How to beat squid game in poker?
I'm fish about Squid Game in poker. but so many private games like this. So I want to make the change.
Based in Manila, Philippine.
5 Replies
All the Squid Game / Stand up Game / Nit Button variants incentivize equity denial and looser play (which of course means proportionately looser counterplay).
How large this incentive is depends on the size of the bounty and the number of players.
I believe the math would be to treat the bounty as a sort of phantom, probabilistic ante with two main weights put on it:
1) The mean number of hands it takes for the lose condition to be activated, so that you can divide this by the size of the "ante" to weight the impact on decisions on a per-hand basis and
2) A probabilistic weight that accounts for the redundancy of winning multiple hands.
ETA: This generally has to be slightly adjusted (usually to x*(n+1) instead of just x*1 to account for both the reward and penalty), but it’s usually a small adjustment and there are too many variants of the game to get too deep in the weeds.
To give a sense of scale, this would make a 1bb/per player ante actually less valuable than a simple, good-old-fashioned BB ante in a neutral leverage scenario (which, to be fair, is enough to change theoretical first-in and defense ranges fairly significantly).
These incentives have increasingly higher leverage when you are one of the last few players standing (think like the last minutes of a close sports match).
The
As far as how this affects first-in strategy, these increased incentives tend to increase looseness pretty evenly distributed among each player, so that everyone from the button to UTG might play (for example) 50% wider. This is because the math that goes into determining theoretical ranges end up being surprisingly arithmetic.
Greater equity denial also means raising larger sizes. Again, this makes sense when you look at the underlying arithmetic because you otherwise run into scenarios where the button's opening range should be larger than 100%, and the math starts to break.
How it affects counterplay is that it makes cold calling from all seats much more prevalent, especially if players aren't properly adjusting raise sizes.
Beyond that, I imagine players would play slightly more aggressive on each node in order to deny equity to others as winning pots has its own value apart from the direct reward of winning the actual money in the pot. I'm actually not certain of this though, and I may be double counting the incentive here.
I'm not an expert, just learning/playing the squid game recently.
I'm playing at an Asian poker app club, 9 handed game, 3bb each squid, 11 squid per round. Lose 33bb each time you don't have a squid at the end of round.
The game I play at the average opening raise is around 8-12bb but it gets multiway every single hand.
So I bump it up to 20ish bb usually gets 1-2 callers max. The problem with this strategy is that it sucks when there are shorter stacks(100bb) they'll shove light, only work when most ppl have 200bb+. Also if they catch on you're opening too much, you'll get 3bet alot as well. So tighten up and pick your spots.
I treat 200-300bb as normal 100bb(I normally buyin 200-300bb as well). 500bb+ is where it sort of gets deepstacks.
Also most people play passively/face up vs 3bets in the game I play at.
Also some players open much larger sizing with a stronger hand, hence, we 3bet them to death when they open smaller. Of course if we already got a squid, we can tighten up.
Position means alot, so try to make plays when you have decent hands or when you have position.
Postflop and such is similar to normal games imho but just more aggression.
Others will be fighting for pots as well.
Sometimes a check/raise with semi bluffs work a lot better than normal because they have a weaker betting range than normal.
Yet on super wet board you'll find opponents going crazy with draws although it's not always the case but it happens often enough.
Also there's special dynamic going on especially the last hand of squid for those who haven't gotten a squid yet. Usually they're going to fight harder for the squid that very last hand. Of course, if they were smarter they should've fought harder a couple hands earlier instead of waiting for the last one since it becomes very obvious.
All of these are just from my own observations of the game I played at.
Paging Poker Giraffe:
Great thread. One thing that's hard to reason about intuitively but becomes clear when you actually solve the game using a solver for Squid Poker.
For anyone wanting to study this more seriously — I built an app called Squid Poker Lab (
) that lets you browse preflop GTO solutions for squid formats (6-way and 8-way, multiple stack depths, different squid formats, various high-impact squid distribution to study). There's a free scenario so you can see the app before buying. Happy to answer any questions about what the solver shows for specific spots.
I recently made a blog post about Squid EV and most importantly how relative Squid EV drives the strategic aspects of the game: https://blog.squidpokerlab.com/thinking-...
Also you can browse through these free scenarios from the library of pre-solved sims: https://app.squidpokerlab.com/ for different variations of Squid Poker to get a feel about how a GTO solution would look like for this asymmetrically incentivised game format.
