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Poker Video: Limit Hold'Em by Deepsquat (High Stakes)

Awesome video, nice work. Got me thinking about some certain spots where my flop calling range is all stuff that won't ever raise the turn unimproved. It's only certain spots and only versus some opponents though. How bad is this and why? What would you do to exploit that if you were my opponent?

Hey endo,

Its only really exploitable if you opponent is capable of exploiting it, which is more common as you move up, so its got to try and practice balance as soon as you can.

Depending on what position you are in can use different strategies.

Lets assume you are in position.

If you open from the CO and get 3bet by one of the blinds and you are generally raising all your good hands on the flop, your range when you just call the flop has become weakened as a result.

So if you have a very weak flop calling range, villain can bet alot thinner for value on turn and riv and prob cbet the turn with more bluffs/missed hands/semi bluffs and take down the pot when u have to fold turn.

An argument for waiting until the turn with all of your hands is that you hide information from villain for an extra street.

He gains no more information from you on the flop except you have a hand that wants to continue. Could be top set, could be a back door draw. Where as, we get to see what villain does on the turn, thus gaining an extra street on information from him first.

There are obviously times when raising flop can be good. If villain is a total spewtard and will cap every street, then we miss out on flop bets.

If we are oop and always kr our good hands, our c/c range becomes weak as a result. This is why its good to occasionally slowplay good hands oop like TP etc.

If villain is always kr good hands, i can bet the turn for value very light and also bet my bluffs and semi-bluffs more often as a result, knowing he wont have a hand strong enough to contine or the threat of being kr on the turn is low.

You should post a few hands and link them to this thread and we can go through them if u want and see what everyone thinks

lol, I was looking for info on a poker tool and stumbled on a video where a big bet player has done pretty extensive work on optimal flop play in position having flatted an early position open. (That situation shouldn't come up in FL, but SB vs BB is somewhat related). He said he'd spent quite some time on working on the optimal play OOP in that situation but had found it too hard (for him) to solve. This was a video from 2-3 years ago, I wonder if there's any newer stuff available - any one seen anything?

I've spent a lot of time working on software tools to help me with this problem. It just happens to be an especially difficult thing to solve as essentially the solution entails a solution of flop poker which is really tough. Conceptually I know how to solve this problem but the implementation is really tough. If you haven't already, look at episode 3 of running the streets, that way we can be on the same page with regards to the actual EV equation that underpins this and the EV equation which we wish to solve.

Essentially the problem is large in terms of computational complexity and as such will always be "hard" to solve. Hopefully sometime this year I can actually start getting some real results out of this work and be able to come back and say something useful in these type of threads. A big part of that will be getting some sort of quantitative analysis of the power of position. Essentially the main thing is that the player in position has more information and more options but it's hard to quantify exactly how much % edge this correlates to. It's obviously far easier to see an equity edge in a program like pokerstove or a next street playability approximation by taking the area under the curve from the next street equity distribution

SB had a 66.5% opening range which i think is about perfect.

Oh, regarding SB open range... is that an empirical result suiting your play style or do you have some theory behind it?

Oh, regarding SB open range... is that an empirical result suiting your play style or do you have some theory behind it?

Nah no theory behind it, just a number thats been thrown around a bit by a few guys alot better than me as being pretty close to correct in their minds.

65-70% is what i hear come up alot, and looking at stove it "feels" right if i look at what ive been opening intuitively.

Obviously we can expand that number vs foldy or bad/passive players

Time Link to 00:48:34

I don't really like the 3-bet pre with our hand given how short villain is currently. In my experience, short players just tend to get really aggressive and showdown bound because they don't wanna fold leaving themselves with 1-2 BB left. 98s seems like the exact type of hands that wants to avoid this situation.

Hey slide,

Thanks for watching.

Its getting pretty close to the threshold given he will have just over 3BB left once we hit the flop.

Villain is a reg ive played alot against so I dont expect him to be as likely to spazz out as a a rando fish who is shortstacking, but it certainly does diminish our FE alot as you pointed out.

Im not as disciplined as I should when observing stack sizes against regs, ive played alot of hands vs him and just saw he opened and insta 3b without noticing how short he was.

Thanks for pointing that out and its probably a fold pf. Id much rather do it with a hand like A5s for obvious reasons

Time Link to 00:24:55

your princess has a nice lil tiara of chips!

Great series title!

this

I've spent a lot of time working on software tools to help me with this problem. It just happens to be an especially difficult thing to solve as essentially the solution entails a solution of flop poker which is really tough. Conceptually I know how to solve this problem but the implementation is really tough. If you haven't already, look at episode 3 of running the streets, that way we can be on the same page with regards to the actual EV equation that underpins this and the EV equation which we wish to solve.

Essentially the problem is large in terms of computational complexity and as such will always be "hard" to solve. Hopefully sometime this year I can actually start getting some real results out of this work and be able to come back and say something useful in these type of threads. A big part of that will be getting some sort of quantitative analysis of the power of position. Essentially the main thing is that the player in position has more information and more options but it's hard to quantify exactly how much % edge this correlates to. It's obviously far easier to see an equity edge in a program like pokerstove or a next street playability approximation by taking the area under the curve from the next street equity distribution

fwiw i feel like having position is worth, in the long run in LHE (like combining all situations all hands all opponents whatever), maybe an extra 5% equity or so. maybe a very non-number-cruching way of getting a rough approximation of the value of postion would be to survey lots of folks and see what their feeling is (for what %), and then average those? i expect it'd be higher in big bet games and lower in limit games, and might vary based on skill level, but i bet it'd yield some useful info. i'd be interested to see the spectrum of estimates

your princess has a nice lil tiara of chips!

Lol nice pick up, if FT come back they should change the avatar to this imo

As for quantitative analysis on position, I read somewhere that in the year 2010 (or 09?) limit HUHU bot competition, the SB was expected to gain .08 big blind per hand. That seemed ridiculously low to me at first (as BB puts in .5 bb more in the blind AND is out of position) but after fooling around with pen and paper with a small minigame involving actual hands with equity (i.e. not a [0...1] game), that started to look more reasonable.

what's your personal feeling on it based on your lhe play?

No clue whatsoever. Even if there was a hard number for 6max (like the .08 above) it would be so tough to separate the effect of position and the ranges involved. I guess some simulations would be helpful... unfortunately it's quite long since I've done any real coding.

i'm just asking if you have a gut feeling based on having played lhe. no simulations or calcs allowed.

If I had a guess it would probably have been way off. I just checked the 2011 competition results, there's 18k logfiles, 3000 hands each so the sample size is pretty good. The bot in the small blind won .063 big blinds per hand. That seems very little to me.