 BB, 2 players) 6 7 Q
BB bets 12.59 BB, Hero calls 12.59 BB

Turn: (51.68 BB, 2 players) 4
BB checks, Hero checks

River: (51.68 BB, 2 players) 5
BB checks, Hero checks

BB shows 5 J (One Pair, Fives)
(Pre 31%, Flop 44%, Turn 39%)
Hero shows T T (One Pair, Tens)
(Pre 69%, Flop 56%, Turn 61%)
Hero wins 49.1 BB
Rake paid 2.58 BB

I was suspicious when i saw something like this before but ive only seen it a couple times. Dude looked like he was disconnected then all of a sudden back and raising over IP. Maybe just a fluke though.

Shot took 100nl for my 2nd time tonight. Was playing well until massive fish sat down and owned me. Vpiped 75%, donked every flop for pot size. Runner runnered 2 pair w 64o having no draw for half a stack, Runner runnered a straight flush to take down my flopped top set for a full stack. Rungood lasting for 2 weeks abruptly ends when you try to move up stakes. Back down to 50 again we go.

I honestly struggle the most to win against those guys with 70+ vpips.

I saw him donk shove river as a bluff on a scary card vs another player so when he did it again vs me i didnt see how i could possibly fold. But of course he showed up w nuts. I tried to get into every hand w him and surprisingly all the regs at the table were super nitty and allowed me to iso him over and over with impunity but i just never could make a hand after that and eventually someone else stacked him. Definitely frustrating when you get Jonah'd by the whale

Same for me! Winning every now and then at least keeps them interested and putting more $ in to the game.

Hoping Fury v Chissora is entertaining and they go for a tear up

Fury is a beast. Joshua dodged a bullet by not fighting him.

Word of advice for you and others - do NOT look at the winrate numbers across such small samples. 50k is not a big enough sample to even look at the EVBB/100 number, especially when it is in this range where you are not sure if you are winning, breaking even or losing. About the positional winrate - that is not even worth thinking about. The variance is so heavy that you would need at least 100k hands in that position to even get an approximation, which would still be heavily affected by variance. I really recommend you play around with the primedope variance calculator.

Fair enough, I think brokenstars said the same thing about positional WR in my first 20K hands. Nonetheless, I get the sense my BB play could be a bit better as I feel like I'm not being aggressive enough. I did a good job last month of 3betting more polarized there than before (villain dependent ofc).

This past week I started working on turn probes with a solver and realized I am playing those spots pretty poorly. Didn't know that OB should get used there as frequently as it does, but it makes sense now. Any there any other spots besides BB vs. BTN SRP and SB vs. BTN 3bp that you'd recommend a relative beginner like me look into?

For SRP:

BTN vs BB
SB vs BB
CO vs BTN flat

For 3BP

CO vs BTN
SB vs BTN
BB vs BTN
BB vs SB

I hope my original reply did not sound like "you shouldn't worry about that spot because your winrate is affected by variance". Actually this is exactly what you SHOULD do - cover the whole game tree node by node and work on your weakpoints. The point I was making was that even experienced HS players oftentimes fall for the trap of looking into the winrate number itself to indicate whether they are playing well (IE making the correct decisions and applying proper strategy) which is absolute nonsense, because the variance is so insanely crazy that even with a huge sample your bb/100 can be extremely off (and likely will be off).

Obviously if you read my coaching thread you will understand that my POV on studying poker is completely different from most players/coaches, so if you are asking me specifically for advice then I would just tell you to forget about imitating solver play. You will end up failing miserably, unless you significantly simplify the strategy (probably much more significantly than you might think) and it will still likely not be even remotely close to the simplicity and EV of an exploitative strategy (for example MDA based).

It is really hard for me to provide you with advice for beginners outside of suggesting MDA play. Just one good piece of advice - if a coach/player is telling you to imitate solver play, they likely either:
a| Don't know what they are talking about
b| They are pushing you towards a super stressful path in your poker career that the vast majority of people can't possibly handle or be good at

The only way I would advise you to study GTO strategies would be to:
a| Check solver bluffing combos on the river and then compare them to what you normally see is being bluffed by your pool
b| See how wide you are supposed to defend postflop against aggression for specific sizings
c| Check what combos the solver defends with on the river when facing an unusual sizing and try to think whether your average reg ever finds those calls ( spoiler - he most likely doesn't come even remotely close to calling as much as he is supposed to, for various reasons)
d| Use extremely simplified postflop strategies (IE one flop sizing, rangebet/rangecheck based on board texture, 1 turn sizing, 2-3 river sizings with large discrepancies)

12/5 Wordle answer below. Don't read if you haven't tried yet.

This is the equivalent of taking a bad beat for me.

Appreciate this, some of the OOP spots as the PF aggressor are tricky. BvB OOP is especially annoying so that's where I plan to focus next.

Good points, I hadn't thought about d. I use 2 flop sizings dependent on board and wonder if the EV tradeoff of simplifying like that is worth complicating turn/river play to the point where I'm making pure mistakes in certain spots. My guess is that the pool is more inelastic vs. GTO so it's useful to overbluff the small sizing and underbluff the large sizing.

That's pretty sick and a pretty common theme for this one... lots of people lost their streaks. I got it on my final try, but was very worried about missing it. It's especially confusing since they don't usually use different tenses of verbs.

"Parer" was my downfall a couple months ago.

Got a guy playing 97/15 to my right.

He had over 1500bb when I joined the table.

So far I've lost QQ, AQ, and KK to him (all to much worse starting hands of course).

Managed to get 2 of those buyins back, and someone else got him for a big pot when he called 200bb all-in pre with J9o

But the whale escaped with 1100bbs intact.

He is coming back tomorrow no worries

Yeah yesterday was tough, I just got lucky and got it in 4 guesses. That put me to 100 in my current streak. If it wouldn’t have been for “gauze” I’d be over 200 lol.

Why do people cash out when AI with like AA vs KK and **** like that? i just got AI AK>KK and villain cashed out. It's 2nl and 40bb effective lol wtf?!

Because the cashout is designed for idiots. I have seen players cashout with something like 5% equity. Gues they are broke and want to play a bit longer.