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Poker Video: Misc/Other by sthief09 (Micro/Small Stakes)

Quantum leap in production quality. Excellent presentation. If anyone felt distanced last week, give it another shot: this is solid material. Truly solid.

Looking forward to this. Thanks Josh!

Hey Josh. Awesome episode. I got through it following along. Very useful info, especially at the end. I had no idea how to begin to edit the popups before watching. Great job.

Time Link to 00:20:26

Regarding how much we're losing in this situation, and 24bb/100 being great because we'd be losing 300bb/100 if we just folded every time, I think your logic is somewhat flawed. This doesn't seem great. Yes, this indicates that our play when we are c-bet into is technically +EV. However, we can always craft +EV situations by putting a bunch of money in bad so we can recover a portion of it later in the hand.

This isn't like blind play where we have no choice but to put the money in preflop. If we're looking at a postflop situation and are just happy to not be losing as much as we would if we fold every hand, we need to trace our lines back a bit further and see what we're doing wrong preflop that's putting us in this situation. And if we're not doing something wrong preflop, then we can and should make the whole hand a winner post-flop, not just a winner relative to losing tons of money by playing horrifically.

With that said, I don't necessarily think that losing 24bb/100 in this situation is bad. But it's not because of the money we put in preflop, as you said. It's because we're in position, and hopefully are winning a TON in the pots that aren't being c-bet into us. In order to excuse this, we need to look at spots where our opponent missed a cbet and make sure we are in fact winning enough to make up for what we lose when he does. If their sum is not positive we have a leak.

Josh,
REALLY informative and educational vid-I definitely was able to follow along, your explinations were conceise and sensical.

One thing I wanted clarified was your explination of how to determine a problem in your game using the filters (such as at 20:00 or so talking about facing cbets). I know this is a bit complicated, especially for someone like me who isn't great at more complex mathematical concepts, but I just wanted to be sure I understand this correctly:

The first step is determining your "break even" point. To do this, we compare the amount invested before the action to our winrate in the situation and see if our winrate is higher or lower. If it's higher (or LESS negative) we are likely playing profitably in this situation, while if it's Lower, we have a leak that must be plugged through adjustments. You also mentioned if our winrate is SIGNIFICANTLY higher than break even, we may be missing opportunities and could open up our game.

Is this all there is to it, as long as you create a filter that is specific enough?

Great video, Josh. Thanks for going into this stuff. I know there's a lot more to get out of this software than I currently am.

At the risk of sounding lazy... Do you think you could share some of your .pop files so we can have the option of using them without duplicating all of your work? Knowing how to do this stuff is valuable, as we all have different ideas of what stats are useful, but for those of us who would be interested in trying yours out of just having them as a starting point it would be nice.

Regarding how much we're losing in this situation, and 24bb/100 being great because we'd be losing 300bb/100 if we just folded every time, I think your logic is somewhat flawed. This doesn't seem great. Yes, this indicates that our play when we are c-bet into is technically +EV. However, we can always craft +EV situations by putting a bunch of money in bad so we can recover a portion of it later in the hand.

This isn't like blind play where we have no choice but to put the money in preflop. If we're looking at a postflop situation and are just happy to not be losing as much as we would if we fold every hand, we need to trace our lines back a bit further and see what we're doing wrong preflop that's putting us in this situation. And if we're not doing something wrong preflop, then we can and should make the whole hand a winner post-flop, not just a winner relative to losing tons of money by playing horrifically.

With that said, I don't necessarily think that losing 24bb/100 in this situation is bad. But it's not because of the money we put in preflop, as you said. It's because we're in position, and hopefully are winning a TON in the pots that aren't being c-bet into us. In order to excuse this, we need to look at spots where our opponent missed a cbet and make sure we are in fact winning enough to make up for what we lose when he does. If their sum is not positive we have a leak.

Ugh, just wrote a long post and tried to watch the video and lost it

I think you're right overall. I should go into this further in this series. I've been running filters lately and context is definitely a big problem. It's tough to know what's good and what's not so good. I think the best way to attack it is to chop up the situation. I've been removing premium hands from most of my filters because they skew the results.

It's probably also good to chop up the situation into in position vs. out of position, and when it's c-bet to us and when it's not c-bet to us. And of course, like you're saying, we need to see how we're doing overall when cold-calling so we know if there's a leak we need to plug.


One thing I'm not so sure about is the 300bb/100 context being entirely wrong. In that filter, we're facing a c-bet, we have position, single-raised pot, and it's heads up. For an extreme example, let's say we called 100% of hands preflop. Then we'd be massive losers facing c-bets because our hand range would be too weak. So I do think it is meaningful that we've put in 300bb/100 here. Yes, it does factor in preflop and it could mean we're too tight preflop (for example if we only ever flatted AA and nothing else, we'd be massive winners under this filter, on a per-hand basis).

Now say we folded to every c-bet. Then we'd be 300bb/100 losers under this filter. So it also says that we're turning a hefty profit when we do put in money against a c-bet.

So this 24 bb/100, relative to -300, tells me one of two things (or maybe both): the marginal gain of playing the next most profitable hand is most likely positive, so we should loosen up.

The next most logical filter from there would be seeing what happens when we opt to put in money against the c-bet. That probably isolates the post-flop play from the pre-flop play a little better.

At least that's what I'm thinking right now. Am I going wrong somewhere? PM me if you want to talk about this on Skype. We can go over your db and discuss this type of thing. Maybe that will be easier to understand.

The first step is determining your "break even" point. To do this, we compare the amount invested before the action to our winrate in the situation and see if our winrate is higher or lower. If it's higher (or LESS negative) we are likely playing profitably in this situation, while if it's Lower, we have a leak that must be plugged through adjustments. You also mentioned if our winrate is SIGNIFICANTLY higher than break even, we may be missing opportunities and could open up our game.

Is this all there is to it, as long as you create a filter that is specific enough?

The above post I just wrote should apply to this. I think it's something I should investigate further in this series. It's really tough to find this breakeven point. I think the best way to gain some context is start with a main filter, and get more and more specific.

For facing c-bets, you can start with situations where VPIP=true, PFR=false, Faced 3-bet=false, Saw flop=true. That just means you called preflop and saw a flop in a single-raised pot.

From there, take out premiums AA-TT,AK. Those are huge winners no matter what the situation, so it's best to ignore those altogether.

Next take a look at in position vs. out of position. Then maybe break it into hand types. Big cards, big suited cards, small pairs, medium pairs, suited connectors. You obviously need to be looking at a big sample of hands (90k min. probably) for this to mean much.

Then from there you can take off the hand filters and look at the set of all hands excluding premiums. Look at how you do when the flop isn't c-bet. Then look at how you do facing a c-bet. Then look at when you don't fold to a c-bet and see how that looks.

I think that's probably the best way to gain context for these situations.

Let me know if I can be of any more help. It's very tricky to really grasp, but the more time you spend on it, the more sense it makes.

Great video, Josh. Thanks for going into this stuff. I know there's a lot more to get out of this software than I currently am.

At the risk of sounding lazy... Do you think you could share some of your .pop files so we can have the option of using them without duplicating all of your work? Knowing how to do this stuff is valuable, as we all have different ideas of what stats are useful, but for those of us who would be interested in trying yours out of just having them as a starting point it would be nice.

http://www.yousendit.com/download/YWhNdFdVdkdOMUEwTVE9PQ

That's the stat report and the popup. Might be slightly different than the ones in the video.

Thanks again for your help-all the above posts give me a great start to better understanding this stuff. I think one daunting aspect of it is there is a high degree of interpretation involved in plugging leaks, and rather than jump in and try it, I'm catching myself approaching this cautiously. I'm afraid of misinterpreting something for one reason or another and "Breaking" something rather than fixing it.

Truth is, it probably can't hurt to AT LEAST play around with these filters, and as you suggest, go from most general to most specific to see in what context you are losing a lot of money and then just apply common sense to determine if it's blatantly wrong. Then again, determining the degree of "Leakage" also seems to be challenging since finding a true "break even" point really is difficult.

On another note, for those out there who have enough hands/month, I've found it extremely useful to compare situations over time, such as "am I improving my winrate in 3bet pots as the 3bettor/4bettor/caller" or something else like this that occurs fairly often. Since we are all constantly studying the game, I think it's important for our self-confidence to show that we are improving our play over time. Of course, if you don't have enough hands to make this statistically significant, variance could easily skew these results, so looking at the actual hands is probably best for finding existing leaks and those you have already plugged.

So this 24 bb/100, relative to -300, tells me one of two things (or maybe both): the marginal gain of playing the next most profitable hand is most likely positive, so we should loosen up.

The next most logical filter from there would be seeing what happens when we opt to put in money against the c-bet. That probably isolates the post-flop play from the pre-flop play a little better.

At least that's what I'm thinking right now. Am I going wrong somewhere? PM me if you want to talk about this on Skype. We can go over your db and discuss this type of thing. Maybe that will be easier to understand.

ok I see where I'm going wrong here. I didn't consider the extreme example of us folding every hand preflop. under that filter, we'd be 0 bb/100.

BEFORE the c-bet, the breakeven point is 0. AFTER we face the c-bet, the breakeven point is -300. BEFORE the c-bet, we're basically looking at how the preflop play fared. AFTER the c-bet, we're looking at if we're profitable vs. cbets, relative to the 300bb/100 investment. in the video, I was looking at BEFORE the c-bet, so the 25 is relative to 0 and not -300. does that sound right?

I'm envisioning a bell curve. We want to play hands at the frequency that maximizes total profits. If we play too many or too few hands, we don't maximize. Ideally, we'd want to find the point when the marginal value on playing the next most profitable hand becomes 0 or negative. Unfortunately, it's not practical with poker since we're human and we'll sometimes fold +EV spots and continue in -EV ones. but if we notice a situation where we're massively profitable, the marginal return on that next most profitable hand is likely +EV.

Truth is, it probably can't hurt to AT LEAST play around with these filters, and as you suggest, go from most general to most specific to see in what context you are losing a lot of money and then just apply common sense to determine if it's blatantly wrong. Then again, determining the degree of "Leakage" also seems to be challenging since finding a true "break even" point really is difficult.

This is a good point. And just like anything else, you can't expect to be great at it at first. The more you do it, the better and more efficient you'll become at spotting potential leaks. It's very overwhelming but I've learned a lot about my own game through this method.

This is a good point. And just like anything else, you can't expect to be great at it at first. The more you do it, the better and more efficient you'll become at spotting potential leaks. It's very overwhelming but I've learned a lot about my own game through this method.

In the evermore-challenging state of the game, I think this is going to be make-or-break for players wanting to move up in limits-Really great stuff, Josh, glad you're doing this series.

glad you're doing this series.

me too! I've gotten better and smarter already.