If Howard has a small pair in the BB, closing the action getting about 12:1 on a call with the best relative flop position on the table vs an UTG raise and is thinking “oh yeah, this is a prime spot to play for stacks pre even though I hold no blockers” as opposed to “flick in a call, get a prime spot to check raise the field the 1 in 8 times or so I flop a set” I don’t know what to say.
finally taught myself to use a solver after getting back into this. I think I’m a believer now, after a few nasty bustouts in my home game from people limping AA against me, I’ve been feeling ranges that have that silliness in them have been surprisingly hard for me to deal with. lo and behold, after going 1-1 in a best of 3 tonight with a more serious hobbyist friend, I plugged some of my ranges into the solver and the solver LOVES limping AA pre against me on SB button when pretty deep stacked. crazy. i still dont know why, but that’s trippy. it’s not even close on here between call and raise. and only AA too, for some reason
oh and p.s. i definitely am able to write scripts for this stuff and if any solver stuff is open source i can probably build my own versions of these tools. I’m kind of excited, I had no idea so much work had been done understanding this fool’s game. when i played seriously we basically only had pokerstove.
I do know that GTO seem to like open limping AA SB vs BB at least some of the time for certain stack depths, but it seems weird if it doesn’t also like limping other premium hands against your ranges.
it likes it for a lot of premium hands but AA the most. I think I made a mistake somewhere. it also seems to want me to mix in some limp/reraises HU at the depths im plugging in, which makes me want to vomit, there’s no other thing in poker i hate more than limp/reraise on button opens, oh my god
also I assume I can’t create new flops because I am using free version.
GTO is all about having balanced lines that are unexploitable. That means that you need to slowplay enough strong hands to protect your passive range. This goes the instincts of many people who learned relentless aggression as an exploitative heuristic that still works against a lot of players.
yea that’s how i played, or i thought, but lots of things I’m seeing in this solver are suggesting that in lots of spots i actually need to get quite a bit looser and more aggressive, while in others i need to be less aggressive and tighter. still seems like overall i need to actually get more aggro, but it’s a lot different kind of aggro than how i typically would have tried to play like 10 or even 5 years ago.
when i was bumhunting hu i did the opposite of what people do now or probably even back then. i’d start out with some super exploitable strategy that worked against idiots, like cbet flop 100% and barrel turn super high frequency, x/r certain board textures 100%, and then adjust after they showed me they werent an idiot. by that point, their adjustment would be poor against my real game plan and I’d usually win several buyins that way if they sat long enough. that’d still work now but only against people that don’t know this stuff, so I stopped playing everything but live cash very occasionally
I just don’t get why you’d take an implied odds gold mine like 88, in a multi-way raised pot, and try to play it aipf for pair value against a wide range that’s flipping vs you with almost all of it.
l dont know why people put the implied odds breakeven for pocket pairs at like 10:1, they never pay out like that. i dont really like to set mine for that chunk of my stack and i didn’t want to fold and i didn’t want to fight against v’s weak range when utg was in hand and crushing us both. i didn’t think he’d come along for my raise. that was a pretty strong read. i also found a big leak in my mid pocket pairs 77-TT in early positions so ive been trying to do other shit with them.
if utg folds to the 3 bet i think it’s far more idiotic, in my view, but w/e, im flatting next time
It’s fancy play if your goal is to limp-reraise with AA and you limp with an unbalanced range. For a long time, the standard belief was that you must always open-raise. It looks like FPS if you believe that, but solver work suggests that really isn’t true, so a never-limp strategy in the SB turns out to be an exploitative strategy that can be counter-exploited.
I’m more interested in the question of why we should have a limping range rather than solving for the exact range.
yea i’ve been successfully open limping a lot of spots for years now, I just would have flatted squeezes 100% of the time. i feel the moment you reraise the range bad players immediately put you on is exactly KK/AA/AK and air.
I think because we have good enough pot odds that we are forced to play a wide range. But since we are out of position we have reverse implied odds on the bottom part of our range. So we need to limp a lot to keep the pot small and pot to stack ratios bigger. So we protect our limping range by limping with the top of our range frequently. I have never worked with a solver but I believe that some times we also raise really large (6x?) with a mix a value and bluffs depending on stack sizes
2/5 NL. I raise to 30 in EP with 45cc, the guy accidentally makes it 75 with 300 total. He was very clear that he screwed up and was just trying to call. Do you rip it here? Or play nice with 5 high oop.
Raising 6bb in EP with 5 high is a play you make when you run out of matches but still want to light money on fire.
A solver pure folds 45s up to and including the LJ and that’s when choosing between 2.5x and fold. Choosing between 6x and fold, I’d guess pure fold until CO.
Thought some of you might be interested in the hand comments from Bart Hansen owner of Crush Live Poker. As a subscriber he comments on submitted hands.
Aligns with the thinking here.
First of all I want to apologize for the time that it took for me to get back to your submission. It’s been a crazy few weeks with the end of the WSOP, catching COVID and the move to my new house in the Boston area.
First of all I think this defend is WAY to wide here preflop. I know you are closing the action but 49dd is not good enough to call here in position to over 3x sizing especially when the pot is multiway. WIth that being said I have no issue with the way the hand is played up until the river. At the end these spots are certainly underbluffed at these stakes however I am having a really hard time finding a probable boat here besides 33 because you block the 4. And for him to have 33 this guy would have had to over call as a slow play on the flop with a player in between and go for a check raise on the river. Sometimes when it doesn’t make a lot of sense you just have to call.