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

I think your overestimating people's bluffing frequencies on the river.

In the first hand, he is not gonna bluff a FD. First, there is not many FD's that aren't some sort of a combo draw on the flop or a FD + overs, so you usually get raised on the flop. Even if he has it and decides to flat flop, he would bet turn. And if he did not, he has some SD with it.

Against nanonoko, you pretty much need some sort of a hand to be barreling that turn card. I would not expect a good reg to call that turn on a bare straight draw on a paired board with a possible FD out or try to bluff the river.

hey noah, nice series so far. Good to see your thought process through some of the unconventional plays especially vs regulars. I have a disagreement with the 33 hand from episode 1 (15mins 14 secs in). Thought it would have a better chance of being read under this thread. I think you properly deduced brizzy's range and it's very deceptive to simply call his bad turn reraise so there is a lot of merit in doing so. However there is a wide combo of cards that would either make his hand (according to the range you assigned him) or make it so he would not bluff at the pot *eg any club. I think you put him on 45 66 55 57 or a7 + 77 etc. With that range it means any 2 6 5 + any club (not because he had a fd on the flop but b/c he won't bluff it on the river) that's 21 river cards that hurt your value on the river. It gives him a lot of control and makes it very easy to play his hand when you just call his turn reraise, the pot is small so he's not terribly attached to folding a bad river, and in his mind his play has disguised his hand so when he hits he thinks he will stack you, and yes i think he also plans to bluff a brick like you suspected. Also he's in position and it's really hard for you to get value from him if you don't check the river. I think it's obvious that if you 3bet him on the turn you look insanely strong, he should put you on 77 a7 56 and other nut hands. I think we know he should fold the turn when 3bet but i'm not sure if he will fold, I think there is more value in 3betting despite the fact that it turns your nut hand face up. From my experience people hate folding especially if they have "disguised" outs and maybe have poorly repped their hand. Brizzy is aggro and we should give him a chance to make a mistake on the turn rather than the river because it's more likely if he makes a mistake on the turn it'd cost him more $ plus the fact that there are 21 bad river cards for you.
I think the play would work a lot better in a situation where there are less river cards that hurt you + vs a range that has less value/outs. I think there are meta game considerations for future plays when he tries to reraise a draw on the turn, he should remember being 3betted and be less likely to do so giving you an easier time controlling pots in the future.

Corsakh,
I think the first hand's really not close. If we ignore the chance that he checks back a 7 ()), then I just don't really see the downside. He never has a set and he's almost never calling a bet with two pair, and there are only 11 2 pair combos possible anyway. He's prob more likely to bet 9T than to call a bet with it. There are plenty of hands to bluff with in his range... A2cc-A5cc,ATcc, KQcc, QJcc,QTcc,34cc, A6s, 55,56, A8. Obviously plenty of those hands are discounted, but they're all quite possible and all pretty likely to bluff.

Plus, even if he never bluffs, I now get a bet and a raise out of 7x instead of just one bet. So I think it's really not close at all.

The nanonoko hand is much more debatable.

Let's say he bets river when checked to with Qx 80% of the time and calls a river c/shove with Qx 20% of those times, and let's use betting 180 as the alternative to c/shoving and assume he always calls with Qx. Then, when he has Qx, and I c/shove, I make .8*(142+.2*363) = 171.68. If I just bet, I make $180 of course. So, when he has Qx it costs me $9.

Since that's essentially break-even, IMHO that makes it pretty clear that checking is better, since I think he definitely will get here with TJ/78 and bluff more often than he'll get here with 9x/88/77 and will call a bet. Lemme know if you're not convinced and I'll finish up the math.

(You're wrong that he's never calling the turn with a bare straight draw. He is and he should be because my range on the turn includes a ton of air that c/fs most rivers and the rest is made hands that he has good implied odds against. Sure, sometimes I have a boat and sometimes I have a FD, but those are small concerns.)

nemee,
Glad you like the series.

I think you're wrong that he's calling a turn 3-bet there with any draw unless he somehow manages to get to the turn with a flush draw + straight draw... which is obv incredibly unlikely. All his other draws here are to 1-card straights, so he has no implied odds.

So what we have to weigh here is the money we lose when he sucks out on us vs. the money we gain when he continues. He probably averages like 10% equity here when we're ahead, so I think that makes it a pretty clear check.

I was not commenting on the decisions you made during the hands, but on some of the ranges that you assigned.

And are your really barreling this turn card with air a lot BvB? If you do you should really be able to value town a nine on the river.

And are your really barreling this turn card with air a lot BvB? If you do you should really be able to value town a nine on the river.

Yeah. Don't get too caught up in expecting your opponents to know what you're doing and adapt accordingly. You make money because they don't.

The fact of the matter is that he's calling flop with tons of middle pairs/9x/A-high and then folding almost all of that stuff on the turn and almost never calling a river bet with any of it. That's true of the vast majority of regs at stars NL600, and I'm pretty sure it's true of nanonoko, so I just try and come up with the maximally exploitive strategy against that... which obv involves 2-barreling a ton.

About the AQ hand at 6:00 or so, you immediately discount QQ+ from his range when he checks the flop, which I think is a little too fast against a somewhat fishy player, who might check those because he doesn't want to get raised on the flop, and then goes for 2 streets of value. Thoughts on this ?

ps : great vid, I really like the format, the hands you chose and the way you talk about hands, keep up the good work !

Also I had a question about the AA hand vs nanonoko, you didn't talk a lot about the pocket pairs he could have and he might hero call with (I think it's more likely for him to call w/ 77/88 than turning them into a bluff since all the draws missed).

Strange, I always thought of it as one of the worst cards to barrel. A lot of people seem to employ "if it does not change anything, don't fold" logic. Maybe I am being result oriented. Perhaps will give it another try. What VPIP/PFR do you have for a reference?

Still, what your saying sounds contradiction to me. On one hand, your expecting him to float turn a lot and hence you check the river to induce a bluff. On the other hand, your saying that you barrel turn a lot with air because he folds most of the stuff on the turn. These can not be both right.

And if he does float you a lot on the turn, hes gonna have a lot of nines and pocket pairs in his range, and none of this is going to bet.

I am getting pretty confused around here, will try to think of this tomorrow.

Corsakh those are good questions, and I'd like to hear Noah answer them. I think I might have an idea of what he was doing though.

I think it is likely that Noah has a value hand when he barrels the turn there the majority of the time, so he probably bluffs sometimes, but less than he value bets.

As far as the bad card to barrel, well if it's a bad card to barrel, then isn't it also the best card to barrel? Have you ever called a good aggressive player, saw them barrel a similar card, and then just felt that your hand wasn't good? Because if it is a bad card to barrel, then you'll want to fold a lot of marginal hands when they barrel it, which means that they should be bluffing it sometimes as well, if they can tell what level you're thinking on. But that's kind of complicated.

I think I might just like a river bet better against nanonoko, I really don't see him calling a river check raise with worse than a strong queen, and maybe not even that sometimes. Or maybe he just views me as a nit, lol. Maybe a river bet would also go better after double barreling that turn, if it's a "bad card", I don't know, then he would probably just think we weren't bluffing the bad card on the turn though. Nice hand anyway, I like the way Noah played it.

Fantastic video again sir.

chob,
Glad you liked the vid.

WRT the AQ hand, there's really no hand that I'd be very surprised to see here. I think he's significantly less likely to take this line with QQ-AA than he is to take it with air, but I def don't think it's out of the question. I hope I made that clear in the vid.. I tried to say the word "probably" a lot, but I know that I def have the standard poker player tendency of speaking in absolutes when I mean to speak probabilistically... "He doesn't do this with AA" as opposed to "He rarely does this with AA".

WRT the AA hand, I think 77/88 basically play exactly like 9x does. I expect him to fold them fairly often on the turn and to almost never call a river bet with them. Obviously, if he turned his hand face up and he had 89 or 77 or something like that, I would bet, but in reality they're not a big consideration here because they're not a huge part of his range and they're unlikely to put more money in no matter what I do.

cors,
It's not about the specific card.. it's about how marginal his flop calling range is. Since he 3-bets the bigger Qx hands preflop and since he's calling this flop with lots of A-high and maybe even any pair, there's just soooo much shit that he won't wanna call two barrels with. I'll see if I can get a nice two barrel spot to talk about in the next vid, maybe with some math.

I think he's calling the turn with like Qx/TJ/78 and a small amount of 9x/77/88 and that's it. That's not a lot of hands compared to his flop range. That's why I like two barreling here with air. Once he calls the turn, that's the range that I think he has... Qx/TJ/78 and a small amount of 9x/77/88. I think the best play vs. that range is to c/r. I don't see anything contradictory about that.

jay,
See the math I did for carsakh above. He doesn't need to call with Qx that often to make c/r roughly equal to a bet here WHEN HE HAS Qx. When he has TJ/78, c/r is clearly better than betting, so that's why I'm c/ring.

Baz,
Glad you liked it.

Hi Noah,

Great series (after watching this one I immediately watched the first two that I hadn't seen!).

Question about TT hand: What would you have done had he bet the turn and/or river? I find myself in similar spots quite a bit and usually have tough decisions.

Looking forward to future vids.

-Blump

blump,
I wouldn't call a decent-sized bet on either street. I don't think you see bluffs much there.

Concerning the questions at the end of the video, I would say that I like the series as it is right now. For the hand selection I guess you can pick slightly more hands that show spots that for you high stakes player are easy to handle but you often see your students making mistakes, so that you can point out where the mistake is and why. However given that this is a series targeted to players that have already a certain grasp of the game, I don't think your hands are too FPSy.
I don't think you should spend less time about your less interesting decisions, because I personally learn more by hearing your thought process behind the whole hand than just finding myself at a certain spot without having understood well how we got there.
As for the remaining 3 questions my take is that I like how it is balanced right now with mostly logical explanations, but whenever a play may look out of line or really close in ev terms you use the math to backup your argument. I am totally indifferent to showing or not results.

nice vid again!

refering to the questions at the end:

1)some fancy hands are always cool to watch, I think the right amount of them in every vid is awesome (not more than two in each episode)

in general the hands you discuss arent too fancy imo

2) definitly! sometimes i get a hard time keep listening (i.e the K4s flop decision where you repeat several times the hands you want to call the flop then fold the turn)

3,4,5) I like the % of math during the vid, as long as it shows interesting results like in the last (Jko) hand its very usefull to understand your play. more math would kill the 'entertainment-factor' of the video - i always like watching cool hands and sticky spots and then seeing the results and how your plan works out (or doenst). therefore I would like to keep seeing the results...

btw there is a shortcut in the ftp software to uncheck "auto-muck".
You can do this with ctrl+m (muck)
Now you can collect all that meta-game equity you want

1) no
2) no
3) your math/rambling ratio is really good. 1 "math hand" per video is ok!
4) tbh no. Your little slides just help a lot.
5) yes

Thanks for the responses.

Dark,
LOL. Wish I'd known that earlier .

Hi Noah.

Regarding the last hand.

True, your turn shove isolated seems to be EV+, but dont you have to include the EV of the flop bet also(assuming this was negative, as you did say you were planning to 2 barrel)?

Trillos,
The flop bet is definitely profitable on its own. I said he gets to the turn with 48 combos of hands. His preflop range is gonna be at least 100 hands here... probably more like 125ish. I'm betting less than 2/3 pot here, so I only need him to fold like 32 hands. So it's a very, very profitable c-bet.

Thanks!

Just keep the videos as they are. They are pretty much perfect how you do them.

1) no. crazy hands are cool to watch and we can also learn a lot from them (thinking in ranges etc.)
2)yes, I think esspecially the K4s HU hand in this vid was a bit long. It´s a interesting hand but not worth talking for several minutes about it.
3)I agree with someone here who said one "math hand" per vid is ok. I would say it is perfect!
4)I can follow when you talk about combinations of hands and why you do discount them. i don´t really understand the formulas, but I think thats my own fault
5) yes