Earlier you said it's a leak to only 4bet or fold to 3bets oop.
I have constructed my range for 4betting with a 70/30 value/bluff range. This is quite easy to do when you open first in the 15%-20% range and villan can't really be exploting you. Things get a bit more complicated when you open wider in the co/bu, sb/bb situations where its much harder to construct a balanced range (I'm not really happy getting it in with ATs, AJ+ ) which if I open 40% is my strategy given I have to 4b bluff a lot to prevent him of picking dead money preflop from me.
So if I understand you correctly you're saying that you call 3bets oop, but in later positions, ep and mp you are 4b/folding? If so, can you give me an idea what hands you call in what position and how do you play postflop (I realize this is impossible to answer, but some examples would be nice). Obviously a lot is dependant on how villan plays postflop, but unless he's bad postflop, it becomes really hard to play oop, with so less space to maneuver at 100bb deep. I assume you call 66-99, 65s+, KQo+, KJs+, ATs+, QTs+,AJo and sometimes big overpairs. But this range will become so hard to play on Axxs flops oop. Do you playback on those flops?If so, how, do you try to float oop and probe river when turn goes x/x, do you cr for value AJ+ so you can bluff more?
Thanks

This is a very tough calculation to do because there are so many unknown variables. Let me break it down by what we can:

We would 3bet 100% of the time if we knew the reg would fold and the fish would call, so let's start there.

We have to estimate how often we think we're getting 4bet by the regular. Was the fish in the SB? If so, do we think that the player was raising lighter to play with the fish?

If we 3bet, will the player be more likely to 4bet AK-type hands to avoid playing postflop? Or will the player flat to keep the fish in?

If we have answers to some of these questions they can dictate our best play. If not, then we have to kind of guess at what to do.

The good news is that it looks like the fish isn't going to fold to our 3bet, so I would be tempted to go ahead and raise.

When/if we flat here, we should be ready to take initiative in the hand and lead out on a variety of flops. The goal is to get the fish calling our bets with a wide range of hands. Tough to give more specific advice because I don't know where we are in relation to the fish.

My biggest question to you is how do you spot your own leaks?

I found playing higher i had some obvious leaks but i only noticed those because lags would start abusing them every single time until i picked up on it and changed my game (e.g. 90% cbet in 3bet pots on flop and turn) and a 4bet/fold game only when OOP vs a 3bet

Without losing a bunch of money to people who abuse your leaks whats agood way to spot your common leaks and vice versa pick up on others leaks?

On implied odds -

I often feel like I overestimate my implied odds constantly. Calling a 3 bet OOP with 44 for 8% of my stack thinking, "Oh if I hit, I'll stack him always" but then rarely is this ever the case. Lately I've been thinking not to play small pocket pairs because I can't seem to find a way to make money off of them. This is true for me with draws as well - I feel like I pay too much to see turn cards, not really knowing my true implied odds.

Is there a way to fix this leak other than just not playing these types of hands? I feel so often I'll hit my draw or whatever even if I'm raising and they fold to my river shove 99% of the time, or to my flop/turn raise with the set regardless of texture, etc. The answer is to shove my missed draws more often (I feel) but I still feel it's spewing every time I do it and I'm never entirely certain when to do it.

I'm pretty noob at NL, I played mostly LHE back in the day so it's almost always hugely ev to chase draws in 3b pots.

Hey guys,

Apologies for being out of touch with the thread again. I actually just launched an unrelated website. Promise I'm back now, keep firing away with those questions!

Greg

Good question, lets get a couple points in here.

The first point kind of backs up the responses I've given thus far and their form: often times I've answered questions by giving general advice that happens to be applicable to the situation being asked about. However, the other reason is because you can apply those general concepts to similar situations.

In this example, it is useful to look at an opponent who double or triple barrels often as similar to someone who cbets a ton. Against that type of player, we are more likely to check and call or raise against their cbets because the bet (ie the added dead money in the pot) will be there often.

The concept is similar for turns and rivers. If an opponent is going to fire lots of turns and rivers against me, I'm not going to be raising often. Instead, I'm going to check and call down with my good hands or maybe check/raise the turn so I can also do that with my semi-bluffs (or if he doesn't notice, c/r the semi-bluffs and c/c the made hands).

Some adjustments that you will have to make includes closing your eye and calling. If I am raising k2hh and firing away on 567J, my range is going to be weak. But it's also going to be weak on a 4 river. So, often times its going to look like I'm crushed but I'm actually not.

We essentially can just choose a hand of strength x and call down with it. For example, even if our opponent bluffs a lot, it's not good to call them down with ten high. So, we pick (given a certain board) where we feel comfortable with a hand of strength x or greater, and then we just station off.

Don't forget about c/r the turn. Then rule of thumb here is to delay when you pounce because there's another layer of dead money being added to me pot. If I c/r the flop and you fold, that's actually not great if you were going to always bet/fold the turn as well.

If our opponent is aware of what we are doing, then he will start betting less frequently on the turn to correct his mistake. Then we can adjust by calling wider on the flop because we are seeing more free cards (turn checks through) and we have the ability to win with air/little (c/c flop, ch/ch turn, we bet river).

I've given this a good amount of thought and also have done a good amount of work on game theory in the past few weeks because its interesting.

I think this scenario plays itself perfectly into the concept of game theory as it applies to poker. A general warning: this is a little abstract.

From a game theory strategy, our goal is to decrease the frequency of which we fold. So, we 4bet to decrease the frequency of which we fold. However, there is a limit because anything more frequent than that amount will enable our opponent to go all in and show a profit (making us fold).

It's the identical reason we don't 3bet every time we enter a pot from the blinds. There's that sweet spot of 3betting %s, and there's these hands we wind up calling with. Why do we call with them as opposed to folding? The answer is because if we fold we have lost 1bb, so we should call if we think we can play that hand and lose less than 1bb.
I'd much rather call with ATs than 78s. The short answer to this question is you call if you can lose less than the 3bb or whatever you've put in the pot. Since this is theoretical and abstract, I would say to focus on high card/high card hands. If your opponent is 3betting a ton of those, keep in mind that you can 4bet/call with a much wider range so it might be better to adjust that way.

The bigger the pot is compared to stacks, the *easier* it is to play oop because there's less room to maneuver. Therefore, the hands you enter 3bet pots with become really important.
Run some combinatorics on Axx flops given your opponents range and you'll realize that the opponent hits that flop much less often than many assume (given the opponent is 3betting the Q4ss types).

The adjustments are not different than facing a cbet. You can c/c or c/r. You can lead. The confidence in either of those mostly comes from realizing what your average opponents range is. If you don't have any idea of what that might be, then putting yourself in a position where you're facing aggression without any idea is something you should avoid (in other words, playing the hand oop would result in you losing more than 3bb so you would fold preflop)

Other than against an aggressive player who will bet his entire range if u check, is there ever an occasion where you would check/call the flop as PFR?

Losing money against others is one very strong way to get better. If you think about it, we aren't really aware of our own mistakes because we exist in our own world. So our opponent noticing is actually a main way.

Other ways include watching videos and hearing the thought process of players which sort of unlocks perspective. The other ways including talking to friends, making videos and showing it to your friends or a coach.

What games do you play nowadays? Do you play on ladbrokes poker?

Were primarily talking about psychological issues since you are able to post and tell me that you overestimate your implied odds but were still here address the question.

One easy way is to go into PT/HM and see what hands you are callings profitably with. Another interesting think would be to keep score: write down when you make your hand, how often you stack the person.

Keep in mind that in order to stack your opponent, he needs to a) have a big hand and b) not fold it. A might not be true if we're talking about a weaker player which is actually a really big deal (when your opponent stations in Holdem is a hugely profitable part of poker).

At the end of the day, if you are not making a profit calling with those hands, just fold them. Follow your instincts, ESPECIALLY since you come from LHE and actually want to fold .

As far as when to shove draws, become best friends with equity calcs. Psychologically it feels "weird" to shove a hand that you know you are behind when called, but having that equity to depend on makes the play profitable. E situation that is overlooked are things like shipping JJ in a spot where you might stack TT and that positive reinforcement makes you keep doing it when you're actually in really bad shape against a range of TT+

You're defining a scenario where we are checking to induce a bet from our opponent's weak range.

The other scenario is for pot control. When we cbet oop, we will inflate the pot oop. Sometimes, we don't want to inflate the pot so much that that is actually our number one priority.

Other times we think there is some combination of deception and pot control and the overall weakness of our range that we check (eg 75 on 679).

I used to play once a month or so in NYC games but that recently stopped. I hadn't been playing poker in a couple years though. When I get the itch to play I hop on Bovada currently. Generally playing Omaha.

What network is ladbrokes?

Ladbrokes is on microgaming.

I think I may have tried to sign up with them a couple months ago and they weren't accepting us players.

Yeah I don't think they do. I had an inkling you were someone on there playing HUNL, from a canadian address, that's all.

Thanks. Yea, your last point is a good one. I can't even think of how many times I'll shove a hand and hit the ass end of their calling range. In LHE, ranges are much much wider and people call much thinner. This is probably why I am more comfortable playing HU more than 6 max.

If you are comfortable playing HU I would definitely recommend doing so to improve your play. Even if you eventually want to play 6m, play HU to accelerate your learning curve. Then switch to 6max, spew for a half-week while you're re-learning ranges for ring games and you'll be good to go. Even with the spewage, which is generally unavoidable, it's a much faster process and I believe builds your fundamentals more effectively.

Bumping this once more a last call for questions

I'm moving up through the stakes and I'm encountering more and more people how double and triple barrel liberally I'm really having trouble deciding when to hero call them. What stats/traits do you look at to consider hero calling? Currently I look at BR and my notes, I would like to know how do you deal with this guys when you have TPGK or some sort of under pair that's likely to be good. Do you count combos and decide? How do you determine % someone needs to be bluffing in a certain spot to call and how do you find out if he us close to that?

A lot of those questions have been addressed in the thread so you may want to give a look through. To say some new things:

I would focus heavily on a) how wide an opening range is b) how frequent a betting range is. For example, if my turn cbetting frequency is 50%, how value vs. bluff oriented that range is depends completely on how many hands I'm entering the pot with, and also how often I'm betting the flop. The more often those latter two things occur, the inherently wider (and likely weaker) my range is on the turn.

It's not really practical to count combos in the middle of the hand, but that would certainly give you the answer. I would first start off outside of my sessions and pull a bunch of hands where I faced turn/river barrels. I would count combos from preflop and on the flop to see what happens here on the turn. In game I'm not doing any of this but I'm still subconsciously processing that type of information for sure.

We use pot odds to determine how often our hand needs to be good in order to call. We then use combinatorics to see how many combinations of hands he can get to that spot with (using stats like preflop raise %, flop cbet %, etc). Then we determine what hands he might bet for value or what hands he might bluff right and run the numbers.

It is noteworthy that this approach is not a game theoretical approach. If that was the case, we would only be constructing our range, and then determining how our opponent would play against that range, and then countering it. It's complicated and vague but all the rage now so I wanted to mention game theory. In reality, we're not really at a point where it makes sense for someone to study game theory as their first approach to poker.

First of all thanks for the reply man, I really appreciate it.

What does your thought process look like in this scenarios?

Mine usually goes: "Uhm I know he is wide here, bunch of draws missed I block X, Y, Z but he still has A, B, C that he might bluff with he bets river a ton and likes to turn made hands into bluffs, woops timebank coming to an end CALL"

Isn't there a more precise thought process you could use to give you a rough estimation off what does he need to bluff with in order for you to know if the call would be right? Say something on the lines of: "Well he needs to bluff 98s TJs and turn 3 combos of Tx into a bluff for me to profit here, I actually think he turns more **** into bluffs so CALL"

It is definitely your responsibility to not feel completely in the dark when racing a common river bet. If you don't know what's happening in this wacky hand where somehow we're on the river and facing a bet, that's fine because those types of hands don't occur often. In the first scenario, we would want to go through the process of seeing what types of hands common opponents might wind up with there off the tables. Then when we are in game it will start to become second nature.

Kind of. Basically you do the work off the table and then figure out that in this spot he needs to be bluffing x% for me to call. Let's pretend it's 20%. We decide he can have 9 combos of hands that beat us. If he bluffs 2 combos we would call. If we think he gets to the river with 30 combos of hands, then he only needs to bluff 2/21 or something like 9%. Then we'd made an educated guess about how likely he would bluff when he held a hand we beat, and decide whether to call or fold.