ITT: --> Lækre links til MTT-spillere!

Hej PN.

Jeg er selv i gang med at læse denne igennem (er ikke en gang halvvejs endnu), og det er sgu guf for turnerings-spillere.
Der vil åbenlyst blive gennemgået nogle ting, som I godt ved i forvejen, men jeg er helt sikker på at 99% af os kan lære meget af at læse "the complete series" igennem!

(Link slettet) EDIT: Linkets indhold findes copy/pastet længere nede i tråden
ADVARSEL: Meeeeeget læsning! ;-)

Tænkte bare lige jeg ville dele den med jer!

PS: Nu vi er ved vidensdeling, skal I da heller ikke snydes for følgende links der omhandler variansen i MTTs:

www.nsdpoker.com/2011/01/mtt-pros/

www.nsdpoker.com/2011/02/mtt_pros_2/

Feel free to share med andre gode links og artikler! ♥

TY - var det dig der shippede en stor tour på stars for nogle dagen siden?

You're welcome! :-)
Og ja, jeg ramte et lækkert run i the big 55$!

Pga regler for links til affiliates osv. blev mit link slettet. Har dog fået lov til bare at copy/paste indholdet ind her i trådem, så de næste indlæg er de forskellige afsnit af:

Things it took me a while to learn - the complete series

Part 1: Stack Sizes

When I read over SSMTT I often see a lot of the same mistakes over and over. I also see a lot of mistakes I used to make a lot, and I’d like to do what I can to try and dispense some concise information that will answer a lot of the basic questions. Sometimes there are habits you make or misinformation you’re given and end up creating bad habits, so I’d like to write a series of posts/articles to address some stuff, that may seem fairly basic to some but will hopefully clear up some common misconceptions.

I’d like to start with stack sizes and their relevance.

1. 10 BB’s and under. Basically, any hand you’re playing at this stack size is a shove. This is pretty common knowledge. However, with the increase in stars antes, and the high antes tilt already has, it very often becomes correct to start open shoving in the area of 15 BB’s.

When talking about shoving ranges with antes I’ve recently been turned on to a way of adding up your stacks relative size that I really like, known as ‘true BB’. What it comes down to is that the ‘true BB’ is 2/3rds of the starting pot. So if the blinds are 500/1000 with 100 ante at a 10 handed table then the starting pot is 2500 with a true BB of 1666. So if you’re sitting on the button with a hand like A5s and 15 BB’s, you can simply open shove since you have under 10 true BB’s.

2. 14-21 BB’s. Most (but not all) of the time you have a 14-20 BB stack you shouldn’t be open raising with hands that can’t call a 3-bet. There will, in fact, be spots where because of very weak/tight players behind you that you can raise/fold this stack size, but for the most part, this kind of stack's usefulness is more for restealing all in than open raising. This is in fact an optimal-sized stack to resteal, though many players these days are very aware that this is an optimal resteal all in stack so be mindful of players who are aware of what this stack size indicates.

3. 22-30 BB’s. With this kind of stack you have more room for open raising, but for the most part restealing all in has become a bit to large in most (again, not all) circumstances. Also, when I say restealing I mean shoving hands that don’t really want calls. However, with this stack you should be restricting your open raising range a little bit more than 30+, moreso in early position. With this kind of stack though, I would still be highly aggressive in opening pots in late position as long as the players behind me aren’t huge risks to resteal. In the low 30 BB’s a go and go is very often the best option when thinking of how to play a big unpaired hand pre OOP. Say you have 32 BB’s and a villain in LP makes it 3X. If you have AQ you should be going to like 9-12X and shoving most flops, although if you really hit it hard and think villain will bet you should check shove instead.

4. 30-40 BB’s. The important part about this stack size is that a lot of people try to resteal with it pre-flop. For the most part, especially in out of position spots, 3-betting this stack intending to fold to a 4-bet shove is pretty bad. This can be done in the upper 30’s in a few spots (and I would vastly prefer to do this in position than out with this stack) but for the most part if you 3 bet a stack of 35 BB’s or less you are putting to much of your stack to justify a fold pre-flop unless villain flips up his hand and shows you that you’re 2-outing or something. At this stack size you can open raise a ton, especially if you’re playing at lower stakes where people won’t resteal on you even after the antes kick in.

5. Over 40 BB’s. At this stack you mostly have the full arsenal available to you. You can resteal with the intention of folding, you can raise pre, get 3-bet, and 4-bet hoping to cause a fold, you can flat call in position, and you can open you’re full range.

Thoughts on what your opponents know about stack sizes: Most people have a good idea that when they're 10 BB’s or under they should be open shoving anything they play. When you see someone at 8 or 9 BB’s who’s been open shoving suddenly min-raise or 3X you need to be aware that he’s got a big hand a ton of the time. A really important thing to watch in people is their understanding in stack sizes and what their shoving range is light on a short stack.

When it comes to restealing stack sizes most villains have a concept of this without actually knowing they know. Yea, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but let me put it this way; most villains know to shove a bigger range over your button raise with 15 BB’s than 25 BB’s. Even though they're bad, and they don’t understand why they're doing this, they can tell that 25 BB’s feels like too many chips. However, some villains will be totally unaware of these things and try restealing marginal hands for a huge amount of BB’s, especially out of position since playing in a reraised pot OOP is most bad players' absolute nightmare.

Also, a ton of your villains (and way more ranked p5’s than you could imagine) don’t realize how bad it is to open raise with the intention of folding at 13-20 BB’s so once you see a guy do this you realize that you can resteal off them when effective stacks are this size.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 2: Position

One of the most common mistakes I see on these forums is a lack of understanding in regards to position. You see this at all levels of play in MTT’s, and it was a mistake I very often made until recently. At this point, I’ve gone so far off the other edge that I might be too tight out of position, which can hardly be called a hole considering how important it turns out to be.

I think the reason a lot of players (myself included) fail to realize how essential being in position ends up being is one, that MTT players are mostly very bad post flop and don’t know how to take advantage of position, and two stacks are often so short that calling OOP you can’t be taken advantage on multiple streets.

The more you play good players, the more you realize its importance. If you want good proof of this, ask the best post flop player you know to play a deep stacked HU SNG and you will literally feel yourself getting taken advantage of.

Thing’s to know about calling OOP: First of all, under 40 BB’s there are very, very few hands you should be calling raises out of the SB with. When it comes to the SB, almost every hand at this stack size is a 3-bet or fold, though there are a few spots where it’s more appropriate. Examples: If a decent and aggressive player raises on the HJ/CO or button raises and you have a stack in the low 30 BB’s calling a hand like KQs, KJs, QJs, AJo is probably okay, though I still hardly end up doing, especially if the BB is a risk to squeeze you. Or if a good player raises in early/middle position and you have something like AQ in the SB, calling is fine as well. Also, you can of course sometimes flat call AA vs a raise in the SB vs players who won’t be aware that you’re calling range should be so tight.

However, it is clearly the BB where people make the most mistakes, as they're getting a discount on seeing the flop and often closing the action pre flop.

A decent range for calling in the BB vs LP raises is KT/KJ/KQ, QT/QJ, JT, AJ/AT, T9s, maybe a few decent suited A’s.

Vs an EP raise my range is reduced drastically, to stuff like AQ, AJs, KQ, QJs, depending on who’s raising and our stack depth. Sometimes I’d go a little looser than that, sometimes a little tighter.

When it comes to playing in position, I think a lot of people on this forum can go even looser than they realize. At the point the antes kick in, anytime it folds to me on the button, assuming the blinds aren’t in a situation where I have very strong reason to suspect they’ll shove, I’m raising an absolute ton of hands.

To give a rough idea of that range, assuming lets say, 30 BB stacks for myself and the blinds would be: 22+/A2o+/43s+/65o+/any two cards 8 and above. T7s+

If stacks were roughly the same and it’s folded to me on the CO I might likely raise a very similar range, though drop a few of the holdings like off suit connectors, T7s, a few of the unsuited ace rags.

When you raise a very wide range like that people in the blinds will start adjusting, however most bad players will adjust by just trying to call more than 3 bet, since as my GF puts it, “3-betting is scary.” Make sure to pay a lot of attention to which players are capable of adjusting with resteals, which adjust with more flat calls, and which just continue to nit it up. Verse people who won’t 3 bet pre, just keep raising your full range since even if they flat call you OOP you should be able to extract a major edge post flop.

When playing this kind of very aggressive style in late positions you should be C betting a lot of flops, though there are a number of flop textures that hit a villains cold calling range so hard that you should check behind. Consider that most semi sensible villains cold calling range in the BB is hands that contain cards 9-A.

So say you get a flop like QT8 after raising 55 on the CO. On a flop like this, villain will have connected enough that your continuation bet will be called or raised an absolute ton so checking behind often becomes optimal. Flop textures to be more cautious on are things like:
QJx, QTx, 89T, 89J, KJ9, JTx, 9Tx, thing’s of that nature.

Hopefully this helps clear up some ideas of position. I’m not sure how much further to elaborate here, but if people have questions or specific areas they’d like to see further explanation on, as always, just ask.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 3: What're you trying to accomplish

This post will seem a little repetitive of some of the things Gobbo covered in his ‘Stop saying you’re betting for information!’ thread but I’ll also be hitting on some concepts he didn’t go over.

I used to post a lot of hands where people’s basic response would basically be “What are you trying to do here?” The common mistake I was making in my post flop play, is I wasn’t thinking through my decisions and understanding my motivation for my actions.

Here’s the basic concept: Every time you make an action in a poker hand (outside folding) you need to know what you’re trying to accomplish by taking that action.

For example, one play you see people making all of the time is raising on the flop, then when they get reraised tanking forever because they don’t know what to do. If you’re going to raise a spot like this you need to know whether you’re doing it as
A. a pure bluff
B. a semi bluff
C. a value raise that hopes to get reraised
D. a value raise that will fold to a reraise.

Most of the time, if you’re value raising it should be hopes of getting reraised, but there are spots, especially on the river, where raising for value but folding to a reraise is the most appropriate play.

If you make a bet, then realize you have no idea whether you want villain to call or fold, you’ve fucked up because you’re bet doesn’t have a clear purpose.

You need to have a plan for every action. It’s okay to make a play, then have your opponent react in a way you didn’t anticipate and think over your decision, but because so much of tournament poker is at a short stack a lot of your decisions, especially pre flop, should be pretty straight forward. When you raise in the small blind vs a player in the BB who has 15 BB’s, you shouldn’t have a tough decision when he shoves. You should be able to anticipate that a player at this stack will be shoving somewhat often on you and act accordingly by calling with an appropriate range.

The bet/raise for information is rarely a viable option because bets should fall into the category of bluff or value bet. There are other ways to discern the information given to you in a hand than spewing chips for simply that purpose. I’ll get into that a little more with the next segment about hand reading.

If you want to practice this concept the easy way, play only a couple tables for a few days so that you have time to make your decision. Then, every time you have a decision that isn’t incredibly obvious sit back and ask yourself “What am I trying to accomplish with this hand?” It sounds like a sort of lame suggestion, but I promise it will help to think over what you’re doing.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 4: Bankroll Management

If there’s only one thing I could teach or imprint upon another poker player it’s how important bankroll management is. There are a ton of talented poker players who are extremely capable in the games they play, but due to poor bankroll management stay stuck around broke for years.

What seems to be the standard rule for MTT bankroll management is as follows: Always have at least 100 times your average buy in. I say average buy in because this allows for a player to ‘take shots’ without over extending.

As far as the maximum amount of your roll you should put on one event, that mostly comes down to your preference, but I personally (and these days I’m a pretty big BR nit) can’t imagine putting down much more than 5% of my roll on one event.

The largest problem with playing outside of your bankroll is that for most players it tends to force up emotional involvement. Building a bankroll and then blowing it due to mismanagement is mentally crippling to almost everyone and often results in going even higher and faster.

I encourage people to not try to move up to fast and when they do to do so in moderation. Creating a bankroll so big that the stakes you play makes it nearly impossible to busto but gives you room to take a shot now and then is truly the ideal.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 5: 3-betting/4-betting

It’s hard to find a good balance between to much pre flop reraising and not enough. For quite a long time I was just 3 betting non stop, if only to make peoples lives hard and image purposes. Over the last few months through a lot of review I feel like I’ve pulled it back a little bit and found a pretty good balance.

I kind of lump 3 betting/4 betting into two categories, for value and as a resteal bluff. Most of this article will focus on 3 betting since it’s way more common than 4 betting. It’s likely that you could go months without 4 betting pre as a bluff and it wouldn’t be a serious leak, especially at lower limits. So lets get in depth talking 3 betting first:

The first important factor in regards to 3 betting is stack size. If you have under 27 BB’s I’d say just about any 3 bet should be an all in. There is however an exception for players who take all-ins very seriously but will foolishly call off a ton of effective stacks to a nominal reraise. In these kind of situations if button raises 3X and you’re sitting with a big hand in the BB you should reraise to 9X and then jam or check/jam most flops, depending on how good they are for you. If you put this amount of your stack in pre you should never check fold the flop.

This move is basically known as the go and go. The more normal execution of the go and go 3 bet occurs with around 28-36 BB’s. The basic idea is this: Simply shoving pre tends to be a bit of an over bet. However your hand is way too good to flat call. So you reraise an amount that will make your flop shove (or occasional check shove) very natural.

Example: Your stack: 35 BB’s. CO’s stack: 40 BB’s. You hold AsQs in the BB.
Preflop: Folds to CO, CO raises to 3 BB’s.
Alright, now the mistake some players make here is reraising to small. At 28 BB’s going to 9 BB’s would be fine but in a spot like this you need to bloat the pot, so I recommend making it about 11 BB’s. Assuming there are antes, if CO elects to call there’s going to be about 24 BB’s in the middle and you’ll have 24 BB’s left in your stack. On the vast majority of flops you need to be open shoving. THE ONLY TIMES YOU SHOULD BE CHECKING IS WHEN YOU HIT A CRUSHING FLOP. If you hit Ad 7s 2s (or something similar) you should be check shoving that flop. So after I make this post if I see anyone do this and fold a flop because their scared to shove I’m going to get medieval on their ass.

The next important factor in 3 bet sizing is not trying to keep your sizes consistent. The most obvious thing you see people doing is min 3 betting or tiny 3 betting with their huge hands in order not to lose the original raiser. VS non thinking villains who just see a good price and click the call button this is okay, but vs anyone capable of thinking about a hand this is pretty bad since you’re tipping them off to your strength. You see this kind of thing very often even at the high levels and from the good players, and every time I see one good player trying to tiny reraise another good player with AA / KK I just laugh at how transparently foolish they are. The defining factor in your reraise size should be effective stacks NOT hand strength, in most situations.

Now lets talk about 3 betting as a resteal opposed to value. Executing this properly requires an understanding of meta game factors. Have you been 3 betting much recently? Have your 3 bets been shown down as very strong hands? Are you near a bubble? What are positions? Is villain opening a lot of pots? Are you in a bubble situation villain cares about? Is villain paying any attention at all to the table?

There’s two kinds of resteals, restealing all in and restealing with chips behind intending to fold to an all in. Let’s talk about proper execution of both:

All in: The proper stack size for this is about 13-21 BB’s. Less than 13 BB’s and you don’t really have any fold equity and if you shove 22 BB’s or more on a sub par hand it tends to be a bit of a spew. Most reraises all in should be over the top of a hijack, CO, button or SB raise. Most people aren’t loose enough in positions before that to get enough folds, though players do come along where you can profitably execute this. I prefer to do this with hands that have some equity when called, suited aces, suited connectors/one/two gapers, low broadway cards. However, sometimes you’ll find a spot where restealing all in with ATC is +EV (especially around bubbles) so if you recognize that situation don’t be afraid to exploit it with whatever you have.

With chips behind: Of course we start with stack sizes. Because I hate putting 30%+ of my stack in pre and folding post I’m not pulling this move unless effective stacks are 35 BB’s or more. Every now and then you’ll see a rare spot you can do this with the low 30 BB’s but it’s not too often. There’s a big difference between doing this in and out of position. I tend to go 2-3 BB’s more when OOP to try and prevent playing a bloated OOP pot with a weak hand.

Example: Effective stacks 40 BB’s. I hold 57s in a spot I think is really good to resteal.
A. Raiser is CO I’m button. Co raises to 3 BB’s, I tend to make it 8.5-9.5 BB’s here. If villain calls and I flop a big draw I try to get it in whether he bets or checks. If I flop a weak draw and he checks I tend to check behind. If I flop a pair and he leads I likely fold, if I flop a pair and he checks my decision will depend on board texture and villain.
B. Raiser is CO I’m BB. Co raises to 3 BB’s. I tend to make it 10.5-11.5 BB’s here.
If villain calls and I flop a big draw I likely lead close to full pot to let him know he has no FE. If I flop a pair I make a game time decision based on villains expected calling range and board texture. Anything else I probably check with the intention of folding to most bets.

Alright, now let’s go over 4 betting. Obviously everyone knows how to 4 bet all in with a strong hand after they get someone to 3 bet them. So lets talk about how to 4 bet with a wide range hoping to get a fold out of villain. First of all this is a very rare move to use, and it is extremely meta-game dependant.

I think optimal effective stacks for this are about 37-43 BB’s. Even optimal effective stacks depends on villain, as some villains will 3 bet you with 32 BB effective stacks with the intention of folding to a shove. In this spot, knowing your villain is everything. At low stakes there are very few players with a high restealing frequency, so if you attempt this move you’re basically trying to bluff out some guy who 3 bet you with TT/AQ and now doesn’t know what to do because he didn’t think ahead. It’s a rare enough thing to do that even at my volume I probably only use it around 1-3 times a week. However, if you can find a villain who seems to be 3 betting you or a lot of villains often, and you raise up a hand and again he 3 bets you (this gets a little easier if he has a betting size tell, like raising smaller with resteals or etc) every now and then you need to take control back by 4 betting all in.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 6: Strategy and Mentality Lies

I regret to inform you that you’ve been lied to, a whole hell of a lot. Actually, I’m not sure if lie is the right word, but misinformed almost certainly. Here’s the truth; many of the common tournament concepts, strategies, and mentalities written about are fucking awful. This garbage is so permeated in the poker society that those who don’t spend their life online or get a very good mentor will likely remain in ignorance. So allow me here, to dispel some of the biggest lies you’ve been told.

1. “You can find a better spot”: What? What the fuck? Listen, any spot that’s good, by which I mean ANY SPOT THAT IS +EV/+cEV is a spot you should take. Now, are there occasionally spots that are +cEV but you should fold because they're –EV? Yes. An obvious example is folding AA in a satellite where you have a seat guaranteed. Want a better example than something this simple? Okay here’s one:

I recently played a live 3k event in Melbourne with ~440 entrants. The structure was very deep, very slow and had high antes. 40% of the field was freeroll qualifiers and probably less than dozen players in the whole field were actually good tournament players. If I was BB the very first hand with a 20k bank at 50/100 with 22, and it folds to the SB who shoves his whole 20k then flips up AKs, I would fold. However, it really does take an example that extreme to make me consider passing up a +cEV spot. SO STOP DOING IT!

2. “You risked your tournament life with that?” I hear this all the time around live tournaments. I guess that’s because with live you normally only get to play one tournament a day, and in the case of a major main event, people may have waited months or a whole year for it. Still, that’s absolutely no excuse. Your tournament life has no value outside a sentimental one, so unless you intend to bottle that magic tournament life feeling and selling to Hallmark for a fucking Christmas card, stop wasting your time with this mentality.

What really has value in tournaments? Chips. If your opponents in a live tournament don’t occasionally tell you something like “dude, you’re insane!”, you probably aren’t playing right. A good example of how people get nitty with their tournament lives is shoving ranges and re-stealing all in. An example:

About 15-20 players from the money, in a WSOP $1500 event, it was folded to me with J5o on the button with 11 BB’s with antes in play. Both blinds were standard weak tight live players. I jammed because I know how insane tight their calling ranges are, especially moderately close to the bubble. The SB thought for about 8 years before calling with AQo, then the BB folded AQs face up. When I turned my hand over the table let out various insults for putting my stack in with J5o. The real mentality you need to have is a willingness to bust if it means creating +EV spots. Just because you waited a long time to play this tournament doesn’t mean you have an excuse to play bad.

3. “I didn’t want to risk it on a coin flip” This has got to be one of the most common. Here’s the simple truth with most probable coin flip situations: at the point you’re considering folding knowing you’re likely in a coin flip, there’s already probably way too much money in the pot to ever fold. If you raise AQo 3X and a guy shoves 15-20X, and you figure his range is AJ+/66+ (You’re about 43.5% against his pretty tight, never stealing range, and still basically flipping) you ARE NOT folding. There’s nothing wrong with getting it in on a flip as long as it’s a +EV one, which most are, especially once antes kick in.

4. “My opponents are very good, I’m going to avoid trouble.” Look, you need to have confidence in your game. If you really feel you are surrounded by players who are much better than you, you’re likely in the wrong tournament (unless you won a satellite or something like that.) Odds are, your opponents aren’t as good as you give them credit for or their results may suggest. I encourage you to have confidence bordering on delusional hubris. It’s okay to tighten up a little if you do find yourself at a table of superior players, but don’t nit it up to the point where they can run over you and you’re to paralyzed to stop them. Tournament poker can be pretty soul crushing, but showing up to the table feeling defeated just about guarantees it.

5. “Tournament poker is about survival.” No it’s really not. It’s about accumulation to enable the creation of +EV spots. I think this has been covered pretty well in the portions, but this is another common one I believe to be totally false.

Alright, that’s what I have for now. If anyone has any other common ones they’d like to suggest I can go over them. Hope this helps and of course, all questions are welcome.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 7: Metagame and Concentration

For a very long time I didn’t really bother with metagame very much. I’d fire up 8-12 tables, switch to auto pilot, and maybe if I made a final table I’d start concentrating. I didn’t think about other players very hard and really didn’t think much about how I was perceived. These days that sometimes still happens if I’ve got a ton of tables up and it’s early, but I still try to make an effort to take notes or remember on which tables I have a specific image that will alter decisions.

First of all let’s go over the basics. You’re going to want pokertracker and poker ace HUD if you do serious multi tabling. Some say if you’re paying enough attention you shouldn’t need them, but I tend to disagree. If you’ve got 6 tables up, it’s hard to tell if a guy is tight because he’s a bit card dead and a sort of tight player, or a full on mega nit. When PAHUD tells you the guy is 7/5 over 150 hands, you can rest easy folding to his raises in spots you might have taken an alternative action. Also, since it stores players data from previous sessions the information is just completely invaluable.

Next I want to talk about what to look for from other players. A lot of times players aren’t quite sure exactly what to put in their notes, and leaving notes for yourself like “loose aggressive” or “tight” can be a little vague and less than helpful later. Here’s some things I like to take notes on:

1. Sometimes I’ll note a whole hand the villain played since being able to reread that later will tell me a lot about them.

2. I always watch what peoples min raises mean pre flop and note it. The two to watch for are EP min raises (which are normally strong hands) and button/CO min raises (which are normally garbage.) Until proven otherwise I assume those two to be true, but the moment I see their cards after a min raise I note what they have.

3. Along the line of number 2, I always note what people tiny reraise with pre flop. Since this normally ends up being a monster, I need to know if their capable of doing this with a wide range, or, like most players, are only doing this with their biggest hands.

4. I make sure to note which players will raise/fold with 13-20 BB’s. You would never believe how many ranked players I have this note on, it’s fucking everywhere. However, when you see a very good 2p2’er at your table you should normally expect them not to be doing this often.

5. I always note which players are resteal capable. Especially at low/mid limits there are still a ton of players who simply don’t have the resteal in their arsenal, so knowing which players can is a huge help down the road. I also like to note who is a habitual restealer.

6. I like to note which players will get very aggressive on the flop without a plan or in spots where it doesn’t make logical sense to do so. The most obvious example you’ll see is somebody make a big raise/check raise and then when they get 3 bet freeze up and wonder what to do or stack off in a really bad spot because they feel pot committed. Against these players I start fast playing more since I expect them to spew.

7. Whenever possible I try to note peoples open shoving ranges. Some guys with 11 BB’s in MP with antes will shove any SC, any suited one gapper, any A, any pair, etc etc. Some will shoe AJ+/66+. It helps to know which is which.

8. I like to note when I’ve done something crazy aggressive to a player and he saw my cards. Putting a note that “villain knows you can be very spewy/aggressive” will help you shape future actions. Again, sometimes I’ll put the whole hand in there.

9. I try to note which players will try to dominate a bubble. If these guys get some chips near a bubble, you can really punish their aggression with 3 bets since many players (myself included) start raising a ton of hands if the table won’t stop them.

10. I try to note what peoples' bet sizes mean post flop. For example, you’ll see some guys who use bet sizes that are CLEARLY for value and it helps to know that. I also like to know what people will over shove pot with, since for some it means draws and for others the nuts. Another common one is the post flop min raise, it tends to be either a draw, information raise, or most common, a monster (especially if it’s done on the turn.) Knowing what your opponent is trying to accomplish with his bet is crucial.

Alright, as for players reacting to my metagame, this really just takes more awareness and concentration at your table. If you want to kind of zone out that day and watch TV or talk on AIM or whatever else that’s fine, but keep in mind it’s cutting into your profits. Being aware of your image comes with experience, but the deeper you get in a tournament the more important it gets since it’s more likely your opponents are paying close attention. To really max out your game, you need to be able to make those ‘feel’ reactions at the table. You can justify a lot of things based on your image or a players image or the metagame at the table, and it’s hard to quantify in words exactly how much it means.

If you want to experiment with how much metagame means and feeling how important it is, here’s one ‘training suggestion’ I have. Fire up Full Tilt one night and at 11pm Eastern time there are two deep stacked 6 max tournaments (one is a 24+2, one a 100+9.) Play only those two tournaments and concentrate on making plays and reads. Since there’s only a total of 10 players to keep your eye on and you have enough chips to splash around and get creative, see what you can do by manipulating your image, especially if you make it to the ante period. This is a great way to improve on reads and post flop play, while taking notes on a manageable scale.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 8: Bet Sizing

Cash games players don’t have a lot of respect for guys who are strictly tournament players. One of the largest factors for this lack of respect is tournament players failure to understand post flop bet sizing and lines. It’s only very recently with the help of NoahSD and Luckychewy pouring over 6 max hands that I’ve gotten a better feel for post flop lines, and I’m still not great at it. I decided to bring in an expert to tell us what he thinks is the big difference between cash and tournament players understanding of bet sizing, Aejones. Here’s what he had to say:

“Traditionally, cash game players bet sizing is better than tournament players bet sizing because of the depth of stacks they are permitted to work with. In cash games, you often have to figure out how to get a large amount of big blinds into the pot for value, or use all of the chips in your arsenal to represent a hand that you don't really have.

Bet sizing is traditionally based around the size of the pot in cash games. Anything over the size of the pot is considered an overbet, anything within the constraints of a pot sized bet (PSB) is considered 'acceptable' or 'normal.' Sometimes in tournaments I'll see a tight or straightforward player raise preflop, check the flop, check the turn, and then bet twice the pot on the river. This player is showing an extraordinary leak in his game- he's got no idea how to get his chips in the pot with his strong hands other than to make an embarrassing bet on one street and hope a bad player pays him off with something less than the nuts. How should we combat that? Quite simply, you need to develop multiple streets of value- whether it be by betting 2/3 of the pot on all streets, checking to an aggressive player and check raising him, or extracting with varying bet sizes.

Another problem that I see with tournament players bet sizing is that they often tailor it to the amount they think can get paid off. "I'll only bet a tenth of the pot... I've got the nuts, but I don't think he's got anything! How can he call?!" The fallacy in this line of thought is that they're more worried about extracting than they are hand reading. If this player is only betting a tenth of the pot with his strong hands... well, he won't be very difficult to play against.

I feel like I've gone off on a lot of tangents, but I've hit most of the points I wanted to make and would like to leave you with a few clear thoughts. Tournament players bet sizing should be tailored around the texture of the board, not the strength of their hand. Additionally, instead of constricting the size of the pot, they should strive to build pots with future betting streets taken into consideration.”

So how can we look at some specifics of what Aejones is talking about here? Let’s start off by talking about making appropriate bets to accomplish something on later streets. A simple way to think about it is this: You shouldn’t think of bets on one street as solely independent actions, they should be working towards something on the future streets. So let’s get into some easy examples:

The first major mistake you see players make is failing to get full value on a strong hand, either because they slow play it, or bet to small to make sure not to drive a player out. Instead, in most spots you should be increasing the size of your bets (when appropriate) in order to play for stacks, or at least the maximum amount, on a future street. Say you’re in a 55 FO tournament with a 3000 start bank.
Blinds 20/40, and for some random reason everyone still has starting stack. You hold 77 in MP2.

Preflop: It folds to you, you raise to 120, HJ calls, CO folds, button folds, SB folds, BB calls.
Flop: K 7 5 rainbow (Pot 380)
BB checks.

Okay, here’s a spot a lot of guys might fuck up. They might check afraid a bet will drive people out, or they might bet like 40-50% pot to make sure someone calls. Instead you need to realize this; in a situation like this, if a person has a strong enough hand to call 200, they likely have a strong enough hand to call 300. The more money you can get in a pot like this the better.
Let’s say I bet 300. If one of the players raises you this is the kind of board you can consider calling and getting it in on the turn since there’s no scare cards, but let’s just say one calls.

BB checks, you bet 300, HJ calls, BB folds.
Turn: J (Pot 980)
So now there’s 980 in the pot and 2580 left in stacks. If you bet something like 700 and get a call there will be about 2400 left in the pot and you’ll have 1900ish left in your stack, making a river shove quite natural. Again, this isn’t a spot you want to try and play weak for value, you want to get a lot of chips in. So lead 700 here and if he flat calls, jam any river of course.

Now let’s see what happens with this hand if you try to get cute with it. Same preflop action but watch what happens with the math when you try to small value the flop.

Flop: K 7 5 rainbow (Pot 380)
BB checks, you bet 200, HJ calls, BB folds.
Turn: J (Pot 780)

Now there’s 780 in the pot with 2680 left in stacks. If you keep up with your half pot value bets watch what happens.
You bet 400, he calls.
River: 2 (pot 1580)
Now the pots 1580 and you have 2280 left in your stacks. A shove here is a substantial over bet that makes the strength of your hand very obvious. Now you’re stuck betting something like 1000 for value, missing 1280 in value by taking this cuter (bitch, you are not cuter in this instance) line.

Now, there is in fact an inverse of this kind of betting. Sometimes you need to bet smaller to manipulate the action in your favor. Here’s a hand I posted a long time ago to illustrate another idea, betting small to set up a play:
Stars 50 single rebuy add on. I’ve been quite aggressive in late position, and the player in the BB seems somewhat aggressive but is no pro.

My stack: 9940
BB: 6700
Blinds 100/200
I hold Qc 9c on the button.
Preflop: Folds to me, I raise to 525, SB folds, BB calls.
Flop: Ts 3c 6c (Pot 1150)
BB checks.

Alright, here’s the idea with a spot like this. Let’s say I fire out a normal bet of say 700. If villain makes a proper sized check raise to say, 2100, he’ll very likely have too much of his stack in to consider folding to our 3 bet, which we’d likely make here. So instead bet small to manipulate the size of his check raise.

Here’s how it went.
BB checks, I bet 450, BB check raises to 1400, I shove 9415, BB folds.

Now, often I would discourage betting less than you’re pre flop raise, but this seemed like a very good spot to make an exception. As luckychewy put it while discussing using this hand in the article, “The very small underbet here is actually better than a more standard smallish C bet because some guys will perceive it as weakness and bluff at it, which will in turn make the 3-bet have a ton more fold equity.” We both agree however, that this probably shouldn’t be done against guys who will realize what it is (though outside higher stakes online MTT’s, these players are mostly quite rare.)

Alright, now let’s talk about adjusting our bet sizes to board texture. Even the most standard of C bets should have some thought put behind them based on board texture (and of course, stack sizes.) Let’s look at a very clear and obvious example of how to illustrate this idea:

We are again in our 50 FO with 3000 starting stacks which haven’t changed, at 20/40 blinds. You hold Qd Qh UTG+1, and villain is mostly unknown.

Preflop: UTG folds, you raise to 120, folds to MP2, MP2 calls, all others fold.

Flop One: Th 5d 3c (Pot 300)
In a spot like this, go with whatever your standard C bet size is. What should your ‘standard C bet’ be? I like to go about 60-75% pot early in tournaments. In this spot, I’d bet 200 even.

Flop Two: 6c 7c 9h (pot 300)
Now this is a kind of board I’m looking to accomplish something a little different. I think you need to bet more to charge draws more, and if villain raises you want to make it so his raise is a more committing size. I’d bet 250 here and if villain raises, shove, since so many draws are in his range.

Basically, when the board is more coordinated, you need to bet larger, since there is more the villain can station or raise you on. With less coordinated boards (Such as the T 5 3), you want a hand like 66-99, Tx, to think you’re just making a very standard C bet with 100% of your range and call you down or raise you.

Now, let’s talk about some late tournament bet sizing. As stacks get shallower, your C bets should (for the most part, but not always) start to get smaller as well. While my early game C bets are in the area of 70%, my late game ones drop to around 55%. At what point should you start dropping the size of C bets? It mostly has to do with what the stack sizes are involved in the hand. As you get later in the tournament average stacks will normally be 20-35 BB’s, where as at the start of the tournament it’s 100-200. When the average stack starts slipping below 40 BB’s, I start dropping the size of my C bets, though this will also be dependent on the effective stacks of the players in the hand. By the time average stack is below 30 BB’s, I’m probably down to 55-60% pot for my C bet.

To elaborate, let’s talk about how stack sizes and texture will still affect my sizing in the late game with some examples. Say average stack in our 50 FO is down to 30 BB’s, with the blinds at 500/1000 with a 100 ante. Both you and villain have average stack. 9 handed. You hold AdQc in MP2.

Preflop: Folds to you, you raise to 2600, HJ folds, CO calls, 3 folds.

Now, what kind of flops are you betting around 55-60% pot, and which are you betting larger on? At this point (even though it makes you’re hand a little transparent to thinking players) the only flops I’m betting a larger on are flops I hit but are draw heavy and I want to get it on. Examples:

Flop 1: Ks 5s 4c (Pot 7700)
I’d bet about 4200 here and fold to a shove.

Flop 2: Qd 8s 3c
I’d bet about 4200 here and pray my villain raises or shoves.

Flop 3: Qd Td 9h
I’d bet about 6000 here, again, intending to get it in.

Flop 4: Ks Js 4s
I’d just check fold.

Also deep in tournaments you need to understand what your stack size warrants for post flop bluffs and semi bluffs. Some players will attempt bluffs/semi bluffs without nearly enough chips to have any fold equity. You need to be aware of when a player is clearly committed to the pot, or when the board texture is such that you can rarely get a fold. Example of a common hopeless bluff spot:

Blinds 500/1000 with 100 ante. You hold KsQd on the HJ. Both hero and villain have 22,000.
Preflop: Folds to hero, hero raises to 2600, CO folds, button calls, blinds fold.
Flop: Ad 9h 4c (Pot 7700)
Hero bets 4200, button calls.

Now here’s a spot where on either the turn the hero may jam hoping to create a fold having so much of their stack invested, or if the button checks back on the turn they may try the river. Because the board is without draw’s and the button is rarely flat calling you with a decent pair that would peel one on the flop to see if you keep up, villain almost always has an ace. Just because you have a significant portion of your stack invested doesn’t give you license to make very spewy bluff. This is starting to fall more into hand reading, which is for another article.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

@OP
Tak for dine copy/pastes, men tror lige du skal slette links i bunden af indlæggende, før Dieb imploderer.

Good job!

8)

Part 9: Tournament Hand Reading

Continuing our comparison of tournaments to cash, tournament players have an easier job in front of them when it comes to hand reading. This is because the shorter stacks in tournaments (except in the first couple of levels) begin restricting the amount of hands players can profitably play, and force an enormous importance on position. However, it’s a safe bet that cash players will get better at hand reading much quicker, simply because they don’t have so much of the work done for them by a tournaments structure. If you want an easy answer at how to get good at post flop hand reading, play a ton of 6 max cash at a comfortable amount of tables where you can sit back and think things through. Save that, I’ll try to sum up what we can here on a sort of complicated subject.

Every time I hear the phrase “Well, I put him on XX” I want to punch the guy in the throat. That singular phrase is the excuse for more bad poker than anything else in the game. So many live pro’s (yes, I know, half these articles seem like a collection of cheap shots at the way live pros think) seem to have this obsession with pinpointing EXACTLY what their opponent has, so when they do manage to catch him with it they lean back, put a smug smile on their face, and announce “HA! That’s what I put you on!” I’m pretty sure Daniel Negreanu spends half an hour a day in the mirror practicing this with varying facial expressions in order to maximize its effectiveness when his moment of glory comes.

Here’s the phrase to remember: You don’t your opponent on a hand, you put him on a RANGE of hands. Putting a player on a singular hand is pointless. The process by which you do hand reading is by starting with a range of hands your opponent has, then eliminating much of that range as the hand progresses and you’re given more and more information. Also important to this process of course, is having a general idea of how your opponent plays. If he’s brand new to the table online, the best chance you have is to look him up on OPR. If he’s brand new to the table in a live tournament, you need to make some broad generalizations about him based on his appearance.

So how do we go about the process of eliminating hands from our opponent's range? You have more information to you than you think. Let’s start with an extremely obvious example:

50 FO on any given site. Blinds are 15/30 and everyone still has their starting stack of 3000. The players in the hand seem straight forward and basic.

Preflop: UTG opens to 90, UTG+1 reraises to 270.

Alright, now if we’re assuming both players are fairly straight forward here’s what we can deduct:

UTG probably has a range like AJ+, ATs+, 77+ and KQs. This range isn’t precise as he could have smaller pairs, or perhaps wouldn’t raise ATs here, but it’s likely close.

When UTG+1 reraises, we can really eliminate a ton from his range. For the most part a straightforward's wide range here will be something like JJ+/AK, but giving them a range of QQ+ is by no means unreasonable in many cases.

So in just two actions we’ve been able to isolate one players range down to about 3-5 hands. As I stated previously, this is an extremely obvious and simplistic example, but it demonstrates how with very little action we can get a pretty precise read.

Most pre-flop hand reading in tournaments comes down to watching peoples' raise tendencies, and watching whether they understand stack sizes and position. Here’s an explanation of how these factor in:

Stack sizes: Some players know or can feel that at 13-20 BB’s, they shouldn’t be opening in a lot of spots where they can’t stand a reraise. However, players who are clueless to this will therefore have a much wider range with these stacks. Also, some players will call in the blinds with stacks that are either push/fold not knowing it’s incorrect to do so. You also need to identify which players flat call with hands even when their stack is much to short, and which players only flat call monsters on short stacks.

One more key stack size understanding to watch for is resteals, plenty of players will try to resteal on a stack that’s very inappropriate to do so, and occasionally you’ll have to jam lighter back. I once had a player who was constantly trying who was constantly 3 betting me despite our 25-30 BB effective stacks, and as a result I 4 bet jammed QJo with 28 BB’s after he’d made it 8.5 BB’s and he folded. Situations like these come along where watching a player's understanding of a concept takes a play from being incredibly awful (which 4 betting QJo all in with 28 BB’s is 99% of the time) to something that can be profitable.

Position: The biggest pre flop situation that widens peoples' ranges in regards to position is blind play. Lots of players call much looser in the than they should (especially the BB of course) due to the discount. Few factor in that this will force them to play OOP for the rest of the hand and put them at a huge advantage. I’ve already written about what a normal players range should be like out of the blinds, pay attention to guys who call much wider, as well as guys who play very tight from the blinds. Another thing to watch is for guys who call reraises OOP much looser than normal. For many good players at the mid to late stages of a tournament, they are basically never calling your reraise OOP without a monster unless stacks are quite deep.

Alright, let’s get into some more examples of hand reading and go into the thought process. First I want to start with an example of what happens when you really know a person's play. I spend 4-8 hours a day on Skype with Luckychewy discussing tournaments and poker hands. At this point I can follow the logic behind his plays with enormous accuracy. For example, I was watching him deep in the stars $300 tonight on AIM and witnessed the following hand:

Poker Stars
No Limit Holdem Tournament
Blinds: t2000/t4000
(Ante: t200)
7 players
Converter

Stack sizes:
UTG: t57888
UTG+1: t60291
MP1: t148859
Hero: t140802
Button: t218154
SB: t65545
BB: t66932

Pre-flop: (7 players) Hero is CO with Q Q
3 folds, Hero raises to t10000, 2 folds, BB calls t6000 (pot was t17400).

Flop: 8 A 4 (t23400, 2 players)
BB checks, Hero checks.

Turn: K (t23400, 2 players)
BB checks, Hero checks.

River: 7 (t23400, 2 players)
BB bets t8000, Hero folds.
Uncalled bets: t8000 returned to BB.

After witnessing this hand I immediately IM’d Chewy with “QQ?”
“Yep” he responded. “QQ.” Now, why does that seem so clear to me? Because I understand Chewy's thought process. Let’s go street by street.

Preflop: Obviously I know Chewy can have a pretty wide range here, although given what stacks are in the SB and BB I feel like he should have a fairly tighter range than normal since he’s expecting to be shoved on with a higher frequency.

Flop: I expect Chewy to be betting a great C bet board like this with 100% of his range that has no showdown value. It’s not totally unreasonable to think Chewy would check back with an A here, since the board is rainbow without any real straight draws and the player will often give him credit for an A. I also expect him to check back hands like KK/QQ/ and sometimes JJ but I know he’ll often bet TT down more turn cards ruin his hand and it’s fairly easy to play with a bet.

Turn: When the K hits that now means KK is much more unlikely. When the player checks again, I expect Chewy to always bet with an A, since he needs to start getting value and the K will often hit the BB, meaning he’ll probably call at least one street of value. It also puts a flush draw out, even more reason to bet. When Chewy checks behind again, it’s at this point I know for sure he must have a hand like QQ, since betting there would basically be a bluff and his hand still has a considerable amount of SD value. I also know that he knows with this line, he probably can’t get a fold from a K just betting one street, since villain will expect Chewy to have bet an A on the flop.

River: When the guy bets 8000, Chewy thought it over and folded. He realizes there are very few hands in the villain’s range he beats and that if the villain is going to bluff the bet will normally come on the turn. He also realizes that betting 1/3rd pot is almost always a blocking value bet.

This is all nice and easy when you know someone’s play that well. What about when you don’t? Again, you have to resort to generalizations and trying to figure out which level of thinking your opponent is on. Paying attention to who’s who in online poker ends up being kind of important as you go higher and higher in stakes. This is where using Pokertracker with PAHUD comes into play, as well as looking up a players results on something like OPR. Any piece of information you can get has value.

Now let’s look at a more complicated hand. Here’s a recent post by Psyduck about a hand he played at the 10k ME in Foxwoods:

Background: villain is a mostly straightforward TAG leaning on the tight side. He is one of the better players at the table and seems to be able to hand-read. He opens fairly tightly but also c-bets with a good frequency, almost always heads-up but he has given up some pots 3-way when he was the preflop raiser. He also doesn't value-bet thin at all, opting to showdown in position with middle pair-TK type hands, and some weak top pair hands as well. He also doesn't seem to double-barrel that much, but his flop c-bet frequency in HU pots is fairly high. He probably has some tricks up his sleeve but seems like 95% straightforward.

I have a losing image. I am down from 30k to 20k mostly because of two big hands, one where I double-barreled on a J T Q board and folded on the river (lost T5500 there), and once when I 3-bet AA preflop, and bet/folded on a K 8 5 rainbow board to a massive insta-check-raise-shove (lost T4000 there, and villain saw the AA fold). I am winning all my small pots and losing all my big pots. I have donked into the preflop-raiser a couple times on the flop and have either won or shutdown, and villain is paying attention to this very closely.

Eff stacks 20k, blinds 100/200. Villain opens to T600 exactly in MP at a 9 handed game, folds to me and I call in BB with 7 5 . Multiple reasons I called, but let's focus on postflop.

Flop Q 7 6 rainbow (pot 1300). Check, he insta-bets 600, I call fairly quickly.

Turn 7 offsuit (pot 2500). I lead 1200, he makes it 2800 fairly quickly, I call.

River 9 (pot 8100). I count my stack, and see I have like 15500 left. I lead 5200. He asks me to move my hands so he can see my stack, I do so and he sees I have very close to 10k left, and he shoves out all his 5k and 1k chips putting me in after about 1 minute.

Let’s talk about the hand reading that needs to go on in this hand. Important information to start off with is that villain often C bets, and that he doesn’t value bet well. This means he has some passive tendencies and prefers to get to a showdown, likely meaning he’s less probable to run big bluffs. Preflop Psyduck has his reasons for calling, which is by no means standard but that’s irrelevant here.

Flop: On the flop, Psyduck knows that since villain will be betting close to 100% of his raising range that his pair is often good and a call is appropriate. This portion seems standard when we know that very obviously there are many unpaired hands in the villains range.

Turn: Now here’s where knowing your player, his tendencies, and hand reading start really taking place. Let’s start breaking down villains range and seeing how they react:

AK/AJ/AT other overcards/air combinations that have not hit: will check back and only put more chips in the pot if they hit a river. If they do hit it will often be for only one bet, as few of these hands will make something strong enough to raise Psyduck expecting to get called by worse hands if he checks the turn and leads the river.

Pairs 22-55, 88-JJ: These pairs will almost always check back and try to get to showdown as cheap as possible. Due to Psyducks aggressive image they will certainly call one street from him, and just maybe two.

Medium strength Q’s: From the description of this player he might check back with his mid Q’s like QT/QJ and if Psyduck checks the river fire a bet out. If Psyduck doesn’t lead it’s possible he only gets one street of value out of these hands.

Strong Q’s and over pairs: These hands will just about always bet the turn, and often the river if it’s a safe card, but they can’t stand a check raise. There is a slight possibility they will check back for pot control when the board pairs, but most of the time we can expect them to bet but not call a check raise.

Monsters like 66/QQ/A7: With hands like these if Psyduck check raises the turn he’s committed himself to the pot and they will obviously never fold. Psyduck knows that if he check raises the turn it is very likely that only these hands (except perhaps AA/KK and maaaybe AQ) are the ones calling him.

As a result from understanding what happens against the various hands in villains range, Psyduck elects to lead out instead. Despite this leads main purpose being for value (as it gets more money out of villains range than a check) when the villain raises him Psyduck also gains information. He can now eliminate all pairs 22-55/88-JJ, medium strength Q’s, and overcards/air (unless villain is getting SUPER creative with him.)

River: When the river 9 hits, it changes absolutely nothing. 99 is no longer in the villain's range. Psyduck knows that the upper end (the monsters) of villains range will always bet for value, and the bottom end (which at this point is strong Q’s and over pairs) will sometimes bet for value and sometimes check behind since Psyduck called his turn raise after leading out on a 7. Psyduck decides he gains the same amount of value from the bottom of villains range by leading, without being put to a decision for a considerably larger portion of his stack, with the added benefit that if villain shoves he knows he’s always behind and can safely fold. He leads a bit over half pot and what is 1/3rd of his stack, 5200, and folds to villains river shove. Nice hand IMO and a good example of how a thinking player used his understanding of hand ranges to his advantage post flop to maximize both value and information (please don’t kill me, Gobbo.)

For my last example I’d like to quote an article written by Nath. I think this article is an excellent example of how to use hand reading into taking actions which under normal circumstances would be ridiculous (If you’re reading this on Tworags, this part is already in Nath’s blog so make sure to check it out):
From yesterday's PokerStars Sunday Million. Villain is unknown.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t600 (9 handed) Hand History Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: 2+2 Forums)

saw flop|saw showdown

SB (t31052)
BB (t35813)
UTG (t29700)
UTG+1 (t19400)
MP1 (t28360)
Hero (t27246)
MP3 (t12775)
CO (t7727)
Button (t11100)

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with 9 , 9 .
UTG raises to t1200, 2 folds, Hero calls t1200, 4 folds, BB calls t600.

Flop: (t3900) 5 , 4 , 2 (3 players)
BB checks, UTG bets t3600, Hero calls t3600, BB folds.

Turn: (t11100) 2 (2 players)
UTG bets t4800, Hero calls t4800.

River: (t20700) A (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets t17646 (All-In), UTG folds.

Final Pot: t20700

OK... now you're probably wondering why I took a line that seems really weird and determined to get as much of my money in the pot as possible while behind. And I'm going to show you why it works here. Let's look street by street.

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with 9 , 9 .
UTG raises to t1200, 2 folds, Hero calls t1200, 4 folds, BB calls t600.

So this is the most straightforward street in the whole hand. A minraise is indicative of everything and nothing; mostly, it tells me my opponent is probably a clown. It doesn't do a whole lot to define his hand, though. Some players love to minraise their big hands to try to induce action on them. Some like to minraise hands they want to see cheap flops with, in hopes the minraise discourages a reraise. FWIW, I think both are pretty terrible, and if you consistently do one or the other you have a huge hole in your game. I try to blend my raise sizes so as to make my hand difficult to read.

Anyway, having said all that, I elect to just call with 99 because I have no idea what my opponent has; if I reraise and he folds, I win a relatively small pot, but if he 4-bets me, I have to fold, and I've wasted a chance to win a big pot. So I decide to call and proceed postflop. The BB comes along because he's getting 5.5:1 and closing the action, not because he necessarily has much.

Flop: (t3900) 5 , 4 , 2 (3 players)
BB checks, UTG bets t3600, Hero calls t3600, BB folds.

Here's where it starts to get interesting. Making a pot size bet here is often indicative of an overpair. Here's the catch: I still beat a few of the overpairs. In addition, some people panic with their AK/AQ hands when they miss here and just start firing big bets in hopes of scaring away an opponent. On this board, AK/AQ has an additional four outs against underpairs. This increased equity makes betting and getting it in with AK here really not that bad a play.

It's also the big reason I don't make a move at the pot now. Some people see "overpair" and think "I have to protect my hand". Having seen him make a big bet at the pot now, I know my opponent likes his hand, but I don't know exactly what he has. It's too likely my hand is good to fold here, but he also has an overpair far too often to make raising and getting the money in profitable. I feel as if I get it in, it's going to be as a 60-40 favorite or a 90-10 dog. I don't mind getting it in as a 60-40 favorite, especially in a tournament like the Million, whose field size I feel dictates a faster style of play, a more "race to the finish line" approach-- but I get it in drawing to the two nines way too often to want to push now. So I call and decide to reevaluate based on the turn. The BB folds, and I never considered him to be much of a factor anyway.

Turn: (t11100) 2 (2 players)
UTG bets t4800, Hero calls t4800.

The deuce doesn't change anything. Neither of us has a deuce and we both know that. Now, his turn bet is interesting-- he bets just under 1/2 pot, which seems weak, but which also sets him up for a pot-sized river shove if I call. (By the way, if you aren't thinking about manipulating pot and stack sizes like this when you size your bets, you are making a mistake.) For my part, the price is too good to fold an overpair-- but still, my hand is not good enough to raise. I suspect some time he has an overpair to mine, some time he still has AK/AQ (the bet size is actually an effective size to block-bet a draw and see if he hits it), and rarely, he has a worse overpair than mine. So considering most of his range as TT-KK and the other major part of it as AK/AQ*, I call again.

* - I don't include AA here, not because it's impossible, but because it's a special case. He has the best of both worlds, and I'm screwed; the river is basically irrelevant because he's shoving all of them. I also considered 66-88 unlikely, though not impossible.

River: (t20700) A (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets t17646 (All-In), UTG folds.

Wow. This is such an interesting card. All his ace hands got there, and all his overpair hands just got scared shitless. This is the beauty of position-- I can use his action to judge what he has. Since he has a pot-sized bet left, he's going to have to shove for value if he hit his ace (or his 33, or if he was already full, or what have you).

He checks.

Now, many, many players' immediate reaction would be to check, thinking that "Oh, either he had me already, or he hit that ace. And he's not calling with a worse hand, and we have a pair, so let's check and hope we win the showdown."

They're wrong.

When he checks, he's completely vulnerable. We each have less than the size of the pot left (he has me barely covered), and if we have anything reasonable, we're pot committed. The only reason not to put in the rest of the money here is if we think, for some specific reason, that a scare card has helped so much of our opponents' range, that we should give up. Trapping would be absurd at this point for villain, given that I should be calling his push with anything reasonable, having gotten this far.

So when he checks, it's not to trap, it's because that ace scares the crap out of him and he will fold to a shove.

And-- this is important-- we should realize that this swings all the Ax hands and 33/44/55 out of his range, and makes his range overwhelmingly overpairs. So his range consists primarily of hands that will beat ours at showdown, but cannot call all-in.

Knowing this, we should move in as a bluff. The fact that he didn't move in already gives us all the reason in the world to. He's announced to us that he is scared of the ace, and he is hoping we will let him show down his hand. So we have to disappoint him.

On a side note, the stack sizes are really excellent for this move. We each have slightly less than the pot left (I have 17.5k and he has 20k in a 20k pot). Which means that an all-in bet can be interpreted as a "normal" bet size. (Moving all-in here for, say, four times the pot would be considered "abnormal".) Because of that, it makes our opponent less likely to suspect that we are bluffing; we could simply be trying to get every dollar possible out of our hand. It puts him in a pretty terrible spot, since from his perspective we could easily have the AK/AQ/33. We certainly wouldn't check those behind on the river. So it's very unlikely that villain is good one time in three, and he folds.

Now, at the table, this process is much quicker, and is occasionally guided by intuition-- you don't always have the time to think out, in words, why a move will work; you "know" it. While it's good to have sound, logical reasons for your moves, it's more important to trust your intuition-- it's a part of you, and it works on what you have learned, too. In the heat of the moment, it's taking all your experience and skill and training and leading you to the right decision. If you have prepared it for the moments you need it, it will not let you down. Work on your logic away from the tables, and study and review and prepare your theory, so that your instincts have the background they need to make the right decision. Trust yourself to learn the game.

I will say that bluff-shoving the river hadn't entered my thought process until the river hit, and the villain thought for a bit and checked. Then it occurred to me that he couldn't call a push, so I pushed-- it wouldn't have really mattered what I had, but I was definitely swayed by the relative weakness of my hand. (If I had, say, KK, I might have checked behind-- or pushed for value.)

But that's another point of this hand-- you have to be able to adapt your decision-making process each time new information comes to light. Even though you have a plan for a hand, something may change which will cause you to abandon that, because you realize an alternate line is more profitable. Online, the pace is fast, so you need to be quick mentally. Live, you always have an opportunity to think through a hand. Online, you have much shorter time limits and may be multi-tabling as well, so being quick on your feet is just as important as being sound on your feet.

So to recap today's lesson:

a) Be alert to your hand strength relative to your opponent's range, not just to the board, or in the absolute sense

b) Don't be afraid to turn a made hand into a bluff

c) Don't be afraid to change plans in the middle of the hand, as you gather information

d) Be a quick thinker

e) Trust yourself

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

@Holstt
Har lige PM'et med Dieb om hvordan det skulle gøres, og så vidt jeg har forstået var det sådan her ;-)

Part 10: Poker, Variance and Life

It seems presumptuous and condescending to tell people how to live their lives. One of the single greatest enemies of poker in our time is the “We know better than you for you” mentality the current US government has decided to perpetrate on its people in regards to gambling, so turning around and writing an article about how to live seems highly hypocritical. So I’m going to try and be specific here, and give advice that I only believe pertinent to improving as a poker player, despite it sometimes branching into other topics.

First and foremost, if you ever want to get truly good at poker, and especially tournament poker, you need to make your peace with variance. I use the term ‘make your peace’ instead of ‘understand’ because understanding tournament variance is very difficult. In fact, I’m not sure I really understand it myself. To my knowledge, nobody on this forum has come forward with numbers that prove how long the long term is in tournaments. I feel pretty confident when I say that it’s very probable that you can’t reach the long term playing live tournaments, that is, you’ll never really be able to ascertain your true ROI in live poker. Even online it’s very difficult to tell how much of results are driven by variance, and how much by skill.

A great example of how far variance can go is in the number 1 ranked player on www.officialpokerrankings.com, ‘vietcong01’ is a player many have written about for his leak ridden play. He may or may not be a bad player (I haven’t seen enough hand histories to pass any judgment) but many seem in agreement, yet he’s won just about every tournament imaginable on Stars five times over. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Ansky (a player many consider one of the best online) has admitted to have been losing through the year 2007 up until April. While skill is of course the most important factor in determining whether you’re a winner or a loser in the end, the amount variance can skew the road to that end is enormous.

I wise man once explained that there is no deserve in poker. That’s really just about the best way you can put it. If you follow tournament results you’ll be forced to sit back and watch as awful players rack up tens of thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands in wins. I personally can barely watch poker on TV, the players are playing for millions and 95% or more of the players on it are so awful I end up sitting there ranting and screaming “Holy fucking hell how the fuck can every single person in this hand play their hand maximum awful on every street and they’re all about to win more than I’m worth I’m going to fucking kill somebody…” etc etc you get the idea. It’s all in good fun, but thinking about things like this too much will make your head explode. In the end, what everyone else does and wins, no matter how deserving or undeserving, is irrelevant. The only weapon you have against variance is constant self analysis and improvement. You have control over nothing else in the grand scheme of things, so worrying about them ends up being pointless when you could be spending your time learning how to squeeze every cent of equity out of your opponents. So when it comes to variance, I guess the best advice I can give is to be self obsessed and ignore the madness around you.

Finding a balance in life with poker can be difficult. Many players end up having the game take over their lives, with other responsibilities and concerns falling to the wayside. Everyone has different things they consider important in their life, but a few things I recommend all players take seriously outside the game are as follows:

1. Your health. Poker’s a sedentary game, and it’s not hard to see why so many players begin getting out of shape. When playing live poker you’re often pressed for time, and even online if you’re playing tournaments it’s hard to stop and prepare a meal, so many players end up going with fast food. There’s about a million studies proving that an out of shape body begins to pour over into an out of shape mind. I’m not saying you need to go running marathons or start training for a bodybuilding competition, just find exercise wherever you want to take it. Start playing your favorite sport again often, go for runs/walks, join a gym, learn a self defense, or even just do a sit up and push up routine at a home. Just stay active and watch your diet, try to eliminate junk and fried foods, and take it easy on the soft drinks and booze.

2. Get some sleep. Nobody functions optimally on low sleep. Some do better than others, and in my case if I get less than 8 hours I shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a table. I know many guys pull all nighters, and because tournaments start at a fixed time you sometimes have to conform your schedule to fit them. Even if you don’t believe sleep is a major factor for you try this experiment, write down how many hours of sleep you got at the start of your sessions. A month later look at your poker tracker results and see how your results differ between the sessions you slept well and the ones you didn’t, you might be surprised.

3. Handling and reducing stress. Everyone has their own method for this. Some tilt uncontrollably and begin spewing, some never seem to get upset. I haven’t had tilt problems in a very long time (unless I haven’t slept well) and I think a lot of this results from volume. The more you play the more ridiculous beats you’ll take in important moments, and eventually you’ll see it all kind of blinds together. This kind of goes back to what we talked about with variance, that in the end it’s out of your control and losing your head over it is pointless. Find your own outlet for stress reduction, for me its writing, for you, it should be whatever relaxes you and lets you vent the stress that builds up over the course of the day. By the way, exercise is a great way to reduce stress.

4. Get a hobby. Unless poker already is your hobby and you play essentially for recreation, you really should get something outside it to occupy your time. There’s a ton to do out there, you just need to find what’s fun for you. The quick answer of course, is Halo 3. Boo yah.

5. Get some. This seems pretty obvious, nobody concentrates well with a distracted mind. If you’re reading this, odds are your pretty young. Don’t spend your life inside in front of the computer feeling awkward around women, and you’d be surprised how many will find poker interesting if you talk confident about it without being a braggart.

6. If you don’t want to play, don’t. When you force yourself to play you end up playing impatient and sloppy poker, so on any day you want to take off and don’t have to play, I recommend doing so. Hopefully if you chose this as a full time occupation, you’ll actually want to play.

7. Make poker friends and connections. This can seem hard sometimes, as people may often appear exclusive in the poker scene. When you first start posting on a place like 2+2 it can be a little intimidating since many of the serious posters seem to have rules and standards in place, and figuring out what’s considered obvious can be frustrating. As recently as 15 months ago I was a complete unknown in the MTT scene on 2+2 and the internet in general. What I found works is asking a lot of questions, posting any hands your confused about, PMing the players you respect for thoughts on your posts, and getting to know other posters whenever the opportunity arises. Most of the guys around do end up being pretty easy going and approachable, and if you show a willingness to learn and understand many will be helpful.

8. Have a social life outside poker. This seems pretty obvious too. Spending your life only talking about the game will make you boring. Nobody likes boring people. See how this could be a downward cycle here?

Lastly, I want to talk about what it takes to get better at poker. A lot of guys ask what it takes to be a great player. I wouldn’t really consider myself a great poker player in honesty, that is if you rated players on a 0 to 100 scale, with 0 being a total beginner, and 100 being Patrick Antonious, I guess I’m somewhere around ~80. It’s hard for me to say what it takes to get from 80 to 100, and part of me imagines that you have to be really naturally smart and talented to attain that kind of mastery.

The people who hang out in the strategy portions of 2+2 are mostly naturally smart guys. Often whenever I ask them what they studied at school, it’s often math oriented or in a field that has real application to poker, at an excellent school that takes enormous talent and intelligence to get into. Me, I’m a theatre major who in the math department is a borderline imbecile. It doesn’t take a background in this area to do very well. What it mostly requires is perseverance and a level head. Here’s the basic process by which I improved:

1. I started off reading books. This is good if you want a foundation in the basics, but I feel like a lot of the information in books these days is outdated. However, Harrington on Holdem is still pretty good for getting some ground work.

2. Then I started reading and posting on 2+2. For quite some time I posted an enormous amount of hands, because I really needed to be guided through most hands step by step. I’m kind of a slow learner, so I needed things drilled into my head over and over to form it as more of a habit before I could understand it.

3. I got a pokerxfactor subscription. I watched a lot of videos to see what the most successful pros did differently to me, what made them successful. I think cardrunners also has an excellent (at this point, probably superior) line up of pros, but both sites have a pretty good line up. The hard part is that even many of these guys have serious leaks and there might be nobody there to tell you what they are. I have a ton of leaks myself, and if there’s nobody better to tell you what they are it gets hard to recognize them. If there’s an interest in that sort of thing, I guess I could Skype with Luckychewy for some of the more popular hand histories in Cardrunners/PXF and identify what we think the mistakes are there to give people an idea of what mistakes other pros make.

4. I got coaching. This part can be hard because there’s not a list of coaches available for MTT’s and many coaches would charge quite a lot of money since their time is so valuable. If you start becoming a successful player and make good money, but still feel like you have serious leaks, seeking out a top player who you respect and know does coaching is a good option. At this point, I’ve done coaching with three HSMTT players and have done hand history review swaps with several more. Finding players you feel are roughly on your own level and doing HH review swaps with them either by taking notes or over the phone/Skype can be a huge benefit.

5. I played an absolute ton. Like they say, there’s no substitute for experience, and the more you play the more you’ll recognize patterns and things will get more obvious to you as you go. Combine this with the other four, over an extended period of time, and you’ll be able to feel the improvement.

6. If there’s one thing I wished I’d done: It’d be learn cash much sooner. I think cash players improve at poker much quicker, and applying concepts you learn in cash to tournaments is much easier than vice versa.

Most of what I do today is play, occasional coaching sessions, and spending a lot of time on Skype with the players I respect swapping ideas back and forth. At any point in my career I can look back at how I played four months ago and think “Wow, I had no idea what I was doing then. I’ve learned a ton.” I imagine it will keep going like that if I keep improving and I hope that pattern keeps up. Well, that’s all the condescending advice I have for today, after this it’s back to more black and white strategy.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 11: Time and Tilt Management

I’ve got some time over the next week before I have to get back to live poker so I thought I’d get back to writing some of these. A lot of people in the ‘what do you want to see from these articles’ thread they were curious about time management (and to a lesser degree, volume) and tilt/emotional management. Neither of these seem like incredibly elaborate topics, so I’ve decided to combine them despite not being all that related.

Time Management: The annoying part about MTT play, is that it’s the most restrictive form of playing poker when it comes to time freedom. Not only do the tournaments go off at a time we don’t decide, but online tournaments often last 5-10 hours and live ones multiple days.

When it comes to live poker we get very little choice in our time management since we can only one table and all breaks/rests are structured for you. The hardest part about live poker in regards to time management, is staying away from the temptations of the live scene in order to get enough sleep at night to play well. On any given night during say, the WSOP, people will be going out for food, parties, strip clubs, bars, and if your not a social pariah you’ll often be getting invites. If you’ve got to play the next day at 12 you should probably be up at least a half hour (depending on where your staying) before so you can shower, get dressed and get some decent food in your system before you have to play. I swear to god if another one of you fuck heads sits down next to me in a live event without showering and smell like shit I’m going to punch you in the throat.

For online poker, time management is a sort of juggling act. My personal process goes something like: Wake up, shower, set out breakfast in front of my computer, fire up 3-6 tournaments (depending on what hour I’m starting on) and continuing to register for the next ~4 hours, with my girlfriend helping me out by making some food about 4-5 hours into my shift. My average day normally ends up lasting within 30 minutes of 8 hours, but some might take under 6 or over 10, depending on which tournaments I go deep in and if I stop registering early. I play around 6-10 tables at a time on two screens, and on truly hectic days it can reach 12, but my average is around 7 or 8, which is comfortable at this point. Over the course of the day I probably play roughly 15 tournaments, depending on which day of the week it is, and 6 sometimes 7 days a week (though I’ll take half days so I get off early and get outside for the rest of the day.)

There are various pit falls of this kind of system. What about when you get hungry? I’d recommend having easily prepared meals around that also aren’t junk food, and staying away from things that will make you feel lethargic (booze, turkey, greasy/fatty food.) When it comes to using the bathroom, it’s nice to play with someone else in the room in this event (though at this point with the one player to a hand/account paranoia who knows, you could be accused of wrong doing here) or have a laptop you can move all your tables to.
As your day gets longer you should likely concentrate on the tournaments you are deeper in, as it seems a lot of players are auto piloting early in tournaments (as I often am myself.) By the time you reach the money, and certainly by the final table, most players are paying to every hand with at least some level of attention. Sometimes maintaining focus over a day this long can be pretty hard, and I can’t fault people who go on semi auto pilot while nine tabling, as long as every time a serious decision comes up you pause and put real consideration towards it. Using PT/PAHUD will also help with this, and I normally prefer to put a couple ‘feature tables’ up in the most convenient spot for me, normally the highest buy in or one’s I’m most deep in, and pay a lot of specific attention to those two and taking some notes. I’m pretty sure anyone who pays attention and tries to take notes on every hand of every table (while 8 tabling) all day is going to drive themselves insane, but if you have no problem with this kind of focus, go for it.

As far as how many days a week you want to play, I find it’s easier for a poker player to play more days since I enjoy my work (some of us don’t) but also since we lose zero time to anything but our work. There’s no commute, no trying to find parking, no homework (I guess reviewing and discussing your game, but that’s hardly homework) and no forced social interaction. If I had to guess, we likely save ~2 hours a day compared to your average worker since we work at home and we can always pick which days to take off or leave early. How many days a week you should play comes down to how much you need the money, how much you like playing, and how many other responsibilities/activities you have in life.

Tilt/Emotional Management: I’ve been lucky in that I’ve never had tilt problems. The last time I can remember really tilting was over a year ago, and I was playing over my bankroll.

The easiest answer to any tilt problem is to play stakes low enough that you never feel a huge pressure to win. Financial instability can be very tilt inducing, and if you really need money playing poker likely isn’t the answer.

Next I’d suggest having a stress outlet. Some people use a stress ball, play with chips in their hand, yell and scream, get exercise, have a cold drink, take some deep breaths, take a break for a few minutes, play a youtube video that cracks them up, etc. Find what works for you, and if it’s a healthy outlet, stick with it. We all have different triggers for our stress/tilt, and figuring out what they are and avoiding them is essential to a level head.

The part I would stress the most though, is realizing how pointless it is to get angry over that which you cannot control. Like I’ve said before, you need to make your peace with variance, since you’ll likely never understand it and it will NEVER be ‘fair’. Bitching about variance is not only counterproductive, but anyone who does more than a little of it will likely be branded as a whiner and a bitch, and you don’t want to be a whiner and a bitch do you?

In the end, all poker that poker winds up being is trying to make optimal decision after optimal decision after optimal decision into infinity, then watching the results. You can control the decisions you make but you can’t control the outcome. Since you’ll always be able to get into another tournament or game fretting about busting out of this one or that one is pointless. Any special importance you give to a singular event is mostly imagined. “Oh but Bond, I busted out of the WSOP ME, how tragic is that?” We all bust out of the WSOP ME (as I find it highly unlikely any WSOP champ is reading this, but just in case, stop being a Dbag Jamie Gold), how tragic can it be if it’s that common? In most tournaments there’s normally only one guy ‘happy’ with how it ended, and that is obviously the winner. If you can’t handle failing at an enormous frequency, then tournament poker likely isn’t for you. It’s okay to tell your occasional bad beat story here and there, but investing a huge amount of emotion into a single tournament is pretty stupid and counterproductive to achieving sick results.

Tilt is simply you being a big baby over variance. Grow up, face the fact that poker will often disappoint you, and do everything in your power to control what you can to reach a favorable outcome.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 12: LP Opening Ranges

One request that came up numerous times in the "What do you want to see?" thread was late position opening ranges. I think since so many of our raises come from late position this would certainly make a worthwhile topic.

First of all, let's define late position. For the purposes of discussion, we’ll talk about the button, cut off, and hijack positions. There’s certainly a difference between the button and hijack positions, but for the most part we’ll group them together.

The first thing to understand about late position raises is that the size of the stacks behind you are nearly as important as your stack. So when evaluating the quality of spots for opening in late position, you need to be highly aware of which players and what stacks are behind you.

First, let’s talk about situations assuming that all stacks behind are equal. I’ll give examples assuming you’re the CO, since it splits the middle of late position. Also, let’s assume there are antes in play, which give more incentive for aggressive LP play. Without antes you can simply drop out the bottom few hands of these ranges.

50 BB’s or more: At these effective stacks you can open a full range of hands. Depending on how aggressive the players are behind you, I’d say you can open the following: 22+, A2s+, A7o+ (you can go lower, depending on villains), 54s+, JTo+, KTo+, QTo+, 75s+ (two gappers), T7s+(three gappers.) If the villains on your left are quite tight, you can go considerably wider than this even, raising off suit connectors and suited two gappers. Depending on how comfortable you are playing post flop with some marginal holdings, you can certainly drop out some of these hands, especially the gapped holdings or weak off suit hands.

~40 BB’s: You can open a pretty similar range however there’s an added factor to be aware of here, good players will flat call a wider range here than at 50 BB’s. For example, if you raise the CO with 50 BB’s (effective) or more and the SB holds AJ/AQ, they may often 3 bet; however with 40 BB’s they will more likely flat call (the good/stack size aware ones anyway) since 3 betting at these stacks creates an awkward pot size in relation to stacks post flop. Example, you raise 2.6X on the CO, SB 3 bets to 9X, BB folds, you call. Now there’s ~20 BB’s in the pot with ~30 behind in stacks. It’s a pot a bit small for open shoving, and a bit big for bet/folding. Many players (especially at low stakes) will still 3 bet that range though, unaware of this multi-street consequence. Outside this factor, the opening range for 40 BB’s should be pretty similar to 50, of course still depending on how aggressive the players on your left are.

~30 BB’s: Here’s where we need to start making some changes. The 30 BB stack is around the area players will start restealing all in (even though you know it’s an overbet, they don’t) as well as go and go’ing you. Against players who are aggressive you should consider tightening your range here, especially since some of the connector/weak suited hands will play a little worse post and players who flat call in the blinds will have an easier time check raising all in on the flop. Although it’s not completely strict, I likely raise things like: 22+, A2s+, A9o+, 67s+, QJo+, KTo+, QTs+. Depending who’s on your left that range can be a bit tight or a bit loose, and you’re certainly paralyzed at 30 BB’s with your range.

14-22 BB’s: At this stack I’m tightening my opening range considerably. Having 23 BB’s+ can be a pretty similar range to 30, but under that you really need to be conscious of the fact that you’ll get re-stolen AI at a much higher frequency than any other stack. It’s additionally bad because when this happens it’s a fairly significant portion of your stack that you lose when you get reraised. Of additional difficulty for the higher end of this stack is that many players will have a very easy check raise all in on the flop, and it’ll often be just enough to price out your weaker holdings. If you raise 2.5X pre on the CO with 20BB effective and the BB calls there’s about ~7 BB’s in the pot, leaving 17.5 BB’s behind. When he checks and you perhaps fire ~4 BB’s and he moves in, you can’t easily call off 100% of your range. This is also the kind of stack size where if you do raise and get called, you should consider checking back more flops with dangerous or draw heavy textures. At this stack, depending on whose on my left, I’m mostly only raising hands I want to get all in with. That means, roughly, 66+, ATo+, A9s+, KQs (debatable.)

13 BB’s and less: At this point most of your late position opens (with antes) will be shoves. In a field of unknowns the only hands you should be raising nominally with are the hands you really want action on, but in tournaments like the 100r you should shove 100% of your range since most players know nobody raise/folds 12 BB’s in late position in that tournament any more.

Now let’s talk about how the players on your left affect your ranges. There will be some players who are so tight and resteal incapable that you should debateably be opening any two cards in LP, depending on your position. This can also apply to players who massively tighten up in bubble situations. However, in some spots you should still consider folding the bottom ~20% of your range, as if you constantly bombard these players with raises they will almost certainly adjust and start spite calling/ 3 betting you. Nobody likes to feel like they are being bullied. With very loose/resteal happy players you of course need to tighten your open raising range but loosen the range with which you call their shoves with.

With players of the very tight/very aggro variety, you’re raise should almost always have a plan going into the action. You should know how tight you’re willing to fold if a nit comes over the top, and how loose you’re going to call when the spewtard does. Don’t raise 55 on the CO with a spewtard in the SB with 16 BB’s then talk yourself out of a call. Running the ranges through pokerstove (you’ll always have to estimate, which is harder with the spewtards) should give you a rough idea of how loose to get with your raise/calls.

I need to emphasize again, it’s mostly effective stacks that matter. If you have 40 BB’s on the CO, and all three players behind you have 13-20 BB’s, you should treat your opening range like you have 13-20 BB’s unless they are all huge nits. Most of the time things won’t line up this easy for you, so you need to watch the players on your left closely to see what they are capable of pre flop with these kinds of stacks and how recently their stack has changed. Players who just lost a major pot down to 15 BB’s are way more likely to resteal than players who waited to shove 7 BB’s and just now doubled up.

The ranges I’ve given aren’t terribly strict, some players will feel comfortable going looser and some tighter, depending on the villains skill and your own skill. Also bear in mind the metagame, if you’ve raised the last two buttons you should probably be tightening up on the third. If you’ve folded the last two, you can raise a looser range obviously. These aren’t hard and fast rules, but I hope they serve well as guide lines.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 13: Ranges

Unfortunately I’ve been busy lighting money on fire at live poker so I haven’t been able to write for a while. I don’t have much live to play for another two months now so I’ve got some time to do some writing and want to restart the ‘Things it took me a while to learn’ series. Hopefully this article is a return to form.

As I wrote in part 9 tournament hand reading is all about putting players on ranges. However, I didn’t really elaborate on the enormous impact of understanding hand ranges in general. The simple fact is this: If you can pinpoint a mans range, you can own his soul. Pinpointing someone’s range can at times be very easy and at others very difficult, and is entirely situational dependant. Sometimes a person will do something so incredibly obvious they make their range basically one or two hands. Sometimes a persons range will get polarized, meaning the villain either has a very big hand or bluff. When good thinking players come up against other good thinking players they go to lengths to merge their range, fancy talk for being deceptive. What this means is that they play in a way that many hands would play to prevent giving you any clues that allows you to weight their range towards a certain strength. Being able to read ranges is simply an extension of hand reading, though somewhat more generalized.

So how do we read ranges? Well for one it does to a degree come down to experience. For example, when I first began playing live poker after spending so many months entirely online I was not used to how peoples 3 betting and shoving ranges were VASTLY different. After some experience I was able to make the proper adjustments. Even some tournaments online the ranges for a similar, or even exact situation, can differ enormously based on what tournament it is. Example:
Both CO and button have 40 BB’s with antes in play, both players are 100% unknown to you. The CO open raises 2.6 X. The button 3 bets to 8.5X. The blinds fold and the CO shoves. Now, take this example in the 100r and the CO has a much wider range than in a 50 freeze out.

This is of course, a very basic and obvious example. However, without knowing anything about the 100r or a 50 FO and having no experience in either tournament, you may not necessarily realize just how big the differences in ranges are. Outside the experience argument though, range reading can easily be taught and practiced. Let’s start with early tournament range reading.

Early Tournament Range Reading:
The nice part about early tournament range reading is that people are often making less elaborate or fancy moves, especially pre flop. Assuming you know a little about you’re opponent you should be able to get a decent idea of his pre flop range when he makes certain actions. Now, this may result in his range being fairly wide, but you’ll at least have something to go with which you then can eliminate hands from later. Example:
Level 1 in a Stars 100 freeze out, with blinds 10/20. You open in MP2 to 70, and the button who is a known winning player flat calls the button. What’s his range? Depending on the player it’s often something in the area of: 22-JJ, AJ-AQ, 54s+, KJo, KQo, JTs-ATs, 64s-J9s. This can’t be exact but it’s reasonable, and we can expect QQ+/AK to reraise.

Once you have an idea of his pre flop range you can begin eliminating possibilities post flop depending on the flop texture and action. This all becomes second nature with experience. Now let’s take a look at some early tournament example hands and think about how knowledge of our opponent plus thinking about his range leads to a decision.

Stars 109 Freeze out. It’s the first level, blinds 10/20. The villain in the hand is a well known 2+2’er, Mattsuspect. He knows who I am and I know him to be pretty TAG at this stage of the tournament. I don’t have much information on UTG+2, so I have to give him credit for a standard range.
Hero’s stack: 2880
UTG+2: 6120
MP2 (Mattsuspect): 3010
I hold Kc Ks on the CO. Blinds are 10/20.

Preflop: 2 folds, UTG+2 raises to 80, 1 fold, MP2 reraises to 280, Hero calls, folds to UTG+2, UTG+2 calls 200.

Alright, at this stage I can feel pretty confident that for Mattsuspect to reraise an early position player at this stage of the tournament he has a very small range. Many TAG’s are even cold calling AK here since UTG+2 isn’t calling a reraise with many worse hands than AK. I fully expect his 3 betting range to be QQ+ here, though at times players will add AKs and JJ. I call because I know if I 4 bet his range can play perfectly against me. His QQ/AKs will snap fold since he knows my 4 betting range is only KK+ given the positions, but he may think my cold call range is something like JJ+/AK.

Flop: 7c Qd 9h (Pot 870)
UTG+2 checks, MP2 bets 700, Hero folds.

To me, this seems like a very simple fold and overall a simple hand. I know that even if MP2’s range includes AK and JJ he’s not betting that large into two players, especially not when a thinking one cold called his reraise. QQ has now sucked out on me, and I’m of course still behind AA. Therefore I beat nothing in his range and easily fold.

Alright, let’s go with one more early example that get into thinking how a players range will react to certain plays:

The player in this hand was well known online player ‘yellowsub’. In my analysis I’ll be paraphrasing a post djk123 made in the thread, so he also deserves some credit. The tournament is the Full tilt $500+50 Sunday Million. We are without reads.
MP2: 4908
Hero: 4940
Hero holds Ah Qh on the CO.

Preflop: Folds to MP2, MP2 raises to 150, Hero calls, 3 folds.
This seems standard to me so far. We can again give the villain a pretty wide range.

Flop: 5c 3h Ac (Pot 360)
MP2 checks, Hero bets 245, MP2 calls 245.

At this point the hand gets a little strange. It’s odd for MP2 to not C bet a board like this, and that often means he has a polarized range. A reasonable range to give MP2 is something like 99-KK, 33, 55, AA, A9-AK, or just maybe a very strangely/badly played suited connector with clubs. Most of the time though, his hand is in one of the first categories, either a pair with showdown value that doesn’t want to turn it’s hand into a bluff, or a huge hand that’s aiming to trap the hero. The AJ-AK aren’t really huge, and are often betting, but they will sometimes check hoping to get value and thinking on a board like this it’s hard for their opponent to hit. The bet seems standard, as we can still gain value from the checking pairs, the rare/odd club draw, and worse A’s. At this point, I would weight villains range towards 99-KK or 33+55+AA since A’s and flush draws mostly bet the flop.

Turn: Kh (Pot 850)
MP2 checks, Hero bets 609, MP2 raises to 2120, Hero folds.

Here’s where a lot of the discussion took place. The real question in the hand is whether the turn was the correct play. Djk123 came into the thread and broke down the villains range and his probable actions with those ranges and provided information as to why bet/folding the turn is incorrect. The logic goes as follows; if we mostly weight villains range towards 99-KK and slow played sets there cannot be very good value in betting this turn. The slow played sets will now check raise us and we’ll have to make a disgusting feeling fold. The pairs trying to get to showdown will likely give hero credit for an ace and fold. KK has no sucked out and will checkraise. If we check the turn and make our flush we can of course get it on the river verse anything. If we check the turn and villain bets the river we can always call since the villain will at times show up with worse A’s and the occasional missed flush draw. The villain is also more likely to pay off two streets with a 99-QQ type hand if we check back the turn and look like we were simply taking a shot on the flop but have now decided to try and bluff again on the river.

Again, we see that the key to ranges is having information and assumptions about our opponents probable actions with certain hands. By being observant and learning about how players react to certain board textures range reading becomes much easier.

Mid-Late stage Range Reading:
In the mid to late stages of tournaments the important part of hand reading often comes down to shoving and reshoving. For this portion of the article I’ve brought in a guest writer, Luckychewy aka Runthistable, who I feel is better suited to explain this process, the math and the tools involved (Pokerstove, Sitngo power-tools.) Here’s his contribution:

Three ridiculously crucial things to have access to for any aspiring tournament player when reviewing sessions are the Calculator, PokerStove, and SnG Power Tools. As all of you know by now, middle through late and especially end game tournament play heavily relies on how strong of a pushbotter you are. These three programs will greatly help you improve your pushbotting and help combat other pushbotters. I use calculator and stove to assist in calling ranges, and power tools to assist with shoving ranges. A lot of spots you find yourself in will become straightforward after a while, but every now and then there is a close spot you need to review and this is how you do it. For what it's worth, I'd recommend throwing some hands in a word document as you play a session and thus making it easier to find exactly what you want to review afterwards.

When figuring out what range to call a shove with you first need to figure out what equity you need versus the players range to breakeven. Obviously breaking even is nice and we shouldn't be passing small edges in most cases, but you’re goal should be to turn a profit calling shoves. There are a lot of situations that arise in which I’m not sure if I’m making a positive or negative EV call because it’s so close, these spots I refer to as marginal. Sometimes I pass on marginal spots and sometimes I don’t, it really all depends on so many variables. As you get better and better at calling and pushing ranges you will find yourself in less and less marginal spots as stuff will start becoming more clear-cut whether it is profitable or not.

So, starting with calling ranges. This is where Calculator and PokerStove are used. First, you need to figure out your required equity given the pot odds. An example hand from full tilt’s 55k guarantee is as follows: Unknown player in the CO position shoves for 15.5k at 1k/2k/250 ante with 8 people at the table, and I’m in the BB with 55 and almost 65k after posting. The pot is 3k in blinds+ 2k in antes+ the 15.5k he shoved for which = 20.5k. I only have to call 13.5 since I’m in the BB, which means I’m getting 20.5:13.5, or close to 1.5:1. To figure out exactly what equity you need to breakeven you take what’s in the pot, add how much you need to call, and then divide this new number by how much you need to call. So if 20.5 = x and 13.5 = y, the formula would be y/x+y. In this case, x+y = 34, and y is 13.5, so 13.5/34 = .397. Essentially I need to have 39.7% equity or better versus his range to make a call profitable.

The second part involves PokerStove. I first plug my hand and then guesstimate an appropriate range for the CO player. Poker has a lot more gray areas than black and white, so if you guesstimate a range and later find out the CO player is a huge nit or huge spew, oh well, you didn’t know it at the time and there’s not much to be said. You will inevitably make mistakes when determining ranges but it will get better with time and even I’m not nearly as good as some players who spawned from sit and go’s where it’s essential that you know the correct call/push ranges in a bunch of spots. In this case I’ll give the unknown CO a somewhat conservative range of 22+, A2s+, K8s+, Q8s+, J9s+, T9s, 98s, 87s, A2o+, K9o+, Q9o+, Jto and I’ve got ~51.7% equity. So clearly this is way better than a breakeven call as I’m only required to have ~39.7% equity and I have ~51.7%, quite a profitable call in the long run. For those that care, in the actual hand he had AQo and I lost a sizeable flip. This could mean that his range is tighter than I assume or it could mean that he just so happened to have the top end of it this time around. Regardless, I’m fine with the call and would make it again if I had to.

Generally with regards to pushing ranges as opposed to calling ranges, your range will be much wider because you profit off of the amount of folds you get. Obviously when making a call you have no folding equity, which as I explained earlier is why you need to be a favorite versus the players range with the given pot odds. The equity of your pushing range versus a players call range is generally going to be a dog, but you get a lot of folds so it’s still profitable. SnG Power Tools is a huge help in figuring out how wide you can profitably push from what position. Unlike Calculator and PokerStove though, it isn’t free, but it is cheap. I’d highly recommend those of you who don’t have it to buy it. You can get it online for like $20, minimal in return for how much money it can potentially make you if you put it to good use. Again though, it makes its calculations off of your assumptions of the other players calling ranges. It’s important of course to make good assumptions, but you will inevitably be wrong some of the time. Generally if you are close enough it will be clear whether or not a certain shove is profitable, but not always in close situations. As always, everything is very opponent dependent so while it’s okay some of the time to generalize (as you will have to do versus unknown players) you definitely don’t want to make the same assumptions of the BB’s calling range versus your button shove is the BB is charder30 or joeshmo123456. If I had to take a guess, charder might call a bit wider than Joe.

That’s all I’ve got to say about calling and pushing ranges. I learned so much from 2p2 and met so many great people and friends from this site I feel I have a debt to fill by giving something back. I hope ya’ll learned a bunch and win lots of monies in the future (though hopefully not from me!). Thanks for reading.

Alright, that’s what I have for now. Thanks to Luckychewy for his contribution and for the other posters whose ideas I’ve stolen. If there’s any questions, you know where to put ‘em.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 14: Playing a Chip lead/Big Stack

Classic poker literature circulated an enormous amount if misinformation about playing a chip lead or big stack. Many wrote that when you have so many chips you should avoid confrontation since it’s ‘unnecessary’ and ‘you have time to wait.’ Yet again, strategy like this is complete bullshit. In situations without sizeable $EV considerations you should never pass up + cEV situations, regardless to the size of your stack (yes there are occasionally spots you (although there are occasionally spots where you would pass up a marginal, high variance spot if it means it would cost you later +cEV spots but that’s another discussion.) Proper chip lead strategy means being able to find what +cEV and +$EV situations exist that could not exist if you had a smaller stack. Many of the best players intentionally take gambles early in order to set themselves up for having a larger stack later in order to create more +EV spots because they are aware of this concept.
Still, it’s important to keep in mind that the size of your stack doesn’t give you a license to do just anything. During a hand the most pertinent detail is still what effective stacks are. For example, if you’re on the CO with 80 BB’s and all three players behind you have 15-20 BB’s, your opening range shouldn’t really be that much different as to when you have 15-20 BB’s as well. Will there be a difference in some spots? Sure, but it won’t affect things nearly as much as some other situations. Let’s take a look at how things change when having a big stack at certain stages of the tournament.

Early Game: Say in the first couple levels you’ve run well and stacked two or three players. You’ve now got one of the largest stacks in the tournaments and are the chip leader of your table. How does this change things? To be honest not all that much. Stacks are still quite deep and nobody’s strategy has changed all that much. There’s no antes and there’s nothing for you to gain by ‘applying pressure’ or anything like that. Very often in situations like these effective stacks will be still very deep and people are playing in a fairly straight forward manner, so getting highly creative solely for the reason that you have more chips will likely result in spew. If you get a large stack and come up against another large stack on the table it’s more important to have a good grip on deep stacked play than have any illusion that you’ll get a ton of extra folds just because you’re both big. Cash game experience will help in situations like these, though they are mostly rare.

Mid/Late Game: At this stage having a large stack begins to be important. When the average stack goes under 50 BB’s (and will soon get considerably lower) and when antes come out you now have some power. To be honest before antes come into play my open raising standards don’t really loosen that much based on the size of my stack, but once they do having a large stack will make a considerable difference. Just how much you loosen up of course still depends on factors like image, players behind you, stacks behind you, etc. My opening range is going to be a little bit looser compared to having say, 25 BB’s, but not necessarily an enormous amount. When you’re on an 18 BB stack it’s better to resteal someone with 20 BB’s than someone with 80 unless you know for a fact the guy with 80 is opening very loose due to his stack size. However, when you’re the big stack it’s the other 15-20 BB stacks who need to be cautious with restealing on you.

One thing that does change considerably is my 3 betting of other large stacks. This is a valuable weapon in the arsenal because
A. Very few players are capable of 4 betting light.
B. Very few players cold call reraises (especially if you do it to players when you have position.)
You should watch for which kind of players will 4 bet light and which will just call reraises light, but most are making a push/fold decision based on whether they think their hand fares well against your 3 betting range. I especially think there is some merit to 3 betting stacks in positions where they wouldn’t expect it. For example, 3 betting an active but not maniacal player who’s opened MP1/MP2/HJ with 45 BB’s when you have 75 BB’s and position behind him can be very good and deceptive since he’s not anticipating a lot of resteals when opening from these positions, especially if you’re not too late behind him.

Bubble: Playing the big stack at bubble time is one of the true pleasures of tournament poker. In spots like these you can bend the rules of stack sizes and position against players who to a degree value the bubble. There’s certainly a difference having the chip lead on the bubble of 100r and a 50 FO, but both still allow a level of aggressive creativity.

On tournaments that play tighter on bubble time you can open an enormous range of hands, especially if the table doesn’t show willingness to fight back. On some tables opening 50% of hands (or even more) can certainly be profitable. I’m willing to raise into a number of resteal likely stacks with a wide range of hands I can’t call with because often their resteal range will be reduced. I’m also watching keenly for other active medium-large stacks to three bet or flat call wide pre in order to make their lives hard post. A few examples of how I may get creative that sort of ‘breaks the rules’.

Example 1:
Hero has 70 BB’s. Villain has 33 BB’s. Hero is CO with 75s, villain is MP2. Blinds 500/1000 with 100 ante. The tournament is on or near the bubble.
Preflop: Folds to MP2, MP2 opens to 2700, folds to hero, Hero 3 bets to 7600.

Now, being in position here as well as on the bubble we can make a small reraise that doesn’t commit ourselves for his stack but still puts a lot of pressure on him. I’m normally not 3 betting people with a 33 BB stack light, but when you get an opportunity like this on the bubble and don’t have an insane image, go for it.

Example 2:
Hero has 70 BB’s, Villain has 25 BB’s. Hero is button with QTo. Villain is HJ. Blinds 500/1000 with 100 ante. The tournament is on or near the bubble.
Prelfop: Folds to HJ, HJ raises to 2700, folds to hero, hero calls.

This isn’t really a standard preflop call. However, the villains stack is too short to 3 bet so that option is out. Instead, consider calling wide in spots like these and making more moves post. On a bubble you’ll even get a higher % of players simply check folding to you. Also consider semi bluffing a wider range of flops. There are some various obvious semi bluff boards like KJx, J9x, 789, but in this spot I’m always jamming over a C bet if it comes 89X, 7JX, J8X, 786 and considering a float on Axx or Kxx type flops.

End Game: A lot of playing the big stack in the end game comes down to being highly player observant (as is important with any end game situation.) What kind of opponents are willing to gamble as opposed to just trying to move up the pay ladder? Which villains are playing higher than normal (use OPR people) and which are in their comfort zone? You need to find a balance between aggression/table control and spew.

If we talk strictly about the final table in terms of end game we can get into more specifics. First of all, if you want to continue to play highly aggressive I recommend doing it having just entered the final table and picking on medium stacks whenever possible. This is because the bottom few spots of final table pay outs are often still pretty small. However, once there’s about ~6 left, players have moved far enough up that they’ve secured a decent score and aiming for first suddenly becomes realistic.

You need to be aware that in final table situations cEV and $EV begin to diverge. I’m not mathematically knowledgeable enough to bring out equations or give you an exact point of gambles you should and shouldn’t take (though perhaps I’ll ‘write’ a future article where I simply employ MikeJ to do exactly that) but I can give a fairly obvious example:

If you’re at a final table with 50 BB’s, the other chip leader has 50 BB’s, there’s a medium stack of 25 BB’s, and two short stacks of 5 BB’s you need to have a very significant edge to get your stack in against the other chip leader. You give up a ton of equity if you bust to him, and playing a marginal +cEV spot verse him is going to be massively -$EV over the long term.

Once you get very deep having the big stack allows you to open a little lighter but overall you’re mostly playing a game of effective stacks. You should be aware of the stacks and players you’re able to pick on and which methods of doing so. Against small stacks open shove when appropriate. Against medium open raise into them a lot and semi bluff more post. Against big stacks three bet pre and put them in an awkward spot.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 15: Small/Mid and High Differences

Recently the online sites have been adding more and more high stakes tournaments to their schedules. Four sites now have a weekly $1000 tournament, Tilt has added a couple 100 rebuys, UB has added a nightly $150, and this is on top of the slew of $100+ tournaments (which we’ll define as higher stakes for the sake of discussion) that already exist. There are a number of adjustments to consider when moving up the buy in ladder which we’ll go over.

First of all, peoples aggression ranges are much wider at higher stakes than they are at low/mid. Take shoving ranges on a 10 BB stack with antes for example. If it folds to a player on the CO in the 100 rebuys, their range is going to be very wide here, and in some situations any two cards. Now take a tournament like the nightly 50/50 on Stars or Tilt. I think the average player is often only shoving A high, pairs, any two broadway, and a few suited connectors. Some may even end up folding the weaker A’s and broadways. As always you need to watch the players on your right to get a good idea of where they’re at, but as a rule expect that as you move up in stakes peoples shoving ranges get wider.

Also, peoples opening ranges get wider but that is fairly obvious. A larger difference though, is that peoples 3 betting ranges get a lot wider and 3 bets are a lot more frequent. For example, in a 50/50 dollar tournament If I open MP2 and the button 3 bets me at 30 BB’s effective I give the average player pretty damn tight range, though again it depends on the player. Still, very regularly you’ll get players whose 3 bet range is simply QQ+/AK. Meanwhile, in a tournament like the 100r the 3 bet range here can be closer to AQ+/99+, again depending on the player and the existing dynamics. Also, players at higher buy ins make fewer mistakes in regards to 3 bets. Many have a good idea what kind of stacks they should shove with, which they should flat with, which they should 3 bet as a go and go, and which they should 3 bet and evaluate post flop with. At the lower/mid buy in tournaments you more often see guys who do very obvious things such as min 3 bet their strongest hands, 4 or 5X 3 bet the hands they don’t really know how to play (TT-QQ, AK) and make shoves for highly inappropriate amounts (either jamming on a resteal with no fold equity because they don’t understand pot odds or shoving a massive stack in relation to your bet, say 10-15X your original raise.) There are still plenty of players at the higher limits who make significant errors in 3 bet situations, but the errors are often to a smaller degree than at the lower stakes, and often erring on the side of aggression which makes your life harder.

Because people are more passive at lower stakes I tend to play a more aggressive game. If I get on tables where the players on my left seem incapable of 3 betting without having a real hand I’ll start tiny raising (2.3-2.5X) a very wide range of hands in LP. Even if these types of players end up defending their BB (which many will since they don’t understand position) they’ll often play too passive and sloppy post flop. When I play in higher stakes and tougher tournaments, I tend to play a more TAG style since my opponents will make far fewer mistakes against me pre and post flop and their aggression can sometimes be manipulated into spewing into my tighter style of play. Of course you should never go to far with this and become a nit (and some players play LAGish at the highest stakes very well) and you still need to be able to pick spots to suddenly and violently open up your range in order to keep thinking players off balance. Along this line, I also flat call preflop a bit wider in weaker tournaments because my opponents will make larger mistakes post, give me more free cards, and I’ll get squeezed behind me less often.

Another major difference you’ll see when moving up in stakes are the concepts of raising for information and pot control. Let’s take an example hand and see how it can (and often will) play out differently depending on stakes.
Example 1: It is the first level of a Stars tournament with a 3000 starting bank at the 10/20 level. The players in the hand not overly familiar with each other. The button in the hand holds 99.
Preflop: It folds to UTG+1 who raises to 70, it folds to the button who calls, the blinds fold.
Flop: 2 5 7 rainbow
UTG+1 bets out 120.
Now, in a Stars $1000 tournament I would expect the button to flat call here close to 100% of the time. The button knows if he raises 99 there are zero hands he can get value out of from another thinking player and he is essentially turning his hand into a bluff. Therefore he elects to call, control the pot size, use his position, and evaluate what happens on the turn. One other quick adjustment in regards to open raising comes with the ability to break the stack size rule. Say for example I’m in a tournament full of very weak players who never 3 bet without having a big hand. If it’s folded to me on the CO with A9s I’ll 2.4X it intending to fold to a reraise. Meanwhile in something like the 100r, I would simply shove this hand.

The same hand in the Stars 50/50 may play out that UTG+1 bets out 120 and the button now raises to 360. The button is failing to think about the big picture and sees the situation at it’s most basic; “The flop is 7 high, I have a pair of nines, I’ve probably got the best hand therefore I should raise and see where I am.” Then if they get reraised they sit there tanking not sure what to do and wondering how they got in this gross spot. For the most part, raising this board with 99 at this stack depth is a mistake across the board, but every so often you’ll get players who stack off so insanely wide it becomes correct. Still, this is a rare occurrence.

The next thing to consider about moving up in stakes is bubble play. Both on the final table and on the cash bubble, the higher you get and against the better of opponents the less players will nit it up around bubble situations and give you folds. There will always be some players who are out of their league in a tournament who have happened to survive to the point that this is relevant, but the bubble in a 50/50 is vastly different to a bubble in the 100r. For example, in a bubble situation where I have a decent stack (it doesn’t need to be huge) in a 50/50 I’ll be open raising an enormous amount of hands for very small raises (2.3-2.5X) since I expect players to 3 bet and flat call me with a very tight range. Meanwhile in a 100r I make almost zero adjustment to my game plan unless I am in procession of a massive stack or happen to be on a table with unexpectedly weak players. Even still I don’t open it up to nearly the level I would in a 50/50 tournament. In a 50/50 it’s fairly rare to see someone else on the table really looking to manipulate a bubble situation unless they have a ton of chips, but in the higher limits most players are willing to go ahead and 3 bet all in light to prevent their getting run over.

Another key adjustment I make between stakes is adjusting how much I play for deception vs obvious value. Against higher stakes and thinking players you need to be aware that they are more observant and watching for bet sizing patterns. They also know that you know exactly what your stack size allows for and doing something outside the norm throws up red flags.

Example: It’s at the 200/400 with 50 ante in a Stars tournament. You have 9,600 chips in the small blind and hold AA. The button has 15,000.
Preflop: It folds around to the button who open raises to 1,100.

Now, in a 100r I am shoving this hand, the same as I would shove my entire 3 betting range. Thinking players know if I do something like make it 3,000 (which obviously pot commits me) that I likely have a huge hand (although these days some players are making it 3000 in this spot with a hand that’s not necessarily dying for action like say, AT in order to look strong, but that’s a whole other article) and that I’d normally shove my lesser hands. So instead of giving them that information I make the most deceptive play (that is, deceptive because there is simply nothing to read into, my raise size can mean AT, 55, KQs, or AA.) I also know that very few strong/thinking players would think of flatting here for 1/3rd of effective stacks to see if they get a good flop or otherwise fold to my inevitable flop shove. Meanwhile, in the 50/50 I would almost always make more a fancy/cute play by flat calling (which basically nobody does in the 100r in the SB at these stack sizes) or 3 betting an amount that makes my opponent perhaps thinking about taking a flop, or, ever so rarely, 4 bet a hand they think has some fold equity.

There are many situations like this at lower stakes tournaments where you can do things that become obvious at higher stakes in order to get value. You should slow play more often in spots where your opponent will fail to realize you have become pot committed and would never call off so much of your stack without such a strong holding. The higher you get the and better of players you run into, the more you should make your actions look similar with your whole range to prevent them from being able to hand read you accurately.

Lastly, keep in mind that players at lower limits adjust slower (or at times, are simply unwilling to adjust) compared to higher stakes thinking players. Meta game in the tougher tournaments is much more relevant and history and reads become highly integral to being able to make a correct assessment of someone’s range. Meanwhile, in lower stakes players may fail to adjust by opening their range up against your aggressive play. They are much less likely to take a pattern you have and exploit you for it, since they simply don’t possess the knowledge of how to react to a variety of situations. Their style is more sedentary. Meanwhile, if you keep the same patterns up against thinking players you will inevitably get exploited and they will find ways to outplay you or only give you the absolute minimum of value with your big hands. Pay attention to the way the table reacts to you. The ‘X-factor’ of skilled tournament play against tough opponents is understanding meta game.

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Part 16: The flaw in level 2 thinking

Special Guest: Shaundeeb.

I’ve been thinking about this concept quite a lot lately. At first I thought I was being results oriented, paranoid, or simply way too nity. I ended up having the same discussion with a number of players I respect, and after some debate we pretty much all came to the same conclusion; we as winning mid-high stakes tournaments players end up leveling ourselves too often.

If you’re reading this you’re likely the kind of person who seeks out information on improving your game. That means you probably read forums, books, articles, and converse about poker with other thinking players in an effort to get better. These are the best ways of getting better of course, but they due tend to cause one problem; we thinking players spend so much time around other thinking players considering thinking situations that we sometimes forget that the majority of tournaments players aren’t thinking, or more precisely, don’t think anything like we do. I’ll let Shaundeeb elaborate with the following:

“Now I would hope most of you are familiar with the levels of thinking in poker and as a poker player, but most of you myself included make this crucial mistake over and over again. The problem with most level 2 thinking done by mid stakes tourney regulars isthey too often when figuring out that persons range use one too close to their own and make an error by giving the guy too much credit or too little credit. Now it's almost always going to be a big guessing game on ranges with a random player but still try to give them less credit before giving them more.

I have made my living beating bad players, you could call me the Phil Hellmuth of lower stakes MTT’s. I learned quickly what to do verse those types of players and made a good profit from it. I notice a lot of times in the lower buyins I make the mistake of thinking this is a great spot to bluff when considering the other person's position and then assume he’s bluffing. However, he's not as good as me and therefore probably doesn't realize what a good spot it is and most likely has what he is representing. We are trained to be the highest level thinking players out there by discussing hands within our own little cliques every day trying to dissect every possible outcome when if we just studied the prior decisions you will find the spot to pounce on your opponent's mistake while conventional wisdom tends to push you towards a different outcome/solution.

We spend most of our most important early decisions vs randoms and it's so hard to predict the way these players will react and what they actually have but as soon as you stop thinking what you would have in that spot you will start playing much better. Thankfully those we play against don't have the same ranges we would have or our edge would diminish due to that. They make huge mistakes for us.

Now most of this advice is not for your biggest buyins online but instead for those oh so soft satellite filled Sunday lotteries as well as those 10-100 freeze outs and rebuys under $100. You will run into so many different players and styles in one day that you can never know whose who and what's what half the time but for the half you do know be sure you make an educated decision based on them, not on you. I mean as a basic learning for level 2 it was a great start to be like what would I have in this spot and to do some hand reading from the outside looking in but now we should be getting past that stage to a more efficient way of thinking.”

Thanks for your input Shaun, it only took me 78 hours and two seizures to turn it into understandable English. It’s a good summary of the issue at hand, so now let’s talk about application. First of all, one assumption to make is people’s ranges are tighter than you expect until proven otherwise. This is another point where being observant or using Pokertracker with PAHUD become important. I would say in most mid stakes tournaments (which I’d define at $20-$100 freeze outs and $10-$50 rebuys, and sometimes the $150’s) the break down in players is something like: 75% too tight/passive, 20% too loose/aggressive/spewy, 5% thinking professionals. This is course a very large generalization which there are many variables to consider, but not a bad break down.

Let’s look at specific instances where I think good/thinking players are giving too much to non thinking players or random players.

1. Paying off small river value bets: You get this all the time, you find yourself at the river with a medium strength hand that you’re fairly sure isn’t good. However, your opponent fires out a bet in the area of 30-50% pot. You look at his bet, figure your medium strength hand only needs to be good around 1 in 4 times or something, and call down. I know it’s gross but trust me, stop paying off these bets until you see someone bluff with them. Nobody bets this stupid little size as a bluff. Sure you only need to be good 1 in 4 for this to be profitable. In my experience though it’s considerably higher, something like 1 in 8 or maybe 10, that the player doesn’t turn up with what you think you’re getting taken to value town with. Now if you get the kind of board where a number of draws miss or you think the villain is very bad at making thin value bets you can maybe call these down, but one of the biggest leaks I see in good players is using pot odds to justify this call. I think something to consider in the future is to look for players who make these thin value bets with good but not great hands and then find spots where you can catch them doing it and blow them off it with a large raise (that’s right, turning your showdown value into a bluff, spots do exist where it can and should be done) as long as you know your opponent has a fold button.

2. Four bet jamming a wide range pre over a small 3 bet: I know sometimes players turn up with truly insane hands when they tiny or minreraise you pre. Yes I know it happens. However, if you look at the breakdown of times you get minreraised by something random/awful and the times it’s a huge hand I think you’ll find trying to come over the top of these light is a really bad idea. Bad players tiny reraise you because they aren’t aware that you’re thinking about their raise size. All they’re hoping for is that you see a tiny amount and either take a flop and fall in love or get annoyed with such a stupid sized 3 bet and come over the top. Until proven otherwise, accept random or weak players pre flop tiny and min reraises as the massive hands they often are.

3. Calling short stack open shoves too wide: Very many unknown players still aren’t aware of how wide they can profitably shove on a short stack. Lots of guys will keep folding well past a 10 BB stack waiting for something semi decent. This is a leak I used to have on an enormous scale, I guess I figured it was one of those things everyone was on to or it was simply obvious. That’s just not the case. Even though shoving ranges have gotten wider an absolute ton of the past two years there are still so many players out there who have no idea about +cEV shoves, pokerstove, SNG power tools or anything like that. As I said in a previous entry one of the most key things I note people on is their shoving ranges. Those kind of notes can come in massively handy late in a tournament.

4. Assuming nobody in their right might would make a massive overshove with a big hand: This one is not as prominent as the others since there are plenty of players who go for small bets with big hands and huge shoves with drawing hands. However, there are a ton of players who when they risk a very large amount of chips are never doing so without what they perceive as a huge hand. One good way to tell if a player is the type to do this is watch how they play a draw. If you see a player play a draw passively then you get in a spot where he pulls a huge overshove on you, odds are he’s got what he’s representing. Especially deep in tournaments where players are anxious about blowing a large stack or a chance at a big score you have to accept that many players will tighten up and take less chances with their whole stack.

Next I want to address an issue that comes up whenever I discuss this kind of thing with smart players. Doesn’t giving people credit for a hand all the time make you an equally exploitable nit? I don’t think so. The only players good enough to exploit your tendencies are thinking players. If you’re a regular tournament player you need to make it your business to know who the thinking players are. That means glancing through 2+2 and P5’s and OPR’ing your opponents on the table when possible. Bad, non thinking players aren’t capable of adjusting to the point that they can exploit my tendencies, or certainly not to a degree that I can’t see it coming. When I play a hand against someone I know to be thinking and who knows I know they’re thinking, I throw all of these assumptions out the window and attempt to play my hand in a manner that aims for deception instead of manipulation.

Who knows though, perhaps after having this article put up I’m going to have to make large adjustments when people start abusing me with 1/3rd pot bluffs and tiny 3 betting me all day. I doubt it though. There are just too many bad players, and we all need to accept that.

Part 99: What Would Phil Hellmuth Do?

Authors Note: As an additional exercise for this segment, see if you can figure out which hands were actually played by Phil and which I’ve made up. I’ll give you one hint; the hands played the absolute worst are the ones by Phil, because I simply don’t have the imaginative ability to come up with hands that awful.

Greetings fellow tournament players, it is I, the worlds greatest tournament player, Phil Hellmuth Jr. Normally I would never dispense with strategy advice for free, and the majority of my skilled analysis can be found in my enormously successful book ‘Play Poker Like the Pros’. However, it’s come to my attention that I’ve been taking a lot of flack on the forums by all these stupid internet kids who think they know something about tournaments, so I’ve come to show them all up and educate the imbecile masses. Allow me to walk you through some hands and show you how a true master of the game would play them!

Hand 1: It’s the 50/100 level in the 10k Euro Main Event in Monte Carlo. The villain in the hand is some stupid internet punk. I hold TT UTG+1. We both have around 20k.
Preflop: UTG folds, I raise to 300, it folds to the button who calls, the blinds fold.
Analysis: This seems pretty standard, though I think TT is the at the bottom of my open raising range here. My normal raising range here is JJ/QQ and AK. I would OF COURSE limp KK and AA.
Flop: Tc 9c 3h, I check, the button bets 600, I call.
Analysis: Haha! We’ve flopped the absolute nuts. That means we of course need to start slowplaying, don’t want to scare our opponent off his hand here and we certainly don’t want to build a big pot, since I might not have the nuts on future streets. I check and the button bets 600, calling is of course best here.
Turn: 4d, I check, the button bets 1000, I call.
Analysis: That’s a nice safe turn card. I check again and the button bets 1000. I of course just call again, I’ve got this kid right where I want him. I just know he’s gonna bluff his whole stack off to me on the river, so we certainly don’t want to raise now!
River: Kc, I lead out 600, the kid raises to 3600, I call. He shows me AcQc.

Analysis: Once the river comes it’s time to take this kid to value town! I lead out 600, a good looking 1/6th pot bet. Now the kid has the gall to raise me! Well, since the flush draw got there as well as the straight draw we had better call since stupid internet kids love to bluff on the river when all the draws get there. I call and he shows me the nut flush. DAMN IT! I had that stupid internet kid right where I wanted him, he was gonna bluff off his WHOLE stack to me on the river if he didn’t suck out like the stupid donkey he is! It’s obvious that I played this whole hand perfectly, I just got really really unlucky on the river.

Hand 2: It’s the 300/600 level in the 10k WPT Main Event at Foxwoods. I’ve gotten my 20,000 starting stack up to about 65,000 crushing all these stupid morons. My opponent in the hand is tournament poker legend TJ Cloutier, who has managed to drag his sorry, degenerate, 200% selling ass off the craps table to play in the tournament. TJ is sitting with about 50,000. I hold AKo UTG+2.
Preflop: It folds to me and I raise to 1800. It folds to TJ in the BB who call.
Analysis: I think preflop is pretty standard here. I’ve got AK so I raise, though it’s important to keep in mind THAT ACE KING IS A DRAWING HAND PEOPLE. When TJ calls out of the BB I know he’s got a big hand, because TJ is a tight player and he’s defending his BB against the worlds best tournament player. I am cautious going to the flop.
Flop: Ah Kc 9d, TJ checks and I bet 2000. TJ calls.
Analysis: I flop okay, though to be honest I’m Phil Hellmuth Jr. so I’m used to flopping a little better than that. I bet 2000 for value, hoping if TJ has made a loose call with A9 I can get some value here, though I imagine he’ll quickly fold AQ. TJ flat calls me, which shows me an enormous amount of strength.
Turn: Kd, TJ checks and I check behind.
Analysis: This is a pretty good turn card for me since it means TJ can’t have KK. I’m pretty sure TJ will check fold everything but AA here, so I check behind for pot control. This seems very obvious to me.
River: 2c, TJ checks, I bet 1000 and TJ calls. I show my AK and TJ mucks.

Analysis: I think this is a pretty risky value bet on the end, so I bet really small so if TJ check raised I could fold. I know the only way TJ raises me is if he has his most likely hand, AA. I’m betting to get value against his next most likely hand 99, which to be honest is a pretty loose pre flop call when you’re playing against the best no limit tournament player in the world. TJ calls and mucks when he sees my kings full, I guess he needs to learn how to play nines like the master!

Hand 3: It’s down to the final 10 players in WSOP 2007 Event 28, and I’m going for my 12th, count em, 12th bracelet! I’m so fucking important they’ve actually taken the event they were supposed to broadcast, the $2,500 6 handed event, and instead filmed the one featuring yours truly. Sucks to be you Terrence ‘not Johnny’ Chan! The table is a mixture of stupid internet punks and the regular live morons I beat up on the regular, plus a classy looking broad who likes to announce her hand while there’s still action, Beth Shak. I start the hand with about 135k at the 10k/20k level. I hold K6o on the cut off.
Preflop: It folds to me and I raise to 50,000, since I know all these stupid idiots are concerned with making the final table they’re sure to fold to me. It folds to the BB whose some stupid young guy, and he moves all in! ON ME! THE GREATEST NO LIMIT TOURNAMENT PLAYER OF ALL TIME! After thinking it over for a while, I fold.

Analysis: When it folds to me I’m in late position with a face card against a bunch of morons who want nothing more than to get as much face time on ESPN as possible, so of course I raise! However, when the BB shows the enormous strength of going all in at this point in the tournament, over me, Phil Hellmuth Jr. I know he has to be strong. Since I know my hand is behind and ‘pot odds’ are only for those stupid internet geeks, I make what is a very standard fold. What makes this fold even more obvious, is that I of course get aces the very next hand! That’s why you fold people! There’s the rest of the world, and then there’s me! Oh, and make sure when you get AA in that spot with less than 4 big blinds left to go ahead and min raise, those stupid donks will never see it coming!

Hand 4: It’s the LAPC Main Event in 2007. We’re at the final table and I’ve got the chip lead. Phil Ivey is here too, and he’s almost as good as I am, so I need to be careful with him. I hold QcTc on the button, the blinds are 30,000/60,000 with a 10,000 ante.
Preflop: It folds to me on the button and I raise to 250,000, a nice big 4X raise. The SB folds and the BB shoves for 840,000 total. I think it over and fold.
Analysis: I know I’m behind because the BB has reraised, therefore I fold. This is so obvious people!

Hand 5: It’s the WSOP ME in 2005 on Day 1. I hold KdJd at 150/300 and I’ve improved my starting stack to 25,000 on the hijack. The button has about 18,000 in chips, I’ve never seen him before.
Preflop: It folds to me on the hijack and I raise it up to 1,000. The CO folds and the button calls, the blinds both fold.
Analysis: My raise is of course a little loose pre, but since everyone behind me is a bunch of nobody morons, I think it’s profitable for me to go ahead and raise here. I get flat called by the button, who could have any number of hands. I’ll wait to see how he reacts to the flop and read his soul so I can know what he has.
Flop: 3c Td Qd, I bet 2000, and my opponent raises to 5,000. I think it over and fold.

Analysis: A lot of people think just because I’ve flopped a big draw I should be getting a lot of chips in here, but let me tell you the truth; my draw is only going to hit like, um, some of the time! Not enough to be risking my tournament life by going all in or anything crazy like that! This is day 1 of the World Series Main Event we’re talking about here! You don’t go deep in tournaments taking big gambles with just a draw! This is a very easy fold, and I bet big on the flop hoping my opponent would fold first. Unfortunately he raised instead, so you have to give up the hand here.

Alright then, that’s all the knowledge I have to impart on you stoned, mongoloid internet retards for now! Perhaps armed with knowledge like this you might actually have a chance of not losing your whole stack in the first hand you play against the WORLDS GREATEST NO LIMIT TOURNAMENT PLAYER!

link: pokersavvy.com/plus-articles/things-it-took-me-a-while-to-learn

Tak for tippet, det skal helt sikkert læses igennem ved lejlighed :)

Folk skal dog lige være opmærksom på at artiklen er fra 2008 hvor pokeren var anderledes, men der er nok en del som kan få meget ud af det alligevel

Raz +1

Hvor kan man læse forkert. Troede der stod links til lækre MTT-spillere :-)

Altså meget af det er ret basalt, men dengang jeg læste den fik jeg klart mest ud af "the flaw in level 2 thinking"

Det er btw Bond18 (Tony Dunst) der har skrevet den, og jeg synes det er synd og skam han ikke får credit for det, nu du tillader dig at c/p'e hans guldkorn.

Ellers godt initiativ mht. vidensdeling. Jeg skal nok lige kigge i gemmerne for at se, om jeg kan finde noget relevant.

I think the reason a lot of players (myself included) fail to realize how essential being in position ends up being is one, that MTT players are mostly very bad post flop

zonki skrev:
I think the reason a lot of players (myself included) fail to realize how essential being in position ends up being is one, that MTT players are mostly very bad post flop

??

Der har vi svaret på den store diskurtion om hvem der er bedst af cash/mtt spillere ;)

@ madsmk
Du har helt ret i at denne Tony Dunst selvfølgelig skal krediteres for sit store arbejde, jeg var tbh bare ikke lige klar over hvem der havde skrevet det.
Derudover er det nok, som Razga også påpeger, vigtigt at være opmærksom på at det er skrevet i 2008, og altså ikke er heeelt up to date :-)

AceKing4more > Det er selvfølgelig også en ærlig sag :)

zonki > Jeg tror efterhånden ikke, at der er nogle vindende turneringsspillere, der ser sig selv bedre postflop end en gennemsnitligt vindende cashgamespiller på tilsvarende stakes.. :)

Razga skrev:
Folk skal dog lige være opmærksom på at artiklen er fra 2008 hvor pokeren var anderledes, men der er nok en del som kan få meget ud af det alligevel

Det her er ret meget spot on, selvom der formodentligt er en del de fleste kan lære fra disse artikler er det satema vigtigt at huske på hvor gamle og dermed uddateret meget af informationen er...

Eller med andre ord +1 i guess:)

Djoffer, Razga, Skuffy > Hvor mener i den er outdated. Jeg vil gerne medgive, at der skal laves nogle mindre korrektioner i stacksizes i kapitel 1, qua at folk er begyndt at åbne med mindre sizings og 3bette mindre sizings, men hvor ellers?

Nu har jeg kun læst de to første afsnit, så var primært de to ting jeg bed mærke i..

Åh sorry, somehow fik jeg fornemmelsen af, at du havde læst det du kommenterede på i dette indlæg:

Det her er ret meget spot on, selvom der formodentligt er en del de fleste kan lære fra disse artikler er det satema vigtigt at huske på hvor gamle og dermed uddateret meget af informationen er...

Eller med andre ord +1 i guess:)