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Poker Video: No Limit Hold'Em by BalugaWhale (Mid Stakes)

Great video as always Baluga!

Time Link to 00:21:51

I think that this hand is very opponent dependent. Folding 33 in this spot may be extremely exploitable on high stakes among world class opponents.
(I am not an expert though, I only play small stakes. Dont flame me if I am wrong, I am just a scientist who likes poker theory. also it is my very first post on DC)

Preflop:
Lets say we open around 30% from the CO
22+, Ax2x-AxKx, A8-AK, K9-KQ, Kx6x-KxQx, Qx7x-QxJx, Q9-QJ, Jx7x-JxTx, JT, J9, T9, 4x5x-9xTx
406 combos (30.62%) [counted with propokertools]

Flop 3TK rainbow
Against tough opponent we are probably checking back A high, most T, and some weak kings (although we might choose to bet them to induce bluff against very agro opponent. We could possibly do it also with AT), with Q9 and QJ we can go either way.
I assume we end up cbeting little more than half of our range against him. This board hits us quite well; we don’t need to check/give up with anything (although we might check/give up with some of the suited trash).
We now have something like KK+,TT,33,AKs,ATs,K9s+,Q7s+,J9s-J7s,T9s,98s,87s,76s,65s,54s,AKo,ATo,K9o+,QJo,Q9o,J9o
16% of all hands [switched to pokerstove, clicking is faster than typing ranges], that should be around 210 combos. I will go on using these percentages of all hands obtained from pokerstove and denote them "%h" to distinguish them from other percentages.
Turn 5
He bets pot and we call. We are calling top pairs, 2pair, sets, we fold air and gutshots. With open-enders we probably can’t call (we might raise though, but since we called we don’t have them anymore). We might not need to have a raising range here against an agro player, also we are a bit confused by his bet. We call with
KK+,TT,33,AKs,ATs,K9s+,AKo,ATo,K9o+
which is about 9%h on pokerstove. This is reasonable, because it doesn’t allow him to auto profit with this play with any 2 cards (if we would have checked/gave up with some air on the flop, we can potentially fold AT and K9 here and not be exploitable, but it doesn’t change much). Anyway, it is quite easy for him to anticipate our range here if he knows that we are good. I like his play against us with any hand that he floated the flop especially if he has some equity. (Against weak players he needs a hand with more equity, because when called he will not bluff. He would only overbet for value and check otherwise.)
River A
Now on the river if he is able to put himself in our shoes, he can see that we will probably fold AK there and call only with sets. Now he can confidently ship any hand that he got into this situation with, because we are calling only 33,TT,KK, AA (1.8%h) that is only 20% of our range i.e. we are folding 80% of the time and with 2x shove he only needs us to fold 60%.
He can just ship all the hands AK and worse, turning everything into a bluff, possibly betting less with some of his best hands.

I think that this hand is very opponent dependent. Folding 33 in this spot may be extremely exploitable on high stakes among world class opponents.
(I am not an expert though, I only play small stakes. Dont flame me if I am wrong, I am just a scientist who likes poker theory. also it is my very first post on DC)

Preflop:
Lets say we open around 30% from the CO
22+, Ax2x-AxKx, A8-AK, K9-KQ, Kx6x-KxQx, Qx7x-QxJx, Q9-QJ, Jx7x-JxTx, JT, J9, T9, 4x5x-9xTx
406 combos (30.62%) [counted with propokertools]

Flop 3TK rainbow
Against tough opponent we are probably checking back A high, most T, and some weak kings (although we might choose to bet them to induce bluff against very agro opponent. We could possibly do it also with AT), with Q9 and QJ we can go either way.
I assume we end up cbeting little more than half of our range against him. This board hits us quite well; we don’t need to check/give up with anything (although we might check/give up with some of the suited trash).
We now have something like KK+,TT,33,AKs,ATs,K9s+,Q7s+,J9s-J7s,T9s,98s,87s,76s,65s,54s,AKo,ATo,K9o+,QJo,Q9o,J9o
16% of all hands [switched to pokerstove, clicking is faster than typing ranges], that should be around 210 combos. I will go on using these percentages of all hands obtained from pokerstove and denote them "%h" to distinguish them from other percentages.
Turn 5
He bets pot and we call. We are calling top pairs, 2pair, sets, we fold air and gutshots. With open-enders we probably can’t call (we might raise though, but since we called we don’t have them anymore). We might not need to have a raising range here against an agro player, also we are a bit confused by his bet. We call with
KK+,TT,33,AKs,ATs,K9s+,AKo,ATo,K9o+
which is about 9%h on pokerstove. This is reasonable, because it doesn’t allow him to auto profit with this play with any 2 cards (if we would have checked/gave up with some air on the flop, we can potentially fold AT and K9 here and not be exploitable, but it doesn’t change much). Anyway, it is quite easy for him to anticipate our range here if he knows that we are good. I like his play against us with any hand that he floated the flop especially if he has some equity. (Against weak players he needs a hand with more equity, because when called he will not bluff. He would only overbet for value and check otherwise.)
River A
Now on the river if he is able to put himself in our shoes, he can see that we will probably fold AK there and call only with sets. Now he can confidently ship any hand that he got into this situation with, because we are calling only 33,TT,KK, AA (1.8%h) that is only 20% of our range i.e. we are folding 80% of the time and with 2x shove he only needs us to fold 60%.
He can just ship all the hands AK and worse, turning everything into a bluff, possibly betting less with some of his best hands.

First, thanks for your detailed post (and the time and effort therein!) And welcome to the DC posting community

However, the basis of your argument boils down to "well, if we just throw Rock, they can just throw Paper and we'll lose!". If people raised rivers as a bluff more, and we kept folding, we would indeed be exploitable. You say, "if he could see that we're folding AK, he could confidently shove everything as a bluff!". Problem there is, if we know he's shoving everything (or even some small % of bluffs), we probably don't fold AK. Lastly, he may shove a bluff THIS time and have us fold AK, but unless he does it ENOUGH we're still not wrong in general.

Of course, your post is littered with other assumptions (we probably check back weak K's, 2nd pair on the flop=false; we can't call the turn with air, gutshots, or even open-ended straight draws= false; also your preflop raising range from the CO is too tight in my cases).

Hope all of that makes sense!

Andrew

First, thanks for your detailed post (and the time and effort therein!) And welcome to the DC posting community

However, the basis of your argument boils down to "well, if we just throw Rock, they can just throw Paper and we'll lose!". If people raised rivers as a bluff more, and we kept folding, we would indeed be exploitable. You say, "if he could see that we're folding AK, he could confidently shove everything as a bluff!". Problem there is, if we know he's shoving everything (or even some small % of bluffs), we probably don't fold AK. Lastly, he may shove a bluff THIS time and have us fold AK, but unless he does it ENOUGH we're still not wrong in general.

Of course, your post is littered with other assumptions (we probably check back weak K's, 2nd pair on the flop=false; we can't call the turn with air, gutshots, or even open-ended straight draws= false; also your preflop raising range from the CO is too tight in my cases).

Hope all of that makes sense!

Andrew

Thanks for a quick reply.
I made all the ranges tighter on purpose (I forgot to mention it in the beginning of the post) to demonstrate that even if we have close to the tightest reasonable range that our opponent can imagine he can still profitably bluff us with any hand in that spot if we fold a set of 3's or even just AK.
The opponent’s line is certainly not standard; he may be using it less than once per couple of thousands of hands. If I was in his shoes, I would just do it as a bluff when doing it for the first time against a very good player and for value against a weaker player. (I would almost never do it as a bluff against someone who saw me bluffing in similar spot).
When I am not lazy and I am trying to play really good I try to keep track about these nonstandard lines, I would even take notes for other players at the table who saw me do a very specific line. I would assume that some people on high stakes do that too.
I think that many people somewhat underestimate these rare situations. I agree that only a very few players are capable of bluffing in this spot, but the question specifically stated that the opponent is extremely good. If he assumes we are also very good (maybe that was not the case in the actual hand) him only overbetshipping TT+ doesn’t make much sense (he knows we will fold a ton until we have seen him do this with a bluff, or with high frequency) on the other hand bluffing makes a lot of sense.
Maybe I am just too paranoid about being unexploitable against very tough world class players, but if I expected he might be somewhat balanced in that spot against me I’d call with AK+. (anyway, I will probably never play against them, so that doesn’t really matter)

Marek

Baluga, nice vid as always. you missed magicninja's 48s hand!! I would really enjoy a second series, think it's a really good concept.

Time Link to 00:03:02

I was the guy moving all in for 100bb the other day. It was my first hand at a table and I was trying to Iso-raise a EP limp with JTo and misclicked the all-in button. Ended up getting tank called by a reg with KK. Not a great way to start a session.

Round 7:

I agree with the bet turn.

If we check the turn, it's cause we think he has more bluff/semibluff than medium hands so shouldn't we follow our idea until the end and check the river?
As you said, If our line of bet/check/bet is super transparent and therefore, pretty unlikelyto get called by TT/JJ. If he decided to delay his bluff, he's definitely gonna bet the river. It's not impossible that he takes this line with a medium semibluff cause of his image. He probably expects us to slowplay vs him more than vs other players and that we will lead river with our slowplays sometimes (as a lot of regs do in my limits when they slowplay in big pots, probably not the case with these regs ).
Isn't it better for our range as well? Probably matter less in a 4bet pot that deep but we balance the time we checked twice and gave up against this aggressive reg.

Thanks for your answer.

Really interesting video, excellent hand selection.

Great video Baluga; you always have some of the best content.

In regards to the last hand, here is my take:

Because we know he is very loose aggressive, he will depolarize his 3 bets (as we will presumably be calling more due to his wide range) and therefore would 3bet QJ, so we can take that out of his range.

He is also probably not wanting to lose value on a set if he should have it via checking the turn, so I presume he would take the initiative there. (even though he is OOP)

My real thought with the river shove is that since his image is so LAGish, that we could show up OTR w/ some 2P (K9, KT, T9) and isn't this a spot were a aggressive villain will shove to fold out any 2P or less? Well thats what I first thought of but I am in the micros and still got a lot to learn.

Time Link to 00:41:08

How does affect the fact that we have 10 outs vs the 89s?

Great series!