Donk flop, donk turn ^^
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On NL200 I have no idea what I would do, probably shit my pants & fold.
But down on my limit if I'm checking flop I probably check turn as well for pot control & bluffcatch. Mostly because NL25 regs don't often check back Ax here & would stab turn very wide then shut down OTR.
If turn goes check/check I'm not sure about river, with his low WTS he probably doesn't call too much so maybe checking again & hoping he bluffs is ok?
Can't imagine the turn being checked through though if he is fairly aggro.
My line probaably makes no sense at nl200 & my hand is kinda face up, but at my limit I think it works ok 
I don't play this limits (yet!), but I'd put him on a busted hearts draw. Ax hands are probably out of the river line. I'd expect him to have something like a 4h5h (or higher suited hearts JT+) which he bluff-jams on this drawy board to push you off a QQ+ and AK. Hi might also have some draws completed with low suited one gappers or so but I doubt.
One info that would be useful to have is how is your perceived range when you check the flop?
Do you have some Ax in your flop checking range?
Originally posted by Dublimax
One info that would be useful to have is how is your perceived range when you check the flop?
Do you have some Ax in your flop checking range?
Yeah, a lot. I have almost any suited A9s-A2s there.
Donking the river is pretty high risk imo because if he's aggro like you say he is, he could jam into you and it's a pretty tough spot because when he raises the turn he can easily have a diamond draw, and you can't rep the flush yourself if you donk the river since it's very unlikely that you're getting called by worse.
I can't really say what I think he has because I don't have any experience of anywhere near this limit 
I never expect him to Xb there weak and then decided to bluff you on the Turn. I mean your range is capped at best you have some weak Ax. So either he has there like strong Ax or he just give up but then I don't think that he will run some super aggro bluff on the Turn and River. For me it just doesn't make any sense if he want to bluff you he would start from the flop.
I know it is different cause it is nl200, limit I have never beaten but most of the time when I see reg doing something tricky it is for value at least at lower stakes.
At best with your hand yuo have one street of value so I would still x the T can't see him calling twice worse unless you are both on some huge level.
Donking the river is pretty high risk imo because if he's aggro like you say he is, he could jam into you and it's a pretty tough spot because when he raises the turn he can easily have a diamond draw, and you can't rep the flush yourself if you donk the river since it's very unlikely that you're getting called by worse.
By donking I meant going allin. And I don't expect to get called by worse, I wanna him to fold some Ax doing that.
@hendo
My range isn't that capped. I can have many nut flush combos and something like AA sometimes. I don't expect him to check back flop with total air either, but he's definitely not super strong, only if 8 on the turn helped him somehow. I don't like checking KK twice because we lose some value from his weaker midpairs, I think betting small twice is the best option against those. If we want to go for 1 street I prefer betting turn and checking river, checking twice isn't that good IMO because he can see all the cards with some sort of combo draws and some other random stuff which can easily outdraw us on the river. Also we can bet turn and c/c river when all draws misses and pick up some bluffs, so I definitely think betting turn is better than checking.
For me it just doesn't make any sense if he want to bluff you he would start from the flop.
This is good point, but we actually don't know that till the river. Maybe he's planning to raise the turn and check back the river with TT for cheaper showdown. Then he decided that we have something like we have and turned it into a bluff. Also he could have some note on me that I c/r similar board in 3bet pot, I'm doing it time to time.
I see where you're coming from and it makes sense. As I say I don't really have much experience of stakes this high, it's pretty rare to catch players bluffing busted draws at NL5
I guess looking at it again and having read your post, although he can have the flush and set of 8s, he'll probably have missed draws/low pairs more often as you say, and Ax is a ridiculously thin hand to shove the river with.
Out of curiosity, what did he show down with?
First of all - I forgot to tell u what my opponent had in that hand. He had Th9h.
Lesson 9 - Preflop play part 1
This time I'm going to make 2 part lesson because there's a lot of stuff to cover and I don't have all the ranges written down I want to show you. I think this could be one of the first theoretical topics ever written about poker, so it's old. Also theory about this hasn't changed that much. In this part I'll cover all the good old theoretical stuff, but in next one I will explain some things I don't like here and how to make some adjustments based on current meta-game and we will see some examples.
A couple of years ago people said that calling 3bets OOP is bad, calling 4bets for 100bb is bad, made 30bb 4bets etc. Now all that has changed and most people play much closer to GTO (at least we think so, as far as I know this game isn't solved yet, so nobody actually knows GTO ranges, we only think that we play close to that :)) It's so hard to solve this because we actually have to go backwards. We have to start solving from river all the way through the hand to come up with a preflop range. Of course we know that opening AA from CO is +EV but how about something like 64s ? Most people will answer it depends on players after you and your postflop skills etc. But the question is what if everyone plays GTO, can we open that hand ? I think we definitely can't open that, but also I think that GTO style is super tight and not very profitable in current meta-game, but it's always good to know what to do in theory to make a right adjustment. Also using GTO ranges against unknown players isn't that bad.
So lets get started with developing some ranges. I will go through all the thought process with first one from analytic point of view. Easiest way to solve something is when we go allin at some point preflop. Then we know all our variables and we can easily do all the math. After that we can leave the rest for later and figure out that.
We have some range X and we raise to 3bbs from UTG. Basically we invest 3bb to win 1.5bb. This means it should work 66% of the time (3/(1.5+3)=0.66. We should expect other players to do something else than folding at least 33% of the time, otherwise we can raise any hand and make some money.
Now CO 3bets to 10bb range Y. He invested 10bb to win 4.5bb, so it should work 69% of the time. Now if we want to 4bet him, we maybe don't know how much to defend. The correct answer is 31%. We already don't care how often our raise preflop should work, only thing we care now is preventing the CO from getting any profit by his 3bet. Since it has to work 69% of the time, we allow that to happen and make it break even. So our 4bet range is 0.31X. We 4bet to 20bb total. This time we added only 17 extra because we had 3 already invested, so we risked 17 to win 14.5. It should work 54% of the time. Now the CO won't let us get any profit, so he 5bets AI 46% of his range or 0.46Y. He had 10bb already invested, so he risked 90 more to win a pot of 31.5bb. U maybe wanna say it should work (90+31.5)/90=74% of the time, but this time it doesn't work that way. He went allin and we can't re-raise him again. We have to call or fold, but when we call, he has some equity and he will win sometimes. How to solve his needed equity for doing that ? Basically he has to compensate lack of his needed 74% by equity, so we could write an equation for it.
31.5*f - ( 100 - 201.5*e ) * (1-f) = 0; e = 0.496 - ((31.5*f)/(1-f))/201.5
where e - needed equity, f - frequency we fold. We don't have any exact numbers yet because we don't know any calling ranges and frequencies. Lets jump back to us now in UTG.
We might think we have to defend only 26% of our range since our opponent needed this to work 74% of the time, but again that's how it works only when we have 100% equity. Obviously we don't have that. But if we know his shoving range, we can just calculate the odds and see which hands is OK to call against that. We have to call 80bb to win 121.5 in the pot, we need 40% equity. But this actually doesn't tell us much about any frequencies from any side, right ? We still don't know how often we will need at least 40% equity hand because it's not our overall equity and we can't know exactly that. So we should start some guessing here or take a deep look into the cards and try to calculate exact equities. I think 50/50 should be OK with these sizings, if we wanna go bigger, we could do something like 60/40. Now we know that we call 50% of the time after 4betting, we can solve needed equity for our opponent in CO to shove. We get 34% using our equation. Something around 34% should be the right number to give him some reason for bluffing because usually only some bluffs have that much equity when going allin, so I think 50/50 is OK here. That means we 4bet/call 0.155X range. Our opponent in CO should 5bet 0.46Y range where worst hands have at least 34% equity.
Now lets take a look how these ranges look like and can we get them in practice. This looks like a reasonable UTG opening range for me AA-22,AKo-ATo,KQo,AKs-A9s,KQs-KTs,QJs-QTs,JTs,T9s. It's 186 total combos. We solved that we have to end up 4bet/calling 0.155X range, so if this range is X, we should call 0.155*186~29combos. Strongest hands I can think of is KK+,AK that's 28 combos. We're almost there, we can add 1 QQ combo, but I will go with these 28. CO could be 3betting range like AA-KK,AKs,A9s-A8s,A5s-A2s which is 40 combos. He has to 5bet 0.46*40= 18 combos. AKs+ is 16 combos and these hands definitely have needed 34% equity. We need 2 more, best hand from these is A5s. But A5s has only 27% equity. So basically CO can't 5bet enough. He has to remake his entire 3betting range to get some bluff with needed equity like 22 (it has even 43% equity) or UTG can bluff much more till the point where CO needs only 27% equity to shove or UTG can make bigger 4bets which will lead to the same result. But lets assume CO shoves A5s and even not only needed 2 combos, but all 4 combos. Now we can check can we 4bet/call AKo (worst hand in our range). AKo against AKs+,A5s actually has 37% equity, but we needed 40. So both (UTG and CO) strategies aren't good. Technically they both could be b/e doing that and they're happy about it. Easiest fix to this could be making bigger 4bets - CO will need less equity to 5bet jam and we will need less to call, so that way this could be pretty balanced and I'm pretty sure it was, I used similar ranges for long time, but now 20bbs 4bet OOP is almost the standard and these ranges aren't that good. This is one of the things I don't like about this, but most people will play this way @midstakes with some variations of 4betting maybe QQ and 5bet jamming AK. We already saw some flaws in this strategy, in part 2 I will show u some more and how to exploit that. This happens because it's very hard to solve for the best range while we don't know opponents range. Then he can solve for the best range against ours, and we have to readjust. This will happen while both players will find some balance point and be happy about their strategies. In this example it was balanced years ago where players made 25bb 4bets or something like that.
Now we have to go to the hardest part. How to solve for calling ranges ? We don't care about calling opens, but more about calling 3bets and 4bets. We already made some guesses to determine best 4betting frequencies, but that was only for going all in and I'm pretty sure everyone who play poker could make that guess and be almost right. For calling it's much harder because we have to take a freeroll effect into consideration. By that I mean situation where our opponent has a bluff and he raises us. We call with much better hand, but he will outflop us sometimes. Also he could bluff us off the best hand. So we have to estimate how much money he can make postflop with a hand he was going to fold if we raised.
The easiest and I think oldest method is to use some multiplier. Like we calculate same way we did before, that we have to defend 31% of the range. But this time we want to 4bet only 20%. We could call just 11%, but then we can't lose any pot where our opponent holds a bluff. Usually that not gonna happen, so people started to multiply that 11 by some number pulled out of ass, like 1.5 and defended 16% or whatever. I think this method is better than defending just 11%, but still we have no idea what multiplier to use and we won't use same 1.5 when we have to defend 20% by calling most likely. You might argue that actually maybe that player will lose more with a bluff and we have a value hand and that will compensate. It is possible, but in reality that doesn't happen. Usually players still can make some money when they're called even with the worst hand in their range. Also this is important why to choose best bluffing hands instead of some random trash.
Then there's an other method where you use average bb loss for player with a bluff. Lets say some player who 3bet bluffs has worst bluff in his range. We know that he will lose 7bbs on average with that (instead of 10 which is his 3bet sizing) when we call. Then maybe he will lose 4.2bb with best bluff. So we can get average out of all his combos. Of course we won't have database big enough to that, but we could try to use average for all players to get some numbers. Or even we could base that on our hands or something else, I think this method is much better than previous one. For solving this we can make an equation, but it's more complicated than previous ones. I don't wanna talk about it right now, I will do it only if many people really will want to see it, so let me know if you want that. I think this is invented by Matthew Janda, so you can probably find some article or video about that from him which will explain it perfectly.
Last thing I will do - I will show you some practical example how to develop standard opening, 3bet calling and 4betting range for utg. Then I will go through some other positions in part 2. I already used same range for OOP play in example explaining theory. I missed any 3bet calling range, you can simply add something like QQ-JJ,AQs and it should be OK.
So our utg opening range is same as before AA-22,AKo-ATo,KQo,AKs-A9s,KQs-KTs,QJs-QTs,JTs,T9s. This time we got 3bet from blinds. First of all we count the combos, it's 186. Then we want to defend ~33% of our range if we were to 4bet, so we take 62 combos. First of all we decide which hands we wanna get in (4bet/call). I'd do this only with AA from these positions. U can call me a nit, but I need a good reason to 4 bet KK here (At least I should know he 3bets AK or QQ from these positions). So we 4bet 6 combos of AA and I will balance it out with 4 combos of ATs. Why only 4, not 6 like last time ? This is one of the times where I feel like players just don't bluff from blinds against UTG. So they will just call with a lot of hands and never fold, so I don't want too many bluffs in my range, but it's perfectly fine to go for more bluffs since our value range is super strong. But I definitely don't wanna allow my opponents to start shoving any bluffs. So we defended 10 combos by 4betting, now we should defend 52 more, but that's only if we 4bet. As we call, we have to defend more. I used second method and came up with 70 combos. They are KK-99,AKo,AKs-AJs,KQs-KJs,QJs,JTs. Looks like calling JTs and some other hands here is super lite, but I think it's OK since we have very strong other hands. We flop very good on any board texture and our opponent can't bluff us that easy.
First of all - I forgot to tell u what my opponent had in that hand. He had Th9h.
Do you think villains play is ok here? Or do you think he doesn't rep all that much?
Mostly draws, maybe AdXd?
How would you play in villains shoes?
Seems like he won't often have sets or two pair.
Thank you a bunch for this article! Can't wait for the second part!
How is the grind going on, hope the trend is turning up 
GL!
Originally posted by dannywratten
First of all - I forgot to tell u what my opponent had in that hand. He had Th9h.
Do you think villains play is ok here? Or do you think he doesn't rep all that much?
Mostly draws, maybe AdXd?How would you play in villains shoes?
Seems like he won't often have sets or two pair.
I actually think when he check-raises the turn it's a clever play, because if a heart hits the river he'll usually get paid, and if a diamond hits he can rep the flush since he may c/r the draw. In addition, he may not put you on Ax or better because you check back the flop, so if he believes you to be weak the c/r makes even more sense because he should have decent fold equity here.
Hi !
Last month ended very badly. Lost a lot of $$ in nl400 and 200 as well. Fortunately managed to finish 2nd in some donkament yesterday for 6k, but that doesn't cover my last month loses on stars. I decided to play less tables and play some hands on french stars, probably will play most of my hands there this month. Also I said long time ago that I will post nl200 graph from french stars when I get 10k hands, finally I got them:)
Graph ofc looks awesome, but samplesize is very small. I hope for a run like this all year long ♠_cool: This definitely looks better than my adventures @nl25 on that site. Maybe I will post some more graphs when I get more hands.
Don't worry, haven't forgotten about u 
Just had a lot of stuff to do last 1.5 months, didn't have much time even for playing, barely 100k hands during that. Now I will have a little bit more time, so it's time to do something awesome. I should make part 2 for preflop play, I think I will do that this week.
Also running pretty hot on french stars, when I get 100k hands, I will show u my graph. Only 12k hands to go or something like that, so it should be in a couple of days.
Finally I reached 100k hands. Graph still looks nice, but some part of my wr comes from HU. I'm starting tables etc. Not doing that well @nl400 tho. I will keep playing on french stars for some time, can't see reason why not Hope for run like this for much longer. Also should've started my challenge with nl200, nl25 is too tough.
Maybe will post nl400 graph after some time, now only 6k hands there. Usually 1-4 tables running, hard to get any more.