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PokerStars Zoom Hand #93940146761:  Hold'em No Limit ($0.25/$0.50) - 2013/02/12 19:27:13 WET [2013/02/12 14:27:13 ET]
Table 'Arp' 9-max Seat #1 is the button
Seat 1: RikkStroken ($39.50 in chips)
Seat 2: GHolden7 ($59.24 in chips)
Seat 3: x_ROSH125_x ($50 in chips)
Seat 4: Sanoj112 ($32.01 in chips)
Seat 5: LFC250 ($72.43 in chips)
Seat 6: Miiiiga$ ($61.07 in chips)
Seat 7: h1_tech_1mba ($48 in chips)
Seat 8: r3na155anc3 ($50 in chips)
Seat 9: toffi22 ($73.38 in chips)
GHolden7: posts small blind $0.25
x_ROSH125_x: posts big blind $0.50
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to GHolden7 [8h 7h]
Sanoj112: folds
LFC250: folds
Miiiiga$: folds
h1_tech_1mba: folds
r3na155anc3: folds
toffi22: folds
RikkStroken: folds
GHolden7: raises $1 to $1.50
x_ROSH125_x: calls $1
*** FLOP *** [4h 6h Ac]
GHolden7: bets $1.90
x_ROSH125_x: calls $1.90
*** TURN *** [4h 6h Ac] [5h]
GHolden7: bets $3.90
x_ROSH125_x: raises $6.39 to $10.29
GHolden7: ??

Just keep raising.

Fold

Min raise / Shove turn?

Make it 18, and shove last 28 or so otr. Its zoom/50nl so doubt you have any reads on him to warrant trying to flat and c/shove the river, just keep putting chips in

G(h)olden indeed!

nh - keep clicking the button on the right till he stops doing the same

call for sure!

Fold pre.

As played fold now.

Lol at fold pre :P

Call, no merits in 3betting turn imo. Call and give him chance to spazz/value cut himself.

Sometimes I like to get my post count up too

50p

If this was true I'd be making 39 page level threads.

Honestly though, I'd prob keep raising but don't click it back at him, make it pretty sizeable, let him think you're spagging out with some pair one-heart hand and if he might try and eyeball you. If he has A/Kflush he'll just moan stars is rigged and you win all the betting discs available.

I'm raising to 15 against this opponent and hope he jams on us. These supernova/sne players never stack off easily, and I would think he would raise the flop with a set. So he either has a flush or nothing. Well that's what the notes say from when I used to grind nl50 with the guy.

Make that 17

Raise....calling looks just as strong on that board and if he's bluff raising the turn he's likely to either fold to a bet / check behind on the river. If he has Ahrt he's unlikely to fold to a small-ish raise, I'd make it around $20 given him the chance to hang himself with the shove.

Honestly all the "raise" responses are tilting me.

The only reason I can find for raising is to avoid the 10-15% of the time that a 4th heart peals on the river. And even then thats not a bad thing since it will increase his bluffing frequency.

Absolutely no reason to raise here.

Raising is perfectly fine, no idea why you would get tilted by this.

I'm not saying that slowplaying is bad, but it is much better if we are IP since villain does not have the option of checking back the river.

We have quite a good hand on this board, villain says he likes his hand too... so let's play a nice big pot.

Please consider villians whole range when you make this statement.

If he had 0 bluffs in his range then go nuts, start piling more money

But its now 2013, lets keep our range as weak as possible and his range as wide as possible.

instead of hoping he "spazzes" with the bare Ah or something equally stupid that others have mentioned in this thread. Cause 50nl players definitely 4bet bluff jam turns.

callum is definitely right..

@ Callum. I hate all this "please think about villain's whole range" stuff, especially when not said as a preliminary to actually giving a guesstimate of villain's range. You tried that line on me once before when you said I was wrong not to want to 3bet TT on a KK8 flop or something like that. Keys called it a 'Dubai bluff' which I thought was quite funny.

Fwiw I did think about villain's entire range before I posted. I just came to a different conclusion to you, that's all.

On this board the vast majority of villain's bluff range is going to continue vs a small 3bet since he should be bluffing with equity and most players don't like folding hands with equity to a small bet, especially when IP. He might also shove some of these hands as a semi-bluff some percentage of the time.

Vs the nutted part of his value range it obviously doesn't matter too much what we do since the money goes in anyway on most rivers... Although it is better to raise turn vs this part of his range just in case a 4th flush card comes on river to sometimes lose us our action.

Vs the mid strength part of his value range a small 3bet works well too. One reason is that it prevents him using his position to get to showdown cheaply. For example, it prevents him succeeding with the free-showdown play (raising turn for protection/value, planning to check back a lot of rivers) with a medium strength hand.

By 3betting small on the turn we do indeed fail to maximise against villain's random zero equity bluffs that he might bet the river with (although he might still randomly jam some of these on the turn vs our 3bet... never completely discount spazz equity). But we maximise against all other parts of his range.

Finally, exactly what pure bluffs (i.e.non semi-bluffs) do you put in his range here? Given that he has called the flop bet, he would have to be turning a hand with showdown value into a bluff on the turn... which is not something I expect most 50NL guys to do very much.

Tbh I would expect a huge portion of villain's non-nutted raising range on this turn to be Ahx hands. It shouldn't be of course, but it likely will be - since almost everyone plays top pair plus flush draw hands completely ridonkulously. And 3betting is by far the best play vs this part of his range since he will often check back the river unimproved.

Thinking about it some more... it seems to me that in practice villain's range on this turn is going to be far richer in mid-strength value hands that he is 'playing badly' than it is in pure bluffs. By mid-strength value hands I mean stuff like Ahx, two pair, sets, straights etc. Villain shouldn't be raising these on the turn, but he likely will. Obviously the way we punish him for having a depolarised raising range is to 3bet the turn. In fact, if we don't do this then we allow villain to make good his mistake by sometimes checking back the river.

Btw, I don't think villain should have a raising range on this turn. Do you agree with this?

this is obviously way more of a raise then  Ahrt 6h, should we have it, for obvious reasons. usually in these spots when we have the nuts we block other "nut or pretty nutted" hands but here we dont block any of them, and the Ahrt is a very very legitimate hand for him given the action, these obviously are good reasons for raising.

clearly there is plenty of merit to just calling as well, but this physically cannot be a spot where one play is way superior to the other as aside from folding we're really gonna struggle to make a mistake here.

Lazy posting by me.

I wont type up a indepth range for the guy but his range for raising the turn is actually very polarised. Its just flushes and "air" imo. Its obv clear that calling>raising vs this range.

He can have all sorts of floats that hes decided to raise turn with just cause we bet small and turn completed the primary. Even turning hands like 88 into a bluff on the turn vs our small sizing.

Overall its a way ahead way behind type situation accept where we either cooler the kid of just rely on him blowing up.

I agree that for the reasons stated above, we should not have a turn raising range. However in reality, people are bad and usually make rather face up bet sizings so we can just play our perceived range and not worry about our opponent going one level higher and realising what we are doing.

can guarantee vs 50nl regs in 2013 that calling turn is going to be WAY superior to raising, purely based on how they play their rages in these spots.

I agree that if villain's range is polarised then we should be calling rather than raising. However, I don't agree with your assumption that villain's range is going to be polarised. Clearly it should be... but thinking about what it should be is kind of pointless, especially as villain should not even have a raising range on this turn.

The important thing is to think about what villain's range is actually going to look like, not what it should look like. In practice you're going to see a lot of bad raises here from a depolarised range that includes everything from sets, straights, two pair and Ahx hands; raising for protection, for value and because they don't know what else to do - they see they have a 'nice hand', and so they raise. This is very clearly a terrible strategy, and it is essential that we fully punish such a terrible strategy. The way we do this is by 3betting the turn. If we don't 3bet then not only are we failing to punish, we run the risk of letting villain make a virtue out of a vice the (frequent) times he checks back the river having raised the turn.

Which is exactly what we are doing, Callum has probably played about 300k hands of NL50 in the last 2 months lol. These regs play super face up.

So you are saying 50NL players do not raise the turn here with stuff like straights, sets, two pair and Ahx? My experience of how mediocre/bad players play is obviously different to yours. Tbh, I suspect you are simply wrong about this. I have seen plenty of guys raising depolarised in this sort of spot at 200NL and so I presume they are making the same mistakes at 50NL (unless 50NL regs are somehow much better than 200NL players).

Tbh, raising depolarised here as a 'free showdown play' (i.e. to check back the river) actually becomes a really good way for villain to play if hero is never going to 3bet the turn. Which is why we should 3bet IMO.

I guess it is just a question of us having different populations reads and different conceptions of the type of mistakes our opponents are making in certain spots.

Anyway, that's me done on this thread. I can't compete with the "please think about his entire range" or the "how many hands of 50NL have you played in 2013?" or the "I can guarantee that calling is best due to my knowledge of how 50NL guys play" arguments.

But its like an online MTT player saying "ah man you gotta 5b/call TT h/j vs btn" and Simon Deadman coming along and saying nah thats terrible. Because he understands how the game plays.

OP is playing 50nl and a guy who plays 50nl and a guy who stakes people/sweats/analyses hundreds of thousands of hands from villains at 50nl are saying that they understand the range. You would metaphorically be the "sick online MTT reg" who hasn't played many live tournaments.

I don't think anybody said:


It was just backing up that Callum has probably experienced these spots a lot and along with myself have a good grasp/understanding of how regs play at different stakes, it's not anything personal to you its just simply that people turn hands into bluffs and go bananas WAY more than they "thinly" value raise, even if villain in OP raised 2 pair/straight, generally the regs are very bad and have super unbalanced ranges.

edit: http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=60194.msg1711273#msg1711273

If you said something like: "In my experience 50NL are hugely polarised in this spot, but are rarely going to 4bet jam if we CIB. If this is the true then it makes sense to simply call the raise to maximise against his bluffs"... then fine.

But neither you nor Callum said that. You just said stuff like "call for sure", "no merits in 3betting", or "all the raise responses are tilting me", or "Callum is definitely right". It was only later on that you both started to justify your arguments by giving your population read on how 50NL regs play.

Then I got the "you are not thinking about his entire range" salvo. Coupled with "it is 2013", like I am so very out of touch (which may be true, although I am grinding online again now).

Then I got the "we know loads more about how 50NL regs play than you do" statement.

Then the "calling turn is way superior to raising based on how regs play their ranges in this spot" bit, with no real explanation... just a flat out statement of fact, as if this is definitely gospel, and with no reasoning.

I am all for discussion and disagreements about hands. But it is difficult to discuss things when people keep falling back onto the "I know more about how regs play at 50NL in 2013 than you do" line, and also when things are offered up as definitive facts rather than as areas for discussion.

Also, it's like you just ignored the points I was making in my posts. I made a case that we maximise against the depolarised parts of villain's range (straights, sets, two pair etc) by 3betting the turn - and in fact that if we do not do this then we actually make his turn raise a GOOD one vs our range, since he can then check back the river having got thin value and protection vs the hands that he beats. You have not addressed this at all.

Now maybe you are correct that villain almost never has these sort of hands in his raising range on the turn. I would tend to disagree, but that is fair enough. It is a difference of opinion, and a difference of experience.

I am seeking to maximise against the depolarised parts of his range, you are seeking to maximise against his zero equity bluffs. That is the essential difference in our suggested lines. I personally believe villain is likely to have a LOT more mid-strength hands that he is raising with than zero equity bluffs, but it is fine for you to disagree of course. I just don't like the dogmatic "I have more experience and therefore I am definitely right" type of stuff.

One thing to note is that if you are never 3betting the turn here then it makes it a GREAT spot for villain to make the 'free river showdown' play by raising the turn and then checking back the river. It gets value and protection when ahead, and also allows him to realise the equity of any semi-bluffs that he has since he always gets to see the river.

I enjoy discussing hands with you guys. But it feels like I am running into a non-constructive brick wall when I keep getting the same "we know more about how 50NL plays" line again and again.

Rant over. And I still <3 you Patrick xx

Yeah, but...

Lol kinboshi....

I think Suuprim summed it up well in that there's merits in playing it both ways... to say you should 'always' call the turn here and dismiss a realistic range including one pair Ahrt, 2 pair, sets, weaker flush etc that our villain will continue with is incorrect.

And this is patronising to say the least!

Please consider villians whole range when you make this statement.If he had 0 bluffs in his range then go nuts, start piling more money
But its now 2013, lets keep our range as weak as possible and his range as wide as possible.
instead of hoping he "spazzes" with the bare Ah or something equally stupid that others have mentioned in this thread

Another thing worth noting is the incorrect perception that players at a particular limit are some sort of homogenised mass, a group of drones playing the same way in all spots at all times. I think this is both disrespectful and completely untrue. And it will have a detrimental effect on your poker development if you persist in thinking of your opponents in this way. I have seen far too many comments in both this and other threads along the lines of, "these players are just all bad, they play their hands in such and such a way" etc etc.

You know something? Every player is an actual real-life person. Just like you and me. Your opponents are not all bad, and neither are they trapped in a meme; they are actually thinking about their plays and trying their best.

And here is another secret: people do not play their hands the same way every time in identical situations. A player might choose to call in a particular spot, and if he faced the identical spot in a parallel universe he might choose to raise. The input would be identical, but the output would be different. There is a lot more randomness to any decision than we realise. Someone termed this 'the law of loose wiring'. It is a brilliant concept and is really important for understanding exactly how poker works. And it applies to you too.

I think it is completely ridiculous to dismiss out of hand the chances of villain in this hand raising straights, sets, two pair, Ahx etc hands on the turn in the hand in question. Authoritatively stating, "Oh, 50NL players just don't do that" is the wrong way of thinking about poker, a dogmatic 'painting by numbers' approach. Population reads are one thing, but massive (over-) generalisations are another. And they are a hindrance to poker development, as well as a hindrance to playing individual hands well.

In my last online session I twice saw opponents (one at 200NL and one at 400NL) make analogous plays to villain's turn raise with a non-polarised range in this hand. Both times they had the equivalent of Ahx i.e. top pair plus a turned flush draw. I am not judging whether this is good play or bad play, I am just saying that this is what a lot of players do a lot of the time. They have a 'nice hand'... so they raise.

Now obviously your experience differs from mine, but how can you know with such absolute surety that 50NL guys never (rarely) do this sort of thing? It seems so reasonable to expect a lot of players to be raising these sort of hands on the turn.

Logically, it seems pretty clear that 3betting this turn maximises against every single part of villain's range except for his zero equity bluffs. So you have to be pretty damn sure that villain's range is made up of a large chunk of these zero-equity bluffs before you sacrifice your EV against every other part of his range in order to maximise versus this one discrete part. Tbh, I'd personally be surprised if most players have many zero-equity bluffs at all when facing a turn barrel on this board... whereas you obviously think that this is what their entire non-nutted range is composed of. It seems a pretty big assumption for you to make, and I don't think it is a good one either.

Finally, villain might very occasionally 4bet bluff-jam the turn vs a small 3bet (spazz equity). And also, when you just flat his raise he will not always bluff the river. This just means that you need to be even surer of your authoritative assumption that villain only ever has (effective) nuts or air here.

But it's absolutely true, trying to play completely balanced and playing perfectly according to GTO will just be a huge leak, if you have a lot of reads on a player, ie a big sample size then of course you wouldn't treat him "the same" as you would adjust to his stats, but in general you have to make assumptions, and the correct assumption is that 50/100nl regs play v v similarly.

I'm not going to go in and quote your other post as its long and we wont get anything out of it, but apologies for the initial few posts the "callum is right" could/shove have been expanded, just generally v busy so probably wanted to input somewhat.



yeah this is the main point, and i assume somethng we will just never agree on so no point debating in the hand anymore, but "from experience" :P which is actually looking into 30m+ hands for a specific project as well as just railing/watching friends play I think categorizing these guys is good. If you just decide to play "perfectly gto wise" until you get a sample then its very likely that you will bleed a lot of potential money as generally regs at a certain stake play very similarly.

I guess if I told you that I get in X range vs opponent on one site with a different range to the same range vs a similarly unknown opponent on another site you wouldn't be best pleased? :P

I have not talked about game theory in any of my posts ITT. So I have no idea where you get that from! You seem to be under the misperception that I only think about poker in game theory terms, and nothing could be further from the truth.

In my posts I am suggesting that 3betting is the best exploitative play vs villain's range as I perceive it to be. Nothing to do with theory, just common or garden exploitative play.

We just disagree about whether players are raising straights, sets, two pairs etc on this turn.

You would agree, I assume, that if we do give him a depolarised raising range then the best play is to 3bet? And that flatting the raise is ONLY the best play in the very specific circumstance that villain's range is heavily polarised i.e. comprised almost entirely of nutted hands or air hands?

You are pretty fond of saying something is a 'huge leak' (I remember you once told me with absolute certainty that it was a huge leak in my game that I never cold 5bet AJo from the BB). Well, I personally think that not 3betting this turn is a 'huge leak', without very strong and specific reads. It is just FPS unless you have a very clear reason, based on a read/dynamic with that particular opponent OR if you have a ridiculously accurate population read. You are making a MASSIVE adjustment from the clearly best exploitative play vs a reasonable sounding raising range - and this adjustment is only good if you are extremely certain of your general population read that most players are completely polarised when they raise the turn here. I just don't think you can be anywhere near that certain, and in fact tbh I flat out think your population read is wrong. In position things change obv, but OOP doing anything other than 3betting is a 'huge leak' IMO.

There... it sort of feels good to state things in such arbitrarily certain fashion!

Please read my last post again though, because it has some general points that go beyond the hand in question and that I think are important.

Edit: And no, I don't think there is anything wrong with having different population reads on regs at different sites, and adjusting your ranges appropriately. This is fine obviously.

Yeah and yeah.


[quote author=pleno1 link=topic=60315.msg1720620#msg1720620

yeah this is the main point, and i assume somethng we will just never agree on so no point debating in the hand anymore

[/quote]

Lets just forget about this hand altogether for a second. The main problem we have here is that we disagree on something that is v important in terms of giving advice on low stakes hands.

Population reads at 50nl are IMO super important, if this hand was at a higher stake then we would, generally, be in full agreement. Don't get me wrong, this isn't somethng I take light in any shape or form, I really, really believe in it. I currently solely hold the biggest poker seminar in the world (not a brag) for a company that I represent and I would say the advice is given mainly on population tendencies and how to play against opponents at certain stakes.


re: AJ hand, I most likely think differently now :D, if you could link me that would be greatly appreciated :)

It looks like we are having a squabbel or something stupid here, but its definitely not as far as I can see, we were actually just discussing about how important a certain factor is (population tendencies) and because we disagreed completely, it obviously means we would disagree with a lot of hands, but still probably agree on a lot more.

As always I agree with 95% of the stuff in your posts and don't think its close that you are best theorist in pha. By "theorist" I just mean in terms of your quality of posts rather than your thinking of the game as I know your recent posts haven't spoke about "theory" :P Guess thats why you made the advent calendar and I didn't.

xx

I don't consider us to be having a squabble at all Patrick. Just a disagreement on a hand, as well as a discussion about certain general poker concepts. Disagreements and discussions are good!

Only thing that I was a 'bit strong' about was regarding some of the ways you and Callum post (especially the 'please think about his entire range' and the 'no reason to raise' with no further comments etc), and, by extension, some of the attitudes that you seem to have about your opponents ('they are all bad', 'they all do things in this way' etc etc). I stand by what I said and think it is a 'huge leak' of yours lol ;) But apart from that, I enjoy debating hands with you. And I enjoy it because we often seem to disagree on them!

BTW, I have no problem at all with using population reads versus unknown regs. This is better than simply playing GTO obviously. However, I just disagree with your population read. But we have already agreed to disagree on this, so let's leave it at that!

Only thing I will say is that you had better be pretty damn sure of your population read in this spot! Because, as you have agreed, your suggested line ONLY works if this read is extremely accurate. It is a very substantial departure from the logically best exploitative play vs any range other than the one you are certain that villain has. And thus you are risking losing a LOT of value if your read is not highly accurate.

For giggles, here is the thread where you told me it is a leak not to cold 5bet AJo:

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=58952.0

Over and out now, got to go and play some poker :)

wow I'm such a nit.

Such a huge statement that is infact 100% justified

Hard for me to say this without coming off as a prick. So please take it at face value.

Normally short/quick answers like this are because the spot (in my eyes) is simple, or the point I am trying to make is simple. It should not require any elaboration. The same way we type "50p" when a guy posts a obvious cooler.

Same sort of applies for the generic reads we apply to players. I imagine if you took the population of 50nl and analysed them, you would find a hell of a lot of very strong trends in how they play certain parts of their range and so on.

For example, vs I would say 70%+ of 50nl regs, we can use extremely face up "thin value" sizing on rivers when a flush completes and we are holding <Flush without fear of them turning weak bluff catchers into a bluff. They simply dont do it often enough and much perfer the middle button in these situations. There are literally hundreds of these examples you can throw around.

Admittedly they certainly wont always be right, but they will be more so than they will be wrong.

I get what you are saying Callum. But the thing is... in the hand in question what you were recommending was anything but an obvious 'standard line' which required little explanation. On the contrary, your recommendation was a serious deviation from the most logical best play and was only justifiable based on a very specific population read, and a rather non-standard (and certainly not 'obviously true') read at that! Without this specific read your recommended line would be pure FPS. And thus it is absolutely not the sort of recommendation you can just give as a pithy one-liner.

The other issue is to do with the tone you chose to use in your posts. All this 'the raise responses are tilting me' and 'something equally stupid that others have said' is just disrespectful. And I personally didn't like it when (for the second time on PHA) you gave me the 'please think about villain's entire range' line. It's such an easy and glib comment to make, and it could actually make a less confident poster doubt themselves and feel like they don't have the right to disagree with you because you are thinking oh so much more deeply than them. Obviously I did not think that - I was somewhere between amused and annoyed that you said this to me. I may be an old git, but I DO think about opponents ranges... who knows, maybe at least as deeply as you do!

I just re-read the above paragraph and I realise it sounds a bit harsh. I am not going to go back and edit it to make it a bit softer because I am on my iPhone and because I am sure you will understand that it is meant in good spirit and with no malice or bad feeling intended.

I think i'd call btw.