"The Pen:" Live NLHE Chat Thread

i don't think checking river here narrows their range in the slightest

20$ iso over 3 limpers is obv a massive size tell and needs to be exploited. back raise prints v clowns that do this stuff. that being said i dig sabrs line 2. but im unlikely to jam tbh

ALSO: 57 and bluebird today - bombed home from vegas after SPCs biking adventure last night. Did the corn harvest whic was ossum. Big storm tonight and should be skiing pow in the AM. How sick is that!?

So we can assume the bet/call line OTT will be checking much of their range OOP here?

You shouldn't face any leads on this river.

yeah definitely, they put out a bet and called a raise

we've taken the initiative and signaled that we either have massive value or are just spewing a bluff

villain is going to check/call at a far greater frequency than donking

it's not a good spot for villain for stab and bluff at all because the turn is a blank and changes nothing - i just don't think there's any meta where the field will ever bluff the river oop after betting and getting raised on the turn

villains call on the turn also significantly reduces the likelihood that he had pure air, if it was a bluff, then he definitely had outs to draw to

for sake of theory, we'll ignore our hand & the card removal of having the most likely draw in spades - let's pretend we don't know our hand

villain either
A) semi bluffed turn, whiffed river and is almost never going to donk bluff river
B) is bluff catching vs a flush semi bluff (which are the most common variant of semi bluffs in my experience)
C) has a nutted hand, which due to card removal typically means we don't have a nutted hand as coolers are infrequent for good reason and thus wants to let us take another stab at it and x/r the river to either get a much larger pot at showdown or a bigger pot - leading out with value is bad because if the hero has value it gets called with a smaller overall pot and if the hero has air then donking leads to a bet/fold where otherwise it could induce sabr to do exactly what he did

so there's basically no scenarios where he's donking if he's a thinking player - and we already know that our read upon him is that he's a thinking player because we're trying to get him to fold something he clearly liked enough to bet/call with on turn

if we didn't spades and river was a 3rd spade then that changes things and I feel like his checkback does indicate weakness as a lot of people tend to shut down on ace or flushed rivers and thus the people who spike that ace or flush after floating are far more likely to then donk the river hoping to avoid a checkback and get some value

i personally like sabr's line but i probably would have either opened or folded pre instead of limping along (but i definitely feel like it is worthwhile studying up/strategizing about how to incorporate limps into my game) so would have never entered that situation to begin with

had i limped, I'm definitely squeezing preflop since it's pretty clear nobody has much of anything and even if it goes heads up (which it will quite often) there's going to be enough dead money out there to take that risk

as played I'm betting like 3/4 pot to pot on river, if we check back we're losing 100% of the time here - overbets tend to get called lighter than pot sized bets so i think it has negative fold equity vs a normal big river bet and we also don't lose quite as much when we discover our read was wrong and the mouth breather called with J9

also, if have a read the guy isn't folding top pair here to a pot sized bet (which are a lot of players IMO) then I'm just giving up and checking back

but we all know sabr got it through, he wouldn't be posting this as an example of his greatness otherwise

As someone who overbets a lot, this is not true.

I also bet 1/10 to 1/5 pot quite a lot, that bet is amazing in low SPR situations.

Looking good for colorado. SPC is doing all kinds o plotting and planning. We are going to be in pc till pcmr closes, 1 moar week. Then the co trip. Ill keep u poasted cuz we would love to make some turns with u guys whilest enjoying the great outdoors in all of its majesty

again, we're talking about lower stakes where us peasants play

one of the biggest things i do is jam rivers when i have the nuts because it gets snapped off so often

Yeah but that depends on the board and what they have. Maybe you're talking about situations where their hand was calling any bet size, it doesn't mean they would have folded to pot.

In this specific hand I highly disagree that A8 calls 2x pot more often than pot.

I am not sure whether we can go nuts with our sets on this board 5 way.

agree with George Michael, A8 is the absolute bottom of his range given that we started 5 handed, he's got a lot of two pairs and sets - making a 2x pot shove based on him not being able to call the bottom of his range feels like a possible explanation for why you're in the midst of 6 figure downswing

Perhaps you're right.

But my 6-figure downswing is also part of my 7-figure lifetime "upswing." So I'll let you decide which is more indicative of my skill level.

was meant as a lighthearted joke fwiw, i don't doubt that you're good at poker and would freely say you're a better player than i am - I'm just saying it's really easy to just go into autopilot though and then your edges wear away

for a few years i was one of the top dfs guys in the world, I'm the guy who controls the lobby and you see in every contest, then last year things went terribly, i was breaking even and slowly losing and had zero income from dfs except losing about 5k over the course of the first 8 months of the year

i had luckily been expanding to a more diversified portfolio so thankfully that was a downer and not a game ender

first few months i viewed it as runbad, then i began thinking "ah it's too tough to beat right now" but then i decided i wanted to try to keep this train going - i started expanding outside my niche site where i play and started playing on other sites, i even began exploring new sports and fields, the results weren't amazing still, but in course of trying to figure out how to beat tennis dfs, something i don't know the first thing about, while building my models it dawned upon me that i hadn't updated any of my other models in years and was just on autopilot - i also wasn't doing the kind of prep work i did before, there were a lot of changing dynamics and because i wasn't really studying and instead clicking buttons, i was still treating things like it was 2018

and then i sat down and really analyzed my game

i had failed to adapt, i was not longer putting in the insane autistic dedication to it and basically just phoning it in, running the sims, running the optimizers, inputting the results into lineups and getting less than desirable results

then it finally clicked, i'd been so strong and dominant that i stopped sharpening my knives, the easier edges are now gone, the field has caught up (NHL has gotten so much tougher last few years, the field didn't understand it well at all, they still don't to a large extent, but really simple things like "average player in an easy matchup > good player in a difficult matchup"

so i went back into the lab, i began reviewing all my models, finding ways to update them, testing the results, doing more research, if there was a new guy listed i wouldn't ignore but instead research him etc etc

results came back, I'm now doing very well again and could once again live comfortably just off dfs income, just finished this NBA season ranked 10th in average scoring out of a player pool of over 20k people doing dfs

so I'm saying that from personal experience that it's easy to do so well that you stop improving and just rest on your laurels and a lot of your posts in recent months complaining about runbad are very similar to how i was feeling myself

for real though, he's never folding 2p or worse, probably calling some of the stronger aces, maybe even some of the weaker ones

what % of his holdings are folding here vs calling?

would you agree that this is villains range on the turn?

i crafted this figuring he needs to have something or at least a draw towards something, so all the 9s with decent kickers, all pocket pairs, all two pairs, all combo draws, all random aces

then we think about what his minimum equity for calling is you I would say AQ or better is where he begins to consider calling - would you agree with that?

so we change your hand not to what you actually had, but as something that beats what folds out and loses to the rest, so you now have AJ instead

he calls 30% of the time but this is artificially low because you have one of the aces that can beat you

so we need to compensate for that, maybe by giving you the weakest ace? I'm not really sure how to address that

but now he calls 40% of the time

let's button up his range and take out more of the random badreg spew hands

now he has this

he calls about half the time now

if he's calling with any ace (which some of them are definitely capable of doing) then it gets really grim

I didn't truly take offense, but it's kinda like, if you're gonna take a cheap shot at me running badly at $50/100 and having a 6-figure downswing, you should at least be fair and also consider that I'm still up overall in those games (prior to the $300K downswing I had a $600K upswing).

Not sure why you're running the equity of my hand vs his range? This hand isn't in a vacuum and I also have 10 combos of value that play this way. We jam some bluffs to make him indifferent to defending two pair, and this hand is obviously one of my bluffs.

the running of the equity vs his range was to determine what frequency he calls with

you really think 2p is folding there? maybe you should leave California and play where the mouth breathers live

Where did I say that I think he'll fold two pair?

I said he should be indifferent to defending with two pair. That's not the same thing. Are you arguing just to argue?

Can V really have those big pairs after limp/calling preflop? What am I missing?

I'm not convinced that he's not trolling. His assumptions are way off base.

You named some very horrible places to live sir. Stockton and Mantweeka? You staying up off French Camp road in StockTown? 😃

ATsai gets a bad rap around here, but that dude put me on the right track in my game a few years back. Not saying I’m a crusher, but he certainly changed my mindset for the good. And as much as people think he’s a dxck, he’s one of the people that text me when Jr was born and congratulated me. I like the dude.

All that to say he just text me and told you all to EAD.

Oh ya, well…. i’ve missed the past two weeks because I have the worst sinus congestion in the world. If this doesn’t kick soon my season may be over.

So come to Colorado and play the home games? Honestly it would be awesome to see someone like Sabr or Squid come out and play in my games. I think I’d just pull up a seat and watch.

The GG stuff from the other page.. I feel like nobody has asked GG the right question(s), which is/are: Do you never go card dead? Have you ever folded every hand in a single session? What do you do when you’re card dead? And by card dead I mean not getting premiums/sc’s/sooted face cards/etc (tight range) in and out of position. I have some OMC’s at my game that never seem to lose (rarely win big), but they also don’t seem to play nearly as tight as you portray.

Also…. EAD, everyone.

it sounds like you are the one trying to argue, this could have been a moment to clarify your position instead of just trying to neg me

"indifferent to defending with two pair" to me implies he's indifferent and doesn't care if he folds or calls his 2 pair - thus deeply implying he will have some 2p folds

i ran it under the "indifferent to folding top pair" where he calls with some aces but not all of them

can you now clarify what you meant by "indifferent" if it meant something else

that wasn't really to say that he did have it just that you gotta always account for random spew sometimes ie someone just be blasting off there with a naked 8, just trying to include a very expansive range there and in the later sim removed all those because i agree they are extremely unlikely but there's always a non-zero chance of GG being at the table and limping KK and being scared the preflop raised because he had aces so he flatted or was just trapping etc - as far as random hands to give them to account for the irrational they felt as good candidates and more probable he shows up with KK there than 82 but as unlikely as it is he has 82, it's not non-zero - when you confine to too narrow a range based on rational play you don't get real world results

how else do you account for the texas mike's of the world (i have no idea who that was, just found via image search as i knew it wouldn't take much to find irrational poker hands in the wild by google image searching poker stream

I don’t know, chat thread, I think we have a new situation on our hands. Let’s pool our money together and stake Sabr on LATB or Hustler. Squid will have to run the money since Mpethy isn’t in LV. I fully expect that money to be gone by via hookers and blow by the time Squid reaches CA.

Hey pal dont bring me into this. You are the one with "the worst sinus congestion" ever

You asserted that people call 2x pot more often than they call pot, and gave no evidence for this beyond "I sometimes jam with the nuts and get called." I said that doesn't support your position at all. You don't know that they would have folded to a smaller bet. Almost certainly you got called in spots where they were calling any bet size.

I'm saying based on the hands I'm shoving here with, he should consider folding two pair as he's losing quite a lot.

In reality I expect two pair to call, but that makes my bluff profitable if they fold 1 pair. And all of my value is really printing here if he ever calls 1 pair.