Hu Sng Bible

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Beginners Guide to HU SnG... 3

HU SNG Bible ... 7

A Guide to the 25-50 Blind Level Part 1: Basic Play ... 8

Proper HU SNG PF ranges ...13

Playing with 20BBs or less ...15

The Anatomy of a Continuation Bet ...17

Dealing with limpers; dealing with constant min-bettors ...20

Check Raise Bluffing Flops ...25

When Overbetting is Nash Equilibrium ...28

Rake, tournament equity and hourly rate ...32

Critical Points of Villain's 3-Betting Behavior...39

Finishing an opponent heads-up: sage, nash and chubukov. ...43

Three bet shoving with 25BB effective ...49

Poker Success ...53

BR Management and You ...64

Success, Failure, and the Downswing Mindset ...67

You suck at poker ...72

mjw006 spews random thoughts... ...77

spamz' first hand history review ...81

spamz' second hand history review ... 127

spamz' third hand history review ... 185

spamz' fourth hand history review ... 237

spamz' sixth hand history review ... 326

spamz' seventh hand history review ... 391

spamz' eighth hand history review ... 429

spamz' ninth hand history review ... 463

spamz' tenth hand history review ... 498

spamz' eleventh hand history review ... 524

A Bad Habit of 3-betting and Range Choice ... 558

A Discussion on Bet Sizing ... 561

Suited Connectors, Implied Odds, and You ... 567

22 Flawed Reasonings in HUSNG Poker ... 578

22 Flawed Reasonings In HUSNG Poker (Part 2) ... 582

Indy's interview with Stevesbets ... 586

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GUIDE TO HU

SN

G

So why should you play HU sngs?

Basically there is no other form of poker where you can make so much money per hour with a relatively small bankroll. If you are a 10% ROI or higher player you could easily take $500 and play the 22s on FT for a little under $20 an hour 1 tabling with almost no risk of ruin. If you were to compare that to other forms of poker you would need a $1k+ bankroll 4 tabling 50nl or about $1500 playing the 16 9-man turbos 8 tabling to make a similar hourly rate (dont get on my ass about numbers Im just giving you an idea). Clearly this is a great way to build a bankroll if your starting low.

Where should you play?

The two main choices are Full Tilt and Pokerstars, Ive never played at UB so I cant comment on that but I know they have a rematch button. If hourly rate is your goal in playing HU sngs Full Tilt is cleary the best choice, it has a super fast structure relative to PS and the players are worse IMO. Over my career I

averaged 7.5 matches per hour at the FT 33s and below and 7 at the 110s (PS turbos average about 5 per hour) and higher now imagine that with a 10% ROI your making 75% of a buyin per hour which is sick good and thats not even the ceiling if you are really good. One thing you should note, you should never try and play on a site that offers HU sngs with a 10% rake, there is practically no way the amount of fishy players on the small site can compensate for the extra 5% in rake.

How should you keep track of your matches?

Ive only used PT, HEM but it works very well and it will give you everything you need and I imagine a lot of you already have it. It will tell you your hourly, matches per hour, ROI, win %, help you review hands, bring up stats from old matches etc I love it

Should you multitable?

99% of the time I played one table and I was able to make over $100 an hour doing so I never worried about multitabling. Not to mention I never got comfortable playing more than one so I never did but I know for a fact there are people successfully grinding 2, 3, 4 and more HU sngs at a time, but you should note that multitabling different villains in HU sngs is a very different skill from multitabling other forms of poker, I have 16-tabled 9-man SNGs but I couldnt handle more than one table of HU sng profitably. Its really a factor of how quickly you can think and make accurate reads rather than your clicking speed not to mention your ROI will be lower and variance will be higher which are two of the really big factors that appeal to people who play HU sngs.

What about the variance?

The thing about variance in HU sngs is that the actual swings can be fairly large relative to swings in buyins you would

experience in like a 6max NL cash game but the high hourly rate tends to soften this quite a bit. I personally have lost 10 straight matches at the 33s where I averaged 17.5% ROI over 400 matches lifetime and I was really happy with all my play and never tilted in any of the 10 matches. My biggest downswing top to bottom was 17 buyins. Now I know that sounds quite harsh but think about it this way, if you work hard you could easily put in 40 matches a day so my biggest downswing would have lasted about half a day, not so bad dont you think?

What skills does HU take?

One thing that is difficult about HU is that it takes a very different skillset from your normal shorthanded or full ring poker. So as a fun exercise Ill rank the skills I think are most important.

1. Hand reading-This encompasses a lot things including being able to put together a strong accurate read of villain and

understand how he is thinking through hands. If you cant read your opponent as well as he reads you, you are the fish even if you have a good general strategy and he has lots of leaks. When you are playing HU you can compensate for a lot of shortcomings if your a great hand reader, too bad this is probably one the hardest most ambigious skills to develop. I started to really develop in this area when I began to read my

entire HHs front to back 2-3 times a day, lots of work but its rewarding.

2. Tilt Control-Tilt is going to hurt you fast HU because you never have time to take a back seat and stop making decisions. This is the undoing of a lot of players who never tilt when they play normal cash games or SNGs, HU is going to test your mental toughness for sure.

3. Adjusting-The faster you adjust your game to meet how your villain is playing this hand in the moment the bigger your edge is going to be, this was always very hard for me I always love to open a wide range from the button even when its not always correct.

4. Playing a 14-25bb effective stack-This is what I like to call the red zone of HU sng's you can get a HUGE edge here

because almost everyone I know plays like crap with these stack sizes, including 2p2ers. If you play turbos this is where you are going to be playing a majority of the time. Strategy here is not clear cut and it is going to test pretty much all your poker skills to the maximum, these stacks sizes are also a major reason I think its super hard to multitable HU sngs.

What else should you know?

-SAGE which is a game theory perfect system for 8bb or less. Note game theory perfect means its unexploitable but does not mean it is the most profitable strategy against a villain with an incorrect strategy.

-Tilt control, I told you this was an important skill but I am going to share my thoughts on this. Tilt is always going to be with you when you play poker its going to be a constant battle no matter how good you are at controlling yourself. You need to learn what your personal triggers are because its going to be different for everyone, for me personally losing a lot of money just doesnt get me angry but there are things that send me off the wall into super tilt monkey mode. One thing I learned personally is that burnout is a very dangerous tilt inducer, I dropped out with a 3k bankroll and forced myself to work very very hard at first but I wasnt getting the results I wanted and the money swings hurt

more. When you have a balanced life if you run bad at poker its not going to hurt as much and on the same token when

something bad happens outside of poker dont expect to continue playing your same game unaffected.I hope this helps you all and I also hope this encourages those of you who may have been hesitatant to start contributing to do so.

HU

SNG

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HUSNG = Heads Up Sit N Go

BB = Big Blind

SB = Small Blind

OOP = Out of Position

3-bet = A reraise or raising when a player raises your bet.

Effective Stacks = The stack size of the player with the least amount of chips, or the maximum amount of chips either player can win if they both are all in.

Two barrel = Betting the flop and then the turn.

Implied Odds = The ratio of your total expected win when your card hits to the present cost of calling a bet (TOP P. 55)

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GUIDE TO THE

25-50

BLIND

LEVEL

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This is the first of a four part series on how to play in the 25-50 level of Heads Up Sit N‟ Gos. In the first article you will learn some of the differences that separate the 25-50 level from the earlier blind levels.

For clarity‟s sake, these articles will mainly apply to situations you face in the 25-50 level, regardless of the stack sizes in other levels of play.

For example, there is one key difference between being 25bb deep in the 25-50 level and being 25bb deep in the 10-20 level: How your opponent is going to play. Most opponents are going to play very differently in these two cases even though they should play nearly identical in both. For this main reason I want to focus on situations that come up in the 25-50 level.

When identifying the basic differences between this level and previous levels, you will notice the effective stack sizes are generally 15-30 big blinds at the start of the 25-50 level. At the earlier levels you are usually deeper stacked and have more room to “maneuver” with bets and raises. At the 50-100 level most of your play is going to be shove or fold preflop with a little bit of exception. But in the 25-50 level of play you‟re often stuck in between. This often puts additional pressure on players and makes a lot of decisions unclear in their mind.

Another thing you should realize is that a mistake in this level is very costly. In the earlier levels of play you can make a mistake or two and lose 10-15% of your stack in doing so. In the 25-50 level you‟ll regularly see players lose 25-50% or more of their chips on one bad play here. Fortunately, if you pay attention to these articles and work hard to improve your game, your opponents will be making many more costly errors than you.

Let‟s take a look at preflop raising. A common mistake players make is committing too many chips into the pot preflop. As the blinds go up and the ratio to your stack sizes goes down, position starts to matter less. Common raise sizing when

20-30bb deep should be 2-2.5x the big blind, or 100-125 chips in this level. Under special circumstances a 3x raise may apply, but this is rare and unnecessary to go over in this article.

You will notice many players raising to 150-200 chips during this level with stack sizes of any amount. We will learn why this is usually bad and how to exploit it in the third article.

Now that you‟ve got a handle on preflop raise sizes, we can talk about the difference in preflop hand values. In the 25-50 level a lot of hands that were valuable to raise in previous levels will go down in value. Hands like suited connectors (56s, 78s) go down in value as the stack to blind ratio goes down. These are

speculative hands and the main advantage of these speculative hands is the implied odds that you have with them. Your implied odds go down as the blind-stack ratio becomes smaller, meaning hands that make top pair are going to be going up in value while lower-card hands that need to make flushes, straights and two pair hands are going to go down in value.

So does this mean you should fold hands like 67s on the button when effective stacks are 20-25bb? Not necessarily. You have to be careful on overplaying them and committing too many chips to the pot in certain situations. We‟ll get into when you should minraise, limp and fold this type of hand in the next article.

We‟ve covered some of the preflop differences in this level, so let‟s get into some postflop play.

In one word, you postflop play in the 25-50 level should be “aggressive.”

As a whole, you want to be stabbing out at a lot of pots against most players in this level. Players generally respond to

aggression by being very over aggressive in this level or by playing very weak. You should be able to identify which kind of player you are playing very early on in this level. Article 2 will go into greater detail about how to adjust accordingly to this.

Continuation-bets should rise in frequency, but not necessarily value. If anything, you can sometimes continuation bet as low as half pot in this level. This, of course, is player dependent. A 150

cbet into a 250 chip pot is probably the standard, or a 125 into a 200 pot.

You‟re also going to want to turn down your two barrel bluffing percentage. As the pot builds from preflop to the flop and then the turn, players will feel more pot committed when calling a street. The more bets they call the more of their stack is in the pot, therefore they will end up calling with a wider range of hands. There are still spots to bluff/semi-bluff, but it is generally harder and less frequent in this level.

Since we‟ve gone over the main facets of preflop and postflop play, let‟s put it all together and go over a couple of basic hand examples.

Reads on villain: Villain rarely folds preflop OOP. He will reraise his big hands preflop and raises a lot of limps. He has become more aggressive post flop as the game has gone on.

Hero (2100 chips)

Villain (900 chips)

Hero is in the small blind with (Kd7s)

K7o is a pretty strong hand 18 big blinds deep. Villain is calling a lot OOP and will reraise us with most, if not all of his premium hands preflop. Add in the fact that he raises limps aggressively and this hand is a clear raise preflop.

Hero raises to 100 chips. Villain calls.

Flop Kh8d4d (Pot is 200)

Villain checks, Hero bets 125 chips, Villain raises to 800 and is all in.

Villain has been very aggressive postflop. If the effective stacks were deeper it would probably be incorrect to move forward in this hand because villain would be less aggressive, meaning the range of hands he would be raising would include more Kx hands that have us dominated and more two pair or three of a

kind hands. In this situation villain has shown more aggression as the stacks have become shallower compared to the blinds and the board has a clear flush draw out there. Villain may think his 8 is good here or may even be raising with some sort of gutshot straight draw. In this case we will call and feel confident that we are ahead of villain‟s range.

Hero calls 675 chips. Villain flips over 9d7d. Hero‟s pair holds and he wins the game.

This hand demonstrates the problem of calling OOP with too wide a range of hands when the blinds to stack-ratio is small. The hand also shows the difference in strength of hands in “short” stack to blind areas compared to situations in which we are deeper stacked.

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Reads: Villain has been pretty loose and aggressive in the early part of the match. He has seemed to slow down lately but is still raising often preflop. Hero has been card dead most of the game and has won very few pots. The pots hero has won have been medium-large sized pots.

Hero (1200 chips)

Villain (1800 chips)

Hero is in the BB with 5s2c.

Villain calls 50 chips. Hero checks.

Flop KdTh4s

Here the flop has completely missed us. There are few draws on the board, a possible straight draw, but no flush draws. Villain has been raising often preflop so a lot of Kx and some Tx hands are not in his range. QJ is not likely in his range either. A lead bet here is good and should take down the pot very often.

Hero bets 70 chips. Villain folds.

If Villain had called here, we would give up on our hand and check/fold the turn and river almost all of the time. If villain had raised we would certainly fold.

The two hands above and the concepts described before them should give you a good idea of the key differences between the 25-50 play and the earlier levels of the game. The difference in starting hand values, preflop raises and controlled aggression are important to becoming a winning 25-50 player.

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HU

SNG

PF RANGES

You want to raise as many BTNs as you can get away with before/unless villain adjusts. So theoretically you can start off by opening 100% and seeing how villain responds. Some people will start off at 85-90%, because opening 100% has a certain feel to it that causes some villains to play back faster ('omg he's blindly clicking raise every time he has the BTN') than if you occasionally fold your BTN ('oh he has some standards, even if they're minimal.')

You may want to start reducing your BTN opens if villain starts 3-betting a lot and is hyper-aggro in 3-bet pots / doesn't fold easily to positional pressure and is generally hyper-aggro OOP / will pay you off lightly but will not go away often enough when you have air unless you put stacks into play every time. In such cases, opening super-wide might still be profitable if you're skilled post-flop, but the match becomes much easier to play if you reduce your opens to like 60%-75%, especially since most villains of the type I described won't adjust well. (For example, there are hugely losing villains whose basic approach is to try to win every pot, literally, no matter how many chips they risk and almost no matter what kind of resistance you put up. Opening super-wide against them can get really tough if you're not running hot or sick good, because you basically have to show them a hand or bluff for stacks or fold and bleed off chips every time you enter a pot.)

As far as raise-sizing pf goes, I recommend HokieGreg's advice (which I presume is standard) when getting started, until you design a scheme of your own that you prefer for whatever reason. The key is that your pf raise-sizing should take effective

stack size into account. You don't want to be opening 3x when too shallow, because it's pretty easy to exploit by 3-bet shoving, unless you open a ridiculously low percentage of hands. There are posts about this on this forum; search for "3-bet shoving 25 bbs deep" by Insane_Steve. Anyway, HokieGreg's advice: raise 3x between 75-51 bbs deep, raise 2.5x between 50-30 bbs deep, and raise 2x between 30-13 bbs deep. Below that, a lot of people start playing push-or-fold preflop, using the Nash

Equilibrium tables as a guide.

As far as limping is concerned, some people never/rarely do it, and stick to raise-or-fold pf, and do just fine. Others will limp anything they're not raising, until villain starts attacking their limps, and then they'll mix in some strong hands into their limps and fold the very worst of their limping hands, in order to make life harder for villain. I typically don't limp until the effective stack is less than 23bbs, then I start doing it with many weakish and some strong hands. So there's a lot of flexibility in this arena.

Finally, you say OOP you call anything remotely decent and raise all decent hands to 3 bb. I'm not sure exactly what ranges you mean here, but I strongly recommend starting out by playing very tight OOP. You can call min-raises a little wider than 3x raises, but the key is to play OOP pots much less frequently than pots in position. Look for hands that flop well, where both cards can make a decent pair, so K9s > A2o. Also watch how

frequently your opponent raises; you don't want to be calling with dominated hands against a nitty BTN-raiser (they do show up.) Your OOP play is of course conditioned but how well or poorly villain plays post-flop. Some guys will give you free turns when they miss and check/fold when they don't connect and you fire turn or river. Others will c-bet 100% but play very weakly against frequent check-raises. But please, please start off by playing tightly OOP. And if someone limps into your BB, don't raise their limp with a wide range until you know exactly what you're doing. Start off by only raising limps with something like 88+, QJ+, KT+, AT+, and taking free flops with the rest of your hands.

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At 20 bbs down to which ever stack depth you think pure push-or-fold* should start (whether it's 10/9/8/7/6 BBs -- villain dependent, ideally):

Typically, you should try a mixture of limps and min-raises on the BTN. The earlier phases of the match should give you some clues about how villain will respond. Any of these BTN pf strategies can be appropriate against the right villain:

1) Min-raise ~70%+ of hands, fold the rest -- because villain rarely 3-bet shoves, folds many of his big blinds, and/or plays fit-or-fold on the flop when you c-bet.

2) Min-raise ~40% of hands, limp a whole bunch more, and fold trash -- because villain is a bit more active in raised pots, so you want your range to be stronger, and to be able to call a 3-bet shove pf more often than a 70% range can; but villain will let you limp without punishing you, and lets you take down limped pots reasonably often with a simple stab on the flop.

3) Similar to the above, but mix in some strong hands into your limping range -- because villain perceives it as weak and has begun attacking limps pf pretty often.

4) Raise very few hands, because villain is very aggro spewy in raised pots due to drug use or whatever reason, and he will shove 52s when you make your first min-raise with AQo after limping the last gazillion hands 18 BBs deep.

OOP: Tighten up your flat-calling range from the BB. Playing fit-or-fold is way too expensive and unsustainable at this stage. You want to enter pots OOP armed with significant flopping power and/or an ability to handle villain when he has position post-flop.

Maybe he has some exploitable traits you've spotted, like only c-betting if he hits, or c-c-betting very often but folding non-strong hands to smallish check-raises, or three barrel spewing too often when you take a check-call line, such that hitting a pair will net you his bluffed off stack.

Also, monitor his BTN raising frequency as you get shallow, and review all of the hands that are +EV 3-bet shoves against

someone who opens too often when stacks are short.

You can also mix in some small 3-bets against against semi-thinking, nit-at-heart players who aren't very comfortable lagging it up (in this case, opening more BTNs than they'd like), and are doing so half-heartedly because they think they should as blinds go up. (That was a retardedly specific villain profile; small 3-bets when shallow can work against a number of opponent-types, especially if you balance them, but this is not my area of expertise. More of a growth area for me.)

Post-flop: Keep a very close eye on stack-to-pot ratios if you and villain start putting bets in on the flop or beyond. It is very easy to cross commitment thresholds inadvertently, and to be priced in to make correct calls with one over and a gutshot, or other weak draws/hands, as the pot grows relative to remaining stacks. In short, constantly look ahead before putting chips into the pot and adjust your future continuing/folding plans accordingly. Try to avoid taking lines that involve calling a bet (or two) on earlier streets and folding to further pressure on later ones. Such lines are sometimes inevitable, but stacking off sooner when you feel more certain of your equity becomes more correct as the stack-to-pot ratio shrinks, especially since you can still get called by worse (or draws) as pot odds become better for villain. Compare this to taking a more inducing/pot-control/way-ahead-way-behind type check-call line earlier in the match when stacks are deeper against a barreling villain.

THE

ANATOMY OF A

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450 effective stacks

wha raised 4 3 to 12 OTB in a 1/2 HU cash game

BB called and the flop came:

K J 4

MLJ and I got into a discussion about whether to c-bet this flop or not which sparked my interest in this topic. DISCLAIMER Im not presenting any of this as fact I am actually trying to improve my own understanding of the factors that lead to a c-bet

decision, take it as you will.

So lets dissect a c-bet in this spot against a loose villain. Lets assume we use 18 here (75%) as a standard cbet and we never get check raised (its just going to be simpler that way). I went through pokerstove and clicked on what I thought was a

reasonable starting hand range for a loose villain in this situation (doesnt really matter exactly what they were) and I came up with 42.3% of all starting hands (I assumed he would 3-bet stronger hands and picked a very reasonable range). Then I assumed villain would call the flop with anything that included a gutshot or better (all pairs not A hi). This came out to 22.7% of all hands which means villain would call approx. 53.7% of all continuation bets. Doing some quick math assuming the hand stopped after your c-bet you would show an immediate profit of $1.74 for each c-bet. That means if you have 32o here you would show an immediate profit by c-betting. I am sure this is obvious to many of you so bear with me.

Now lets assume a tighter villain preflop with the same calling standards I picked out a reasonable calling range of 25.5% of all

hands which would lead to him calling c-bets with 19.2% of all hands or approx. 75% of all c-bets. Now each c-bet shows a profit of -$7.5. So what did I learn from all this? Preflop range has a huge impact on c-bet success (LDO) but what did surprise me is that a loose preflop player that plays the same postflop as a tight preflop player can be c-bet against more aggressively. I tried this idea on a couple different flop textures and the

impression that I get is that this is probably universally true.

Clearly assuming tight players will call gutshots and and any pair is a pretty strong assumption (far from reality) so if we use the same flop as in wha's hand and the same tight player (25.5% preflop) and assume he plays a much tighter range after your c-bet to the tune of 14.6% (again came up with a reasonable range fiddling with pokerstove) of all hands which would mean our c-bet gets called 57.3% of the time for a total immediate profit of approx. -$.07. This is great for a couple reasons, it shows that postflop tightness increases the profitability of c-bets (obviously) and we found a realistic ratio that is very near the break even point of the c-bet in this hand.

***Obviously when we c-bet there are other factors at stake than the immediate success of the c-bet as a bluff on the flop. A lot of times when we c-bet the flop we will be called but still go on to win the hand in some manner later on ands its good for our metagame to be betting strong hands as well as weak hands, all very obvious stuff. Now that leads us to what kind of hands we should c-bet in this spot given how they play later on in the hand. How is 43 different in this spot than an 87 or a 55-88? Basically given some very rough estimates of how often you get to

showdown like this I think its worth about $1.3-$2.5 on average (I just took a rough estimate of how often this would happen I assumed about 10%-20% here). Add in the 11% of the time we improve on the turn and 22% by the river for 43 and we have very solid value for c-betting this flop. Interestingly with either 43 or 55 most of the value comes from their draws to two pair or trips even though this only happens rarely (this is pretty revealing to me as I think many of us would prefer to c-bet the 87 thinking that it has no value on this flop so its better to bet and give up). Given these loose approximations with some added double/triple barrel equity its probably profitable to c-bet against the tight preflop player who plays loose postflop, thats a pretty stunning

revelation to me.

I know that was confusing so let me try and sum up my approximations quickly:

-$.7 c-betting immediately on the flop against tight/tight -$7.5 c-betting against tight/loose

+$1.74 c-betting against loose/loose

+$1.3-2.5 for showing down a pair against a whiffed draw (only accurate against a tight/tight adjust upwards against tight/loose and loose/loose)

+$4-5 for both 43 and 55 (only accurate against a tight/tight again adjust up against tight/loose and loose/loose)

+$x for improving on the river

+$x for v-betting when our 'draw' hits, who knows probably worth at least $2

+$x for double and triple barreling (lets not even get into it) +$x for metagame

One important thing to note is that the numbers really arent important (dont check my math) I used specific examples to try and make the factors that make a c-bet profitable more concrete and clear. I think understanding these factors and adjusting them correctly for the situation can help you make better decisions about c-betting.

D

; DEALING W ITH

CONSTANT MIN

-BETTORS

"Dealing With Min Bettors

The first question in the Q and A is from Marchy in Germany.

Question: How do you handle players who minbet (1/4 to 1/3 of the pot about) 90% of the flops?

At the moment i play the 33s on FullTilt and there are lots of these guys. I just cant stand

them because i really dont know what the best strategy is against them.

Response: This is a very good question. This is something I struggled with early on in my husng progression and I'm sure many others have or do struggle with as well. There are a few things I like to keep in mind when dealing with min bettors: 1) We're usually dealing with a very wide range of hands, so we should not try to narrow their hand range down based on actions that do not warrant it.

2) Our odds of calling a min bet on the flop are much greater than on the turn, therefore we'll probably be calling a lot more often on the flop and we shouldn't be worried about folding turns.

3) We want to be careful about getting overzealous about raising them too often in small pots and folding to the min bet too often in bigger pots.

Keeping those points in mind, here are a few things I like to do against min bettors: - Figuring out if they will min bet 3 streets with strong hands (top pairs+), good draws (flush draws, OESDs, weaker pair combo draws), weak draws (low flush draws, gutshot straights, overcards) and outright "bluffs" (weak hands that need runner runner to beat most hands that will play a big pot).

to try to find out which hands that they are deviating from their min bet strategy with and what they are doing instead.

- I want to also figure out how they react to a raise. I generally want to raise a

stronger hand first, because most min bettors are going to be too loose and call with a lot of hands they should not on the flop, at least in the early portion of our match. If I notice a fold I'll try again, perhaps with an outright bluff or semi bluff, if they fold again I start to see they are weak and will throw in a good amount of bluff raises along with semi bluff and strong hands and wait until they adjust.

While I may not always get action on my strong hands, the raises are most likely going to frustrate the player.

- It might not be too difficult to win when you are hitting cards/boards vs these players, but what about when you are card dead and the boards just aren't hitting your starting hands?

In these cases, you really have to pay attention to how you are playing your high cards, how often you are chasing without the correct odds and other decisions you make in marginal/close spots.

If a player is going to min bet every street with any hand, it's going to be correct to call down with a hand like A high. If you notice he is starting to check hands that are really weak or that have no showdown value, you're going to want to adjust and starting folding high cards to his bets.

A few things you'll want to avoid are bluffing off a lot of chips because "I haven't bet big in awhile, he has to respect me here" or "he bets every street, he can't call a few raises from me."

Be careful on taking raises too far. If you bluff raise his min bet on the flop and he calls, be weary about following through on the turn. Don't blindly spew chips against these players, that is how they are going to win because they usually don't get enough value out of their bigger hands and end up letting you build pots when you want with stronger hands.

A few other lesser points that I want to make about playing min bettors:

- Don't over or under raise them. For example, if they bet 30 into a 200 pot on the turn, raising your weak top pair to 400 is going to be an over raise. On the flip side, raising 3x to 90 is going to probably be an under raise. Often times against constant min bettors, I almost "ignore" their small bet and just raise them to what I would bet if they had checked. In this case it would be a 130-160 type turn bet (raise) that I would make.

- Like I said earlier, be aware of the odds you are being offered compared to their presumably very wide range of hands. You also want to be aware of the odds you are offering them. If their drawing hands are 20-25% likely to hit the river, you don't want to "keep them in the pot" with an under raise that offers them the correct odds to draw. They will likely make the mistake of calling without odds, so don't be too

worried about pushing them out of the pot with a 4-5x raise. In fact, your raises will often be over 4x the bet against min bettors.

In conclusion, since this is a player and situations you're probably not dealing with on a regular basis, you might have to think a little longer/harder when facing the min bettor. While I gave a lot of general advice, you should find enough above to

effectively combat the min bettor and to get you thinking in the right direction against almost all of them.

I'd say above all, awareness is key against these players, and the most common mistake is a lack of discipline and emotional control when dealing with these players. The same can go for the opposite end of the spectrum, the aggro-maniacs, though it is not just a simple "take this advice but apply it in the opposite direction." That, however, is another day and another blog post."

--- "Facing A Limp

(Or why you should resist the temptation of raising limps over and over and over again)

You probably get what I'm going to advocate in this post.

First, the following is a response to another question from Spacko about "when you should raise limpers." It's a very general question but I notice that even good players often have a general problem with how they approach this area of the game.

Lets begin by looking at reasons why people raise limps.

**We'll assume that effective stacks are a relatively deep 40-75bb, unless otherwise noted.

1. Our hand is better than the range of hands villain will call with.

2. We think villain will fold a tremendous amount of time and we will raise for the fold equity. You could call this a bluff-raise.

3. We have a great read on villain and have found an exploit in their game (fairly rare early on). For example, a player that calls almost ATC preflop but is very weak/tight postflop. You would want to get chips in the pot preflop to steal postflop.

There are no doubt other reasons you can raise a limp, but the most common will be similar to the 3 above.

We'll start with raising for pure hand value. A common reply to "why did you raise his limp with that hand (we'll say a hand like QTo)?" is "he'll call with worse hands." That is probably true, a lot of villains will limp and then call a 3-5x raise with a lot of worse hands. But unfortunately, many people don't consider other factors of the hand besides the hand values.

position, so you're at a disadvantage (the deeper you are the more this is true). This will weaken your holding/value somewhat.

Another factor is postflop play. How does your opponent play postflop? What is his calling range? What is his limping range? If you're having trouble answering any of those questions, raising a medium-strong hand like QTo OOP for around 4x the bb is probably not going to put you in good spots postflop.

As an example of how crucial it is to know most if not all of these things about your opponent, I'll point you to a thread in 2+2.

In this thread, Skates (a 220-550 regular) raised Heir Apparent's (a very solid

200/220 regular) limp with what you could call a "medium-strong" hand. He assumed that Heir would raise any ace preflop, so therefore an ace could not be in his calling range. Based on that assumption, it would be a pretty easy call based on Heir's line (call, c/c, c/bet). However, Skates even admitted that he was pretty confused about the hand/line and it turns out Heir had a weak ace. Throw aces into Heir's range and it would be a pretty clear fold on this river.

Moving on, the other big reason people will give when raising a limp is "he's only limping weak hands, he'll probably fold."

While this is fine reasoning, this is generally not worth doing until effective stacks (in bbs) are pretty small (think like < 30bbs deep). Most players will adjust after you raise their limps a few times, so you're not going to want to pick up their 20 or 30 chips once or twice when you have 1500 chips and then have to figure out how they are adjusting later on. Knowing they are limping weak and/or folding often is going to be much more valuable when you can pick up 50-100 chips each time or more

appropriately, 5-15% of their stack a pop.

I'll touch on one other point about limp raising before I conclude, and that would be to think about what it means to face a limp. Are you really worried about a player

limping his button when stacks are deep? You shouldn't be. Most players are losing value by constantly limping their button when stacks are deep, so why should you abuse that leak early on and force them to raise more often in position and generally play more aggressively throughout the game? It is my belief that you should not. Now lets quickly touch on when you should raise limps.

-The blinds are a big % of the effective stacks. 5-15% is probably a good rule of thumb for when you really want to be paying attention and looking for spot to raise limps for fold equity.

-You really have a good grasp on this villain and his calling range as well as his postflop play.

-Your hand is very strong. I would never suggest checking a hand like 99 or AK in the big blind when a player limps. With a hand like this, your hand is just too strong to not want to build a pot, position or not, good reads or not.

Building off of that, my default raising range for low-mid stakes husngs would be 55+, A9s, ATo+, KJs+, KQo+.

That range would change as effective stacks, game flow and reads developed and changed, but on the first hand of a 22 dollar husng that would be my suggest raising range facing a limp from a random player.

To conclude, in general I would suggest letting players limp early but especially paying attention to limp ranges, reactions to aggression and postflop play of villains so that you can take advantage of poor play as effective big blinds get shallow and leaks grow tremendously. A good way to gain this information is to mainly only raise strong hands early on when facing a limp, and to deviate from that strategy as the conditions above warrant."

C

R

FLOPS

- What does the opponent's hand range look like going into the flop? If your opponent is open folding 30% of hands, you can safely assume that weaker hands such as 42, 52, 62, 72, 82, 73, 83 are not open raising. This will automatically narrow your opponent's range of hands down before you even see the flop.

- How does that hand range line up with the board? You want to identify habits above such as "limps K-rag, Q-rag, A-rag

hands" so that you can look at the flop and get a general idea not only of the types of hands in your opponent's range, but how well they did (or did not) connect with the flop.

Intermediate/Advanced Note - I left out the variable of "how often does your hand range hit this flop." I don't consider it particularly important unless you're playing against an opponent that can hand read good/well. If you're unsure of your opponent's caliber and you don't play $50+ levels, assume they are not a good hand reader.

That's not fully correlated (good hand reader/ability to realize you didn't likely hit a flop you're bluffing) but it's an assumption that won't likely hurt you (and over time you will notice how often players rebluff you versus how often they have a rare value hand on dry boards that miss most of their hand range and you can adapt by default without reads accordingly once you have that experience to reach from).

For a lot of you, the above was rather obvious. If it wasn't, you've already learned something important.

So what are some other common things to look out for when deciding whether or not to check raise bluff? Here are some

more things to think about that build upon the two basic tips above:

- Continuation bet range. There are many ways you can take advantage of opponents that offer severely unbalanced

continuation betting ranges. A common c-bet "leak" would be opponents that cbet most boards with a range similar to: any good middle pair or better, any good draw and any air except high cards with showdown value. In many cases, this represents a c-bet range that is much too weak, and thus should often be check raise bluffed frequently.

Another common c-bet "leak" is from players that check back dry boards with most pairs; the strong pairs they can consider won't get enough value on the dry board and the weaker pairs are "only called by better." If an opponent is checking back A92 rainbow boards with any pair, what does that tell you about the times that they c-bet? How should you react?

- Bet sizing. This one comes up a little less frequently, but is still valuable. You can dissect bet sizing "leaks" the same way as c-bet leaks, though it can be a bit more complicated. For example, many opponents like to bet a little bit smaller with their bluffs on a drawy heavy/"scary" board; to try to get a cheap fold. Similarly, many opponents like to bet a bit larger on those same boards, to maximize value from any potential pairs or draws that rarely fold, even to larger bets. In that simple example, even though you might not normally bluff a 50% open raiser that cbets a QJT board, if they c-bet to a large size for value and like to make cheap bluffs when they miss, you would be throwing away money not bluff raising often when they bet small.

I don't often consider these leaks (it's situational), as I do it myself at times and believe it is correct against a lot of

opponents (fit or fold, for example, especially coupled with loose preflop). Which leads me to...

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you'll find that even the best players will have ranges that are not balanced in many areas. Over

balance in of itself is not the best way to win the most money. Properly building a strategy that exploits your opponent's tendencies and frequencies is the best way to win. As such, great players will often present to you ranges that (at least for a brief time) can be exploited. Pay attention, good players

constantly adapt their hand ranges based on how their opponent is responding.

But many players (including some winning players) have more set in stone or rigid hand ranges. Many players will not recognize that you are exploiting them. So learn how to recognize and exploit a leak, often times you'll find a consistent stream of added edge in your games that will translate into profit sooner or later.

Afterthoughts (and ABC Poker)

The above, even if you weren't fully aware or thinking about it previously, probably seems quite simple, basic and obvious in hindsight. But that doesn't mean it is not helpful.

Many a time in threads, videos or every day conversations, players lament "ugh, ABC poker, this is so boring, running bad." More often than not, when insight is available, I'll find that these players are not taking full advantage of what is being given to them by their opponents, even in the most basic of ways. ABC poker is not check folding when you miss, check raising with strong hands and keeping the pot small with weak pairs and high cards. ABC poker is a sound strategy to beat the average

opponent whom you have no real reads on. Ask yourself how long that lasts for. How long do you have no meaningful

information about your opponent? The answer, in my mind, is not very long.

Next time you're feeling uncreative, or feel like you're playing a boring button crunching game, quit your session. If you can't get yourself to do that, at least pay attention to your opponent, because you're certainly not being honest about what your opponent is actually doing, and how you can counter that in a way that maximizes your edge in the match. And if you're not actively looking to make the best decisions, you're not actively

looking to win, nor should you expect to profit as fast as you would probably like to.

- ChicagoRy

W

N

MersennearyPoker.com $10000.00 No Limit Hold'em Tournament - 2 players - Blinds t5/t10 - The Official Reddit.com Hand History Converter

Hero (BB): t3500 BTN/SB: t2500

Pre Flop: (t15) Hero is BB with A 5 BTN/SB raises to t20, Hero calls t10 Flop: (t40) 5 A Q (2 players)

Hero checks, BTN/SB bets t40, Hero raises to t160, BTN/SB calls t120 Turn: (t360) 7 (2 players)

Hero bets t320.00, BTN/SB calls t320 River: (t1000) Q (2 players)

Hero checks, BTN/SB bets ?

Suppose, further, that both players know that the BB has Ax here always (this isn't the best hand to demonstrate this, as BB has plenty of busted draws, but whatever, pretend it's a standard ace high board with no draws and it's gone c/c c/c c/b if you're hung up on that), and that BTN has 50% Qx+, and 50% air. This is, naturally, an idealized situation, but we'll get to the practical applications at the end. For now, you should all know what the Nash Equilibrium of this situation is (Equilibrium isn't just an endgame thing). Do you? If not, let's calculate it.

For demonstration purposes: Let's assume as the button, we have three choices on some site with crummy software: Betting t500, betting t1000, or betting t2000 all-in to the pot of t1000. Let's say we decide to bet t2000, or not at all.

In Nash Equilibrium, after you make your river bet, your opponent should be

indifferent between calling and folding. Hence, as the button, along with betting t2000 for all of our value hands, we want to bet t2000 with the percentage of our air that makes it so folding and calling have the same EV for our opponent. The math on that:

-500 = (2500)x - (2500)(1-x) -500 = 5000x - 2500

2000 = 5000x x = 2/5

Thus, at Nash Equilibrium, BTN shoves what makes a BB call correct 2/5 of the time. So, BTN shoves 100% of her value and shoves 2/3 of her air. This makes BB

indifferent between calling and folding, meaning that 5/6 of the time, BTN has an expectation of +t500, and 1/6 of the time, BTN concedes the pot for an expectation of -t500. Hence, EV playing this strategy is +t333.

Let's note what happens if we try to make our bets only in 1000, or only in 500: If we're betting 1000, again, we should be doing so with 100% of our Qx+, and some % of our air.

BB should be indifferent between calling and folding in equilibrium. Code:

-500 = (1500)x - (1500)(1-x) -500 = 3000x - 1500

1000 = 3000x x = 1/3

Thus, we want to bet what makes BB call correctly 1/3 of the time. So, we shove 100% of our value hands and 50% of our air. This makes BB indifferent between calling and folding, meaning that 3/4 of the time, we have an expectation of +t500, and 1/4 of the time, we concede the pot for an expectation -t500. This means our expectation playing this strategy is +t250.

At equilibrium, betting pot is inferior to overbetting 2x pot. If we're betting 500, you know the drill...

Code:

-500 = (1000)x - (1000)(1-x) -500 = 2000x - 1000

500 = 2000x x = 1/4

So we bet what makes BB call correctly 1/4 of the time, which means betting 100% of value and 33.3% of air. 2/3 of the time we have an expectation of +t500, 1/3 of the time it's -t500. Expectation playing this strategy is +t167. The bigger the bet, the bigger the EV.

Let's take it to the extreme, though. Say we're really deep-stacked, perhaps at a cash game with 10k behind and this river decision. This is also applicable in smaller

HUSNG pots. If we make a big overbet shove (crazy, reckless stuff, right?), what's our EV?

-500 =(10500)x - (10500)(1-x) -500 = 21000x - 10500

10000 = 21000x x = 47.6%

Which means we bet 100% of our value and 90.8% of our air, giving us an expectation of +453, the best yet.

The general theme: When it's clear your opponent is highly unlikely to have anything other than bluffcatcher, your chipstack is a weapon. You want to use your chips to allow you to remain unexploitable as you bluff with a bigger percentage of your air hands.

Two quick points to make, which I won't bother to show the math on:

1. At equilibrium, overbetting is better than any combination of small/large bets with different types of hands.

2. Shoving is still a Nash Equilibrium regardless of what

percentages BTN has air and value; it doesn't have to be 50/50. OK, you get it. But you read 2+2 strat so you can take more maney. When does this help me take money?

The downside: I am a strong advocate that in the vast majority of games, Nash Equilibria are going to be useless. Nash relies on both players having perfect information about each other's

strategies. This is ridiculous. If a Nash Equilibrium calls for you to do something 90% of the time, you might as well do it 100% of the time - nobody's going to know. Mediocre players who have no history, aren't attempting to balance ranges, and do not respond appropriately when you unbalance yours, make it a critical error to not go for MORE than the +t300 expectation that t2000 overbet shoving guarantees you in this hand. There also will be concerns about variance and putting your stack at risk for too slight of edges. All these are legitimate concerns: There's simply no reason to play any Nash, be it end-game or early-game, if deviating from it affords you a better winrate because of the incompetence of your opponent.

However, as you move up in stakes and get more and more history between common opponents, who tend to understand and react appropriately to your frequencies, you need to start

playing more equilibrium strategies. The Nash Equilibrium here is overbetting, and that's a significant part of why you see it at higher stakes, taking advantage of players who would never, ever check the river with a big hand in the example above. Stop thinking about Nash in poker as only relevant to the endgame and start thinking more about it in early-game decisions when you're up against a tough opponent, especially one you have history with. I would argue that the "you only have a bluffcatcher" situation is pretty commonplace, but regardless, there are

numerous other spots that make thinking about equilibrium and how its occasionally counterintuitive conclusions more than mental masturbation, but hookers and blow from all of the bing blang blaow you're going to be singing.

R

, TOURNAMENT EQUITY AN D HOURLY

On the first hand of a heads up sit and go, your opponent moves all-in. You estimate your hand to have 50% equity against this player's range. Should the fact that this would result in an expected loss for the tournament after the rake is accounted for nudge you into folding?

No, it shouldn't. The rake (and indeed the buyin) is a sunk cost. Sunk costs should not be factored into rational decision making. There is a prize pool and that's all you're interested in. All either things being equal you should want the highest probability of winning it. If that happens to be 50%, you should take it.

But wait, you surely couldn't apply this overall? If your long run winrate was 50% you'd eventually go bust due to the rake. So what's the difference? The rake in future SNGs are not sunk costs. Since they have yet to be incurred, you can account for them in your decision making.

So how do you do so? Getting back to basics: your goal in poker is to make as much money as you can. (You can certainly have either objectives, such as fun or playing better opponents for the sake of learning in order to hopefully make more in the future, but those are for you to evaluate). There is a finite amount of time that you can play poker, so maximising your hourly

expectation will maximise the amount of money you make. (Note that there is nothing special about the use of hours, it's just the standard way of measuring earnings over time).

Every decision you make in a SNG should be evaluated on its effect on your hourly expectation. Rake matters because it reduces your expectation on future SNGs. Notably, it matters in

the exact same way as you playing a particularly fishy opponent. In both cases, you have a higher expectation from trying to keep the current tournament going than you than you would starting a new one against a random opponent. Thus, I will evaluate both of them together.

Let's start with a simple example. When should you chop a HUSNG? For this example, we'll have a $200 + 10 SNG,

assume an even chop and ignore rakeback. (In reality, you must account for rakeback and any other bonuses arising from playing as fully as you would anything else. Note that the value of a VPP is not the average benefit of its effect on your VIP status, but its marginal benefit. If you are planning to play a lot of poker

anyway, you can't count it for much. If you're struggling against the clock to rack up VPPs, you might rate a VPP quite highly).

What is your opportunity cost for playing the SNG to completion? It is your hourly rate for one table divided by the expected time the SNG will take. Note that it is your expectation for games played now, not "overall". If it is a fishy time of the day and you're playing well, your expectation will be higher than an off-peak time in which you're on your C game.

Let's suppose for divisibility's sake that your hourly rate per table is $60 an hour. If the expected time for the SNG is 15 minutes, by playing the SNG you are foregoing $15 in expected profits and must make at least that in the current one to justify continuing playing.

Currently, you are being offered $200 to end the SNG right now. Therefore, you must expect to win at least $215 by playing the game out. This equates to a 53.75% winrate. At anything less, you should chop. Interestingly enough, this winrate is large enough to beat the rake. Even someone +EV to play against after the rake can be still be so far from being the most +EV that it's worth taking even money to free yourself up to play someone else. In fact, the rake in this example wasn't important. It was your hourly rate, which all the rake did was presumably to reduce it. Rake here isn't distinguishable from any other characteristics that might serve to change your hourly rate.

(Uneven chops are possible if both players acknowledge a reasonable skill gap existing. However if done properly they

would result in players only concerned about money chopping 100% of the time. Poker is mutually a waste of time for two people only interested in money, since any money exchanges must be at the expense of the other. Both players could be made better off if they proposed an uneven chop.

The fact that games are not chopped show that at least one player overestimates his/her edge and/or they are not playing for direct monetary reasons (which are outside the scope of this post)).

Let's continue to evaluating specific implications of this to poker hands. Since the chopping example already highlighted both players getting all-in, I'll move straight ahead to uneven stacks.

Suppose the pot is 200 chips, you have 900 chips, your

opponent has 1900 chips and has just moved all-in. How much equity does your hand need to have against his or her range in order to justify calling?

You're looking for what has the highest expected value over time. To calculate this you need to determine the probability of winning the SNG under each distribution of chips that could arise minus the loss of EV that occurs from the time it would take to play out the rest of the tournament.

Expected value of calling:

((Probability of winning after calling and winning * Prize Pool)-(Hourly Rate * Expected time in hours for SNG to take after calling and winning))*Probability of winning when called + ((Probability of winning after calling and losing* Prize Pool)-(Hourly Rate * Expected time in hours for SNG to take after calling and losing))*Probability of losing when called

Expected value of folding:

(Probability of winning after folding * Prize Pool)-(Hourly Rate * Expected time in hours for SNG to take after folding)

(I've ignored the possibility of a chopped pot for simplicity of calculations but you can calculate it in the exact same format).

So let's plug some numbers in. Assume you're playing a $200 + 10 SNG, with an hourly rate of $60 an hour 1-tabling. If you call and win, you'll have 2000 chips and figure you'll win according to your chip equity, 66.67% of the time, with an average game length of 10 minutes. If you call and lose, you'll win 0% of the time in no time (after the hand is finished). If you fold, you'll have 900 chips and figure you'll win 30% of the time of the time with a slightly smaller game time (due to a smaller stack) of 9 minutes. So how often do you need to win when you call?

((0.67*400)-(60*(10/60)))*PrW + 0 = (0.30*400)-(60*(9/60))

(266.67 - 10)*PrW = 120.00 - 9 256.67*PrW = 111

PrW = 0.43246

This is less than the 0.45 equity you would need in a standard chip equity calculation. Despite the fact that you're not playing against a player who has an edge against you, it's still worth getting the money in somewhat lighter.

You could plug numbers into the above equations, altering them as you wish to describe different scenarios (like the equity of betting yourself and getting called) and get the right answers. However, it may be somewhat difficult to estimate your win percentage at given stack sizes and the expected time to finish a SNG. One way to do so is empirically - if you have a large

enough database of SNGs, you could go through all of them and find out your win percentage/time taken at each stack size

against opponents of various skill levels. This is probably unrealistic, however.

One method is using the "Theory of Doubling Up" from the

Mathematics of Poker, Chapter 26. If you can estimate what your overall winrate will be against a player, you can estimate your equity for any stack size. If E is the probability of a player

need to double up to win and C is the constant probability of that player doubling up, you have the relationship:

E = C^N

Suppose you know your E to be 55% for an entire SNG against a given player. What is your equity when you have 20% of the chips?

For a full SNG, N is 1, since you have to double up once to win.

0.55 = C^1. C = 0.55.

Note that N for 40% of the chips is not 2.5. To work out N, take a log to the base 2 of the number of times you will need to multiply your stack to win.

N = log2 2.5

= 1.321928

Plug these values into the equation to solve for your equity:

E = 0.55^1.321928 E = 0.45371.

So this model projects that with 40% of the chips, you will win 45.371% of the time against someone that you would beat 55% of the time with 50% of the chips. Note that both proportionally and absolutely this is a higher return. However, it is not so simple to infer that this means you should be willing to take slightly the worst of it in order to get to this spot. This does not take account the effect on time. When you win a SNG from 40% of the chips, it should on average take longer than winning one from 50% of the chips – there is more ground to make up. If you are the big stack, the gap in equity will not be so large that as a short stack, but the average game length will be smaller as you are more likely to eliminate your opponent than vice versa. I am not sure exactly how to quantify this in a model: if someone else wants to propose one, I‟m open to it.

The problem with this model is that it assumes a constant probability of a double up. This is almost certainly not the case. At low stack sizes, the blinds are larger relative to the effective stacks, so it‟s more likely that your chip equity will be closer to your tournament equity at some levels. However, tournaments go faster whenever blinds are relatively higher. This is the major reason for playing turbos and indeed HUSNGs in general

(compared to cash). Both of these factors will need to be accounted for.

Nonetheless, we can still infer a number of concepts:

- All other things being equal, against players that you have a positive overall winrate against, you should pass up slightly +EV spots in order to avoid stack sizes from becoming too unequal. Conversely, against players that you are an underdog to, you should be more willing to get into spots with shorter stacks all other things being equal.

You can see the effect of this by plugging small and large numbers in the equation above. With 10% of the chips, your equity is 13.72%, with 90% it is 91.31%. These numbers are not so useful because they include the higher equity that occurs after double-ups have occurred and stacks become larger. It is

perhaps better understood intuitively: it is bad to play with

effectively small stack because your potential upside is limited to the size of the short stack. Now, a small stack can be

accompanied by factors that you might find desirable (such as higher blinds relative to the stacks, which you may find to increase your hourly rate), but that can be modeled separately. Controlling for the blind/stack ratio shows it clearly: you would rather have 1500 chip stacks and 75/150 blinds for someone you have an edge against than a 50% chance of 2700/300 or

300/2700 stacks and 15/30 blinds.

- All other things being equal, you should be willing to make slightly –EV decisions if they result in net favourable blind/stack ratios. Conversely, you should pass up slightly +EV decisions that will result in unfavourable such ratios. The type of

tournament you play is evidence as to what this may be: if you play turbos, you‟re presumably doing so because you think your hourly rate will be higher with increased blinds, and the opposite if you play regular speeds. However this is only true on average.

There will be some opponents whom you would have a highly hour rate playing deep stacked, others you would have a higher hourly rate playing short stacked. When combined with the absolute stack size effect above, you have a way to calculate your tournament equity from the chip distributions that arise from a decision.

- When you're attempting to estimate your probability of winning and/or the expected time the SNG will take, you need to do so taking into account that you will also be making these

calculations in the future. You cannot, for instance, reason that "The average length of a SNG that I've played against a winning player is 10 minutes. Therefore, the expected length of this SNG is 10 minutes." This is incorrect because the fact that you're willing to get the money in slightly bad later will reduce this length. Additionally, you should consider whether your opponent might be aware of these concepts (and also if he or she believes that you are, too). Two winning players who are 50/50 against each other should both be willing to try to shorten game lengths by making slightly -EV raises and calls. But if both are aware of these concepts, they'll shove slightly lighter for value and call slightly wider against their opponent's new lighter shoving range. It's what you might call "implicit chopping." This should tend to an equilibrium, as the more frequent all-in situations make the SNGs shorter and thus reduce the value of getting the money in wider in the first place.

C

VILLAIN

'S

3-BETTING

B

Skates Points: Critical Points of Villain's 3-Betting Behavior

These are the critical effective stack depths at which your villain makes dramatic adjustments to their preflop ranges when facing a minraise. A good, balanced player should not have these, but most do. Before explaining why, I should define them. There are two:

1) Skates Calling Point (SCP) - This is the effective stack depth at which your villain switches from an all-in or fold strategy to one that incorporates calling. When facing a minraise at 2BB, your villain can only go all-in or fold. At 5BB, nearly all villains will either go all-in or fold. At 10BB, some will mix in calling with some hands. The effective stack depth where the calling frequency becomes significant is the SCP.

2) Skates 3-Betting Point (S3BP) - This is the effective stack depth at which your villain switches their 3-bet sizing from always being all-in (or committing) to having a significant fraction of their 3-bets being non-committing. At 15BB, if a villain 3-bets when facing a minraise, they will almost certainly go all-in with the majority of their range. At 22BB, some villains will keep going all-in, but others might switch to smaller 3-bets. The effective stack depth where the frequency of the non-committing 3-bet size becomes significant is the S3BP.

When I say "majority" and "significant", I am referring to a range that does not incorporate AA and KK. Many players play in unbalanced ways with those two hands, and in this case, we would like to remove them from consideration. Some people, when you minraise at 10BB, will flat or min-3-bet with AA or KK and only those hands. This is not what we are looking to isolate.

When talking about SCPs and S3BPs, it might be helpful to refer to them as "hard" and "soft". A "hard" SCP is what most players have. If Mr.

StandardVillain has been reading 2+2 for the past year, he might have learned that when facing a minraise at less than 20BB, he should either go all-in or

fold. At 20BB though, he should start to call with most hands because he does not want to risk more than 19BB to pick up 2BB. This means that

StandardVillain has a hard-SCP of 20. This is a very common behavior among weaker players and mediocre regs at this point in time. Historically, I think this is because the average hero often had a very wide open % (say, 80%), and a very tight call % (say, 12%). Playing the way the StandardVillain played was incredibly profitable. Now, the average hero at higher stakes might still open very wide, but has often adjusted to having a wider calling range, neglecting the primary source of equity won by StandardVillain. As such, many of the stronger players today do not have SCPs at 20, but rather closer to 15. If instead of having a hard-SCP, StandardVillain were to start gradually

incorporating hands into a calling range at 18BB, he would have a soft-SCP at 18. Very strong players have soft-SCPs that are very hard to define because they adopt mixed-strategies (they do not always play a given hand the same way).

S3BPs are almost always extremely hard (non-gradual), and are usually in the range of 22-25BB. Sure, StandardVillain might always jam 33 if hero limps into him, but the rest of StandardVillain's 3-bet range is likely to have a 3-bet size between the range of 4BB to 6BB. Most people have a fixed 3-bet size that they switch to when the first incorporate non-committing 3-bets. I can not think of one villain I have come across who does not. Of course, we ignore behavior with AA and KK.

Now that we've defined these... can you think of any forum members or coaches that have well-defined SCPs or S3BPs? Are they hard or soft? How many of them that have easily recognized hard-SCPs play high-stakes? The answer is probably close to zero, and here's why:

If I can notch you into a box, I can read your frequencies and exploit you.

Over the course of a match or series of matches, a good hero attempts to best understand the frequencies with which their villain takes each possible action on each street, then utilizes that information to make estimations of villain's range on each street, then utilizes that information to come up with a maximally exploitive strategy to combat those ranges. Although I would be happier putting a lot of caveats and footnotes in there, that is some very rudimentary poker theory. As a consequence, anything that allows the hero to get a better estimation of those frequencies enables the hero to make more precise adjustments to better exploit their villain.

Stop here, take a breather. You should be able to extrapolate the rest of this article from what I've said already. I will walk you through it, but I strongly encourage you to step back and not continue reading until you try to figure it out on your own.

***** ***** ***** ***** *****

Hello again!

If you play within a well-constructed set of rules, or box, your easily observed frequencies no longer tell a part of the story; they tell the whole story. If after one game with you, I observe what I think to be a hard-SCP at 20, I am

immediately estimating a 3-bet frequency I think you have at each depth below that. If I've played many games with you, I can just look at my database and pull the information directly. Then, what do you think my adjustments look like? Fix a stack depth and consider a range of villain 3-bet frequencies. Take a moment to try to come up with my opening range with respect to those frequencies on your own.

***** ***** ***** ***** *****

Anddddd here you go: If your frequency is lower than 50%, I will raise any two cards. I'm not going to spell that one out for you. If you don't see why that is the case, you need to step back and think about it more. If your frequency is higher than 50%, I will raise any hand that I am also calling a jam with, and fold all hands I would fold to a jam with.

So what is the result? I have a raise/fold range if and only if I think your 3-bet frequency is less than 50%.

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Now... here is where things really get interesting, despite the simplicity of the topic. Notice that my adjustment is not continuous; I don't gradually add hands into my opening range. Since you are playing within this box that you have defined for yourself, my adjustments are effectively in the binary. I either raise everything, or I raise my calling range, and which strategy I adopt is

dependent solely on your 3-bet frequency. (Of course, the size of my raise-calling range will vary based on your 3-bet frequency and the effective stack depth).

If I think you 3-bet all-in with 50% of all hands at 15BB, then my raising frequency at 16BB is likely to be 100%, but my raising frequency at 14BB might be something like 40% (and raise-calling my J9s ). If someone were to isolate my hands from 14-16BB, they might see my raising range at something