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

Just signed up for the site and am 20 minutes into this vid and just had to stay that its pretty sick so far. Very good commentary.

In my eyes the second hand ( 4-bet with 33) is bad played. Hero should raise bigger and call the shove.
As played hero has still an easy call and no fold against a shove by the Button and perhaps a close fold against a shove by the Small blind.

Excellent material, I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.

Vanessa:

Could you comment some more on the 4-bet sizing in the AQc hand at 9:08?

You say that you expect Villain to call your small 4-bet with most of his 3-betting range, given the stack sizes.

This puzzled me at first, but if I understand the plan correctly, we're OK with him calling with a wide range, since we expect him to fold a lot of hands to a flop c-bet. At the same time, we don't expect him to 5-bet light, so 4-betting small saves some money when he has us crushed.

So basically, we're hoping he folds preflop, but if he doesn't fold, his range should be wide enough for us to steal a lot of pots later. We expect this to be more profitable than 4-betting big and letting him off easy. Also, not bloating the pot will give us more flexibility postflop when we flop a top pair.

Is this reasoning valid?

TIA

Great video showcasing some non-standard plays that, when used judiciously have the potential to really pad your winrate. My main suggestion would be to add in some comments about how frequently plays should be made. You mention that the cold 4 bet should be done at most once per session. Some other specific examples of where this kind of commentary would be useful:

(a) You mention checking behind Ax in a reraised pot when an ace flops. How often are you checking behind with this type of hand? If you do it too often, then in polarises your cbetting range into monsters or bluffs and (as you mentioned) since you don't have monsters too often...a thinking villain will check/raise you like crazy...

(b) If you raise with a suited connector on the button and get 3bet from the blinds, how often are you calling the 3bet. I know that this depends a lot on villain, table image, game flow etc but from the video you make it seem like you would always call the bet hoping to outplay the villain postflop. For 100BB stacks, my standard play with a SC is to fold to a 3bet.

(c) Delayed float is an interesting concept. What type of "real" hands would you play in this way? At the moment I can't think of any hands where I check the flop in position, call the turn and then value bet the river.

Looking forward to the rest of the series!!

Just signed up as well, great site, great vid, love the format, congrats on putting out a great product.

I have a few comments about the 95ss hand on the ATT flop. I hesitate to comment on this because you two are much better players than I am, however, I really dislike this hand and I feel that it was put in there because the play worked. In a vacuum, however, I just can't see your line folding out 99 or JJ let alone QQ and KK. That turn card is a horrible card to float on because most people would tend to raise an ace in this spot to get value. If this play is based purely on the fact that he is betting the turn like a puss, then fine, but for the most part, I really think that this one is a bit spewey.


edit: K, I just went back and rewatched the hand paying particular attention to the commentary which makes it a bit better. However, I just can't see an ace legitimately playing passively on the flop and turn given the board.

Great video showcasing some non-standard plays that, when used judiciously have the potential to really pad your winrate. My main suggestion would be to add in some comments about how frequently plays should be made. You mention that the cold 4 bet should be done at most once per session. Some other specific examples of where this kind of commentary would be useful:

(a) You mention checking behind Ax in a reraised pot when an ace flops. How often are you checking behind with this type of hand? If you do it too often, then in polarises your cbetting range into monsters or bluffs and (as you mentioned) since you don't have monsters too often...a thinking villain will check/raise you like crazy...

(b) If you raise with a suited connector on the button and get 3bet from the blinds, how often are you calling the 3bet. I know that this depends a lot on villain, table image, game flow etc but from the video you make it seem like you would always call the bet hoping to outplay the villain postflop. For 100BB stacks, my standard play with a SC is to fold to a 3bet.

(c) Delayed float is an interesting concept. What type of "real" hands would you play in this way? At the moment I can't think of any hands where I check the flop in position, call the turn and then value bet the river.

Looking forward to the rest of the series!!

a) Against somebody who you're playing with for the first time, I think checkbehind should be standard with Ax (KK or QQ are pretty much the same as Ax, too) and bet should be standard with air. Against people who you play against a lot, you should mix it up: bet some Ax's, check back some weaker hands. That principle is probably solid for a lot of specific situational plays, actually.

b) I would say that calling should be standard, actually, and folding should be a mix-up depending on the situation. In today's games, you're just getting 3-bet so much that you can't afford to raise-fold too often, especially with hands like SC's that are among the more favorable hands to have in that spot.

c) Well obviously the point of a delayed float is to represent a decent but not huge hand, because he won't try to bluff you if he knows you're in "bluff-catcher" mode. So, when you take that line, most of the time you should have just that. Maybe a hand like 88 on a 954 board, or Ax on a dry ace-high board.


As for frequency, most all of these plays should certainly not be your standard, but you can use them until you get caught . Like all bluffs, they work better if you don't use them often.

Just saw this first video. I have to say it's very good. Added a lot of ideas to my play. I am still NL50, but by signing up I hope to be in NL200 in 6months.

Thanks a bunch.

On the delayed float with position, what's your move if villian leads out into you on the river or raises your river bet.
Do you generally fold or continue the bluff with some other move?

BTW, Great video!

I just signed up for DC today, but have been a member of CardRunners since their first week of business... If the video quality of the rest of your videos is as good as this one during my 7 day trial, you have won my business =). Excellent video... Hopefully this kinda stuff gets me back on track... about 5 years of poker without a big down swing come full front over the last 4 months. Maybe these are the things I needed =)

On the delayed float with position, what's your move if villian leads out into you on the river or raises your river bet.
Do you generally fold or continue the bluff with some other move?

BTW, Great video!

The main reasoning behind the delayed float is that once the villain checks to us twice he doesn't have much of anything, and as a result we can bet him off of it. If he fires one of those two streets we'll generally be giving up, though of course if we sense some sort of weakness in that bet theres always the possibility of making a second move (usually a shove)

We are professionally trained spewtards

Just signed up yesterday, but I already know I'm going to like you guys.

Hey Professors,

Great video. I'm not even all the way through it and I wanted to post a comment and a question. First, I'm going to +1 the request for your intro music.

Second, I really agree with Xanta that the AQdd on the Kh8s5h board seems highly spewy. I understand the squeeze aspect of your read and how that impacts his hand range but he still has nearly half his stack in and he's getting 2.5:1 on a call and unless my math is off you need him to fold over 50% of the time (assuming 0 equity when called). This, combined with the fact that your line makes very little sense (as Xanta pointed out) just made me stop the video right there to see if anyone else had commented on it.

While the texture is fairly dry you have to know that you are getting called by hearts and 76 and probably 98, 87, 65, 54 with one heart as well with the pot laying such a price as well as AK, KQ, KJ, sets, 85, etc.

In any case I know you are both on the Whiz end of the math spectrum so it would be helpful to those of us who have to work this stuff out with slide rules and punch cards if you could point out "in this case we are going to shove, which means we think he is going to fold more than 55% of the time" which is a judgment we mere mortals might have a better chance of making within the flow of the game.

Finally, I love the site and what I've seen from this video so far. I signed up because I heard Vanessa on pokerroad or 2+2 radio (one of those streamed poker shows) and I had the pleasure of seeing her in action once in Atlantic City and I'm very happy that I did. I'm looking forward to more great content.

Shawn

Shawn,

If you consider that the majority of players will fold everything worse than a pair of kings here (though I guess they'll call with draws too which is OK with me) I think that we're going to fold out way more than 55% of his range, or whatever the appropriate amount is for our purposes. As you get into higher-stakes games, people will start to call with QQ or JJ or sometimes less when you shove here, which can make things more complicated, but in a 1/2 game I don't expect people to do that.

Shawn,

If you consider that the majority of players will fold everything worse than a pair of kings here (though I guess they'll call with draws too which is OK with me) I think that we're going to fold out way more than 55% of his range, or whatever the appropriate amount is for our purposes. As you get into higher-stakes games, people will start to call with QQ or JJ or sometimes less when you shove here, which can make things more complicated, but in a 1/2 game I don't expect people to do that.

Hey, Congrats on going deep at the 101. I'm hooked on pokerstove like a fiend so in these spots I want to have some idea of his squeezing range and then check to see if he's going to fold 55% of those hands (all this is after the fact of course). The 55% number comes from us risking $178 to win $143 so by my math for the play to be breakeven we need -$178 *(1-p) = $143 *p so p (the probability our move wins us the $143 without a fight) must be 0.55. Maybe you can confirm this (or laugh at my nitty mathness). So what kind of range of hands do you give the BB there?

A brief aside, does the doublestacked limp from EP influence the range you give to the BB? Obviously most of the time a limp is just a limp, but does the fact that he is not just squeezing the SB have any significance for you?

Thanks,

Shawn

I am admittedly not a heavy pokerstove user (though I'd probably benefit from using it). Most of my estimations about ranges come from years of experience and the developed intuition that i've grown to depend on. There are some difficulties with composing a range for him here which are due in no small part to lack of previous data and the fact that his range can have hands which may be 3-bet 20% or 50% or something other than 0 or 100%. But if we give him AA-99, AK-AJ, I think we're already there. Throw in some SC's or weaker aces or other stuff and we sweeten the deal. Take away those things and we maybe aren't in such good shape.