You may have noticed there are currently two similar communities: r/pokertheory (this one) and r/Poker_Theory.
Here is the short version of why that is: Originally, there was only one. Paiev and I helped build and moderate the other subreddit for a long time. However, we eventually hit a wall with the head moderator, ProfRBcom.
ProfRB controls dozens of gambling-related subreddits specifically to drive traffic to his rakeback affiliate site. He uses this network to censor potential competition and employs paid moderators to maintain control.
When he began censoring any mention of GTO Wizard (my employer), I stepped down. In response, he banned me and nuked my entire post history. Years of work gone. The full drama, along with his side of things, is covered here. He's currently banned from r/poker.
But that’s in the past. Here is the good news:
My hands were tied in the old sub; I had very restricted moderator rights. I had ideas for the community that I simply wasn't allowed to execute. Now, I have the freedom to really go all out.
My goal is to build a place dedicated purely to the game. I’ll be reposting my old theory posts and sharing plenty of new insights. I hope you'll stick around to see what we build here!
You're playing against an aggressive reg that has a quite high 3bet percentage stat (e.g. 13% overall). You are on the Button and he is on the Small blind.
First adjustment to make is to Open Raise a bit less.
How do you respond against his 3bet? What deviations are due compared to standard GTO charts? How much would you increase your 4bet percentage? What hands would increase their 4bet % the most? If someone ran a solver simulation that would be great.
n.b. You anticipate that he is also aggressive post flop.
I'm sure there's a good and simple reason, I just don't know what it is.
I've just been reading about the formulas for calculating poker chances, and it stood out to me that "High Card" is rarer than 1 pair or 2 pair in a standard game. So why doesn't it beat the pairs? Is it something to do with the pursuit of trying to get 3 of a kind, or a straight or something?
I'm trying to work out in my head what that would look like in practice, players trying to put together a hand with no pairs in it so their solo jack card beats a pair of 3's and pair of 8's. Or something.
I've been grinding MTTs for about 1.5 months now (ACR) and have built up a 13.8k hand sample size in PokerTracker 4.
Overall, my All-In Adj BB/100 is positive across the board (except for the blinds), but I want to make sure I'm not building bad habits or missing major positional leaks early on.
I've attached my full positional stats breakdown screenshot below. A few things I'd specifically love feedback on:
My VPIP/PFR gap seems a little wide in some positions (like the BB and SB). Is this normal, or am I flatting too much pre-flop?
Are my loss rates in the BB (-261.53 All-In Adj BB) and SB (-261.75 All-In Adj BB) standard for these stakes, or am I bleeding too many chips out of the blinds?
Looking at my post-flop stats (WSD, WTSD%, CBet F/T), do you spot any glaring red flags or areas where I am playing too passively/aggressively?
Upswing is advertising a set of custom pre-flop ranges, tailored to the 8-max, straddle + ante structure of Club WPT Gold. I play microstakes on that site. Winning after 50k hands, but wanna get better.
I can't find free pre-flop ranges for this structure of game. At the stakes I play, I can't afford a yearly Upswing membership. I'm thinking about paying for 1 month of access to their Lab, studying (and copying) those new preflop ranges, and canceling my membership before month 2.
Worth it? Anybody have difficulty canceling their membership?
Not a big sample size but recently got into poker again and found a huge discrepancy between my winrate at 5nl and 10nl rush on gg. On 5nl, my winrate is around 20bb/100 (1600 hands) and on 10nl it is around -0.4bb/100 (1400 hands). Is this expected? Did I move up in stakes too quickly? How much of this good or bad is variance? Can I measure my skill level based on this sample size?
Microstakes online, straddle + ante. 350bb effective with BB. BTN and SB had 250bb.
I open in HJ to 6bb, with QQ
BTN 3bets to 24bb
SB cold calls
BB 4bets to 72bb
Shortstack in the straddle folds.
I fold.
BTN wasn't 3betting often. SB calls anything pre-flop so wasn't worried about them. Hadn't seen any 4bets from BB, and felt like they wouldn't bet that big into 4 other people as a bluff.
I plugged the hand into a range calculator and even if the BB only does this with KK, AK, AA, I still have ~30% equity so I was getting almost exact pot odds to call.
Hey everyone!
Just pushed a big update to Range Craft, this one's been highly requested, so I'm really excited to share it.
Custom actions
Players can now create fully custom actions in the app. This was one of the most anticipated features, and it opens up a whole new level of personalization. You can now build strategies that truly reflect your playstyle or the specific game format you're targeting. Custom ranges are coming soon !
Builder navigation & brush update
The range navigation in the Builder has been revamped for a smoother workflow. The brush system also got a significant upgrade:
A dedicated Fold action has been added
Mixed action brushing is now more precise
A new custom brush mode lets you paint using only the actions already assigned to a given hand
More updates coming soon! The app is completely free, no paywall.
A typical scenario in a soft field is when an EP player limps, then you would raise (typically, I use 3bb + 1bb per limper) other limper folds except EP?
What ranges do you use? Do you cap their calling ranges?
I posted on the other sub. I was not aware of what happened in the last few months. I did not get any poker specific feedback there, so hopefully i can get something here.
I am really enjoying playing and studying poker. I treat the game as an academic subject. My background is in Mathematics, and my day job is analyzing data. I will appreciate any insight on my analysis.
Note that i built my own solver (using the engine powering WASM postflop) and i also built an MCP server around it. This is so I can ask help from AI and it will minimize hallucination (i.e. it would only provide feedback based on actual solver data)
Context: CO(Villain) vs BTN(Hero) 3BP. Flop comes 6h8h7c 17.5bb, 89.5bb effective. V checks, H checks back. Turn is 7d. V bets 6bb H calls. River is Th. V bets 15bb H calls.
Analysis:
V range: TT-77,AQs-ATs,KTs+,T9s,98s H range: TT+,A5s-A4s,A9s+,ATo+,K9s+,KJo+,QTs+,QJo,JTs
Flop:
At equilibrium, V is essentially range betting the flop. Mainly because
The range has no air. Not a single combo sits below 20% equity.
V has a nut monopoly. It holds all the sets (88, 77) and the nut straight (T9), none of which exist in IP's range.
IP is forced to overfold. Facing the small bet, IP folds 56.9%.
V's strategy vs how H's responds if he bet his rangeV equity distribution
As played, V checked the flop. H checked back as played, which is aligned with the equilibrium strategy. The check back is pretty much the same reason as why V's equilibrium strategy is betting. Also, if H stabs bets into the check, V's equilibrium response is Raise 61%. H only has overpairs in his range, and those hands does NOT want to play a big pot.
H's equilibrium strategy after V check the flop. The right shows V response if H bets after V flop check.
Turn:
The 7d pairs the board, and at equilibrium V is betting it ~97% of the time, split between a 33% and a pot-sized bet. Mainly because
The check-check flop did not cap V. V was betting ~100% on the flop, so the check line still carries the whole range - all the boats (88), quads (77), the T9 straight and the 99/TT two pairs are still there.
The pairing card only extends V's nut monopoly. H cannot hold 77 in a 3-bet range, so V owns 100% of the trips/boats/quads. The 7d helps V and does nothing for H.
H is still capped at overpairs. (I mean idk what the proper lingo is but you get what i mean)
As played, V bets 6bb (the 33% size) and H calls. Facing the lead H folds 58%, calls 18%, and raises 24%. The raises are H's value hands i.e. the overpairs all raise heavily. The pure calls are H's nutted draws (AhKh, AhQh, AhJh). H folds out the K-high/Q-high junk.
River:
The Th makes ~57% of V's range now a straight or better, while ~34% is a busted pair of sevens that beats nothing. V bets this ~70% of the time, weighted to the smaller 33%/50% sizes. On the other hand, this helps H's range too. H now has full house, straight and flushes
As played, V bets 15bb (the 50% size). H responds Call 49%, Fold 42%, Jam 8%, Raise 2%. The jams are H's TT boats (~93%) and rivered nut flushes. H calls with the bluff-catchers that beat V's busted sevens (Ax, A9) and folds the KQ/KJ that cannot beat even a bluff.
The analysis is done by me and the LLM using the MCP server.
Key Take aways:
Board texture decides range advantage, not who 3-bet.
No air + a monopoly on the nuts = bet your whole range small. Nothing wants to check and the opponent is forced to overfold.
A capped range can only call. Watch for the card that uncaps it.
You double up the very first hand of an MTT. How much $EV did you gain?
Naturally, you'd ask me about the payout structure and field size. How many places are paid? How much do they get paid?
But there's a more interesting generalization:
ICM Doubling Conjecture:
Let 'P' be the portion of field that gets paid. When you double up the very first hand, your ICM stack value multiplies by a factor 'M' between:
2 - P ≤ M ≤ 2
You approach the lower bound (2-p) in large fields with flat payout structures. For example, in a satellite paying 20% of the field, M approaches 1.8x as the field gets very large.
You approach the upper bound when the payouts become more top heavy and chip EV. For example, in a winner-take-all, M = 2
Assumptions:
1) Calculate ICM as if we have 2x the starting stack, everyone else has 1x the starting stack, and one player has been eliminated.
2) This is a standard MTT, no bounties or landmarks or other shenanigans.
3) Prizes are monotonic (non-decreasing as you approach 1st)
Standard Tournaments
In most MTTs with a normal 15% payout structure, the bubble factor on hand 1 is about ~1.07. That means losing hurts 1.07x more than winning. So doubling up is worth (1 + 1/1.07) = 1.93x your starting stack. The general formula if the bubble factor (BF) is known: M = 1 + 1 / BF
Note that 1.93x is smack dap in the middle of our upper (2x) and lower (1.85x) bounds.
1000-runner MTT, First Hand, BF = 1.07
So first hand of an MTT is not exactly chip EV. There's still a non-negligible amount of ICM pressure at play.
I don't quite get the underlying concept behind folding the full house being GTO as BB against SB here? All BB needs is a 21% chance of catching a bluff, and surely SB can have some straight draws turning into bluffs? And, this is like assuming the full house as only a bluff catcher. Is this one of those ghost line in solver going wrong? Coz BB donk after SB c-bet flop...
Not experienced in HU deep stack, so throw your thoughts and enlighten me
I made a video about SB leads 3-way. In the introduction, I wanted to talk a bit about the function of leads in general, but I realized I wasn't quite sure about the explanation, so this inspired me to run an experiment (which I ended up putting into the video).
The experiment:
If the OOP player has a range *dis*advantage on some board, but IP is nodelocked to always check back, would we ever play any leads?
If the answer is “yes” then we must add some nuance to the common take that "leads are about who has the range advantage."
Spoilers: The answer is "yes" to playing some leads. You might think that's obvious, but there's some added nuance: It only happens on specific boards, not on every board where we are at a range disadvantage. The key concepts are how dynamic are the boards and desired betting volume and betting urgency of our nutted hands.
3:51 to 14:09 in the video covers the poker experiment I just described. The rest of the video is about a particular application of leading (SB leads 3-way when the Big Blind overcalls -- mostly worth watching if you're interested in MTTs, where this spot comes up a lot).
Let's advance the GTO vs Exploitative debate today.
Exploitative poker: Assume you know your opponent’s strategy. How do you win the most money against it? How do we maximize the ceiling?
GTO poker: Assume your opponent knows your strategy and max exploits it. How do you lose the least? How do we maximize the floor?
These are complementary frameworks. How are you gonna exploit without a baseline from which to recognize imbalances? How can you understand GTO without studying at the exploitative threats that shape it?
You need one to understand the other.
The Deeper Problem
The deeper problem is this: Both frameworks rely on this abstract object we call a "strategy".
In game theory, a strategy is a complete map of how one would play every possible hand in every possible spot.
And that's critical. To find the best move with your hole cards on the flop, you need to know how your opponent plays every hand in their range on every future node. And to find the least exploitable strategy, you need to know your entire strategy. What you do with one hand in a vacuum doesn't matter in terms of the exploitability of your strategy.
The issue is, this "strategy" does not exist in reality.
I promise, you cannot write down your full strategy. It is an unfathomable amount of information. It changes with the runout, formation, betting line, stack depth, and so on. Even if you could, it's a fuzzy ever-changing thing that swings with your mood and blood sugar.
So any framework that needs a well-defined strategy to operate, is operating on fiction.
This is why I believe the best (and only real) framework is Bayesian. You need a hybrid approach that can make fuzzy reads, perhaps using Nash as a prior and leaning towards best response after updating with population/player data.
Every top pro is already doing this intuitively. But you'd be surprised just how little quantitative work has actually been done to map this out. Even basic questions like "what makes a strategy exploitable, and for how much?" are barely explored.
And once you get into this area, things get weird. Ceiling/floor are no longer the only objectives. There are valid strategic ideas like exploratory moves that seeks to uncover where their response adjusts poorly.
