Ok, after my very frustrating blog post, I talked a bit with a friend about this. He doesn't play poker, but he's good at math and statistics. We talked about Nash and shove/fold situations, and neither of us could come up with a solution to the following problem:
- If your opponent radically changes his strategy when you approach 50/100 and he's tight enough, then there is no way you can gain any +EV edge over him.
- If he gets lucky, then he can even gain a huge edge over you.
Key point is that
- 60/40 or 70/30 situations are quite common and due to variance, you're also on the bad side of this flip often enough. This means he'll actually have a hand often enough.
- With only 12-15 bb, there's not enough room to maneuver, so it'll cost you too many chips before you can get any accurate read on the guy.
Let's say it's the first hand at 50/100, you're 13 bb deep and in the bb. You're holding any random hand in the Nash 20+ shoving range (which is really quite huge) and your opponent minraises his button.
The problem here is that you don't have any idea what this guy is minraising with and you also can't just assume that you have any fold equity whatsoever if you shove over him.
You can't really call that shallow and see a flop either, so you have to choose between bleeding chips to him with a potentially very strong hand, or throwing your buy-in away as a huge dog.
Unfortunately, getting the read that he's opening very wide from the button costs you at least 4 bb.
A similar problem arises when he limps and you're holding a PP 77-TT - seeing some overcards on the flop would really suck, so you'd usually shove over his limp with it. But you can't know whether he's not limp-trapping with a monster here.
The same situation may also happen later in the < 15 bb range if your opponent does some very weird thing for the first time and you have a strong hand. For instance, you're holding A9s but now your opponent suddenly opens 4.5x. Is this an insta-fold or do we throw away our buy-in ?
My counter argument to all this was "the value of your blind" - this shallow, you need to defend your blinds and can't always fold potentially strong hands. But is one single bb really that precious that you want to get it in as a huge dog when you know that you can easily be beat ?
The guy can play super predictable and exploitable - it doesn't help you since it'll cost you at least a third of your stack before you figure that out. Of course, key point here is that the guy radically changes his strategy once you reach 50/100, but it makes perfect sense for a really bad player to do that - play super loose while you're deep and then tighten up once blinds go up since he now suddenly gets scared of getting it in pre with a weak holding.
I've recently experienced this alot - first hand at 50/100, my opponent minraises, I shove with Ax and run into AQ+ - and this happened way too often to be considered variance. Many times, I even rematched these guys and then got the confirmed read that they only minraise strong hands at these blind level and limp or fold all the rest.
So how do you guys handle these situations, which hands do you shove over a minraise with ? And how often does your opponent need to minraise before you start doing that ? Can you even fold KQ / A8 to a minraise at 12-15 bb or is it simply "bad luck" if you shove and get it in bad (even if that already happend to you way too often in the past) ?
Jack
Lots of stuff in your post here.
1) It doesn't sound like you did any full calculations on this stuff, you just assumed a ton of things.
2) There's too much paranoia and doom scenario here.
3) You're ignoring prior reads. Yes, a player can totally mix up his play, but that doesn't make it unexploitable or winning.
Often times when you aren't sure what somebody is doing, you have a lot more fear and a lot less confidence in what you're doing.
I was playing a very random and losing player the other day over a series of six or so games. This player was very bizarre. He was taking just about every line (minus turn aggression) you could think of and showing up with strong hands in all of them, and medium to air hands on the later street type lines. His bet sizing varied so much, that I was really trying to focus on finding major leaks of his through the bet sizing and was growing frustrated.
After a few games, I really stopped to think and realized this guy was already being exploited in other ways by my play. I was value betting super aggressively and large and he was paying me off all day. He was very loose and fairly passive on the flop, still pretty loose on the turn, and then his river play varied tremendously. I ended up settling on the fact that I really had no good read on his bet sizing, but that was OK. I went 4-2 and felt fine that I was exploiting him well.
The point is, that just because I didn't have a very clear picture of how bad this player was or what he was doing initially, does not mean I was not beating him, or what he was doing was not bad.
"Let's say it's the first hand at 50/100, you're 13 bb deep and in the bb. You're holding any random hand in the Nash 20+ shoving range (which is really quite huge) and your opponent minraises his button.
The problem here is that you don't have any idea what this guy is minraising with and you also can't just assume that you have any fold equity whatsoever if you shove over him."
Imagine it is the first hand of the game, 10/20, 1500 stacks. You open KK, you are 3bet. How do you know he's not only 3betting AA here? You play a default strategy that is best vs the field of players without any other information. Maybe you sharkscope a player and gain some other information (losing players that are tilting and moving up stakes are generally more spewy or prone to tilt, for instance). But overall, you base your decisions on prior experience. You know that almost everybody 3bets wider than AA and also that most people will get it in much lighter than AA here, so KK is more than fine to play.
It's the same thing in the end game. Almost everybody that raises aggressively in the end game is giving you some fold equity if you shove. The difference in the end game, is that you already have reads to go off of. You already have an idea of how your opponent plays. Now, he may have a totally different random strategy (suffice to say, almost nobody does and those that do usually have a bad one), but you can play a default game until then. Shove wide value hands over his PFR. It can't be terrible unless he's only open raising a very tight range, and odds are if he open raises his first hand he is not open raising a tight range.
Look into the Bayes Theorem, that might lead to some insight on making assumptions with a lack of large sample sized information.
Don't fret though, I only say these things about fear because your post really just gives me this feeling that you're worried about this player type. Nobody really does what you're talking about, and if they do, they are almost certainly not playing well.
That does not mean this isn't worth looking into and thinking about, but it's more likely that time is more valuably spent on things like common postflop spots that you're in, or playing some games.
The overall short response to your post from me is: You don't need to know exactly what your opponent is doing to play back or obtain an edge.
Thanks a lot for your time to answer this so detailed, I really appreciate that.
You're right, I'm really lacking confidence at the moment, especially in the end game. Maybe I should simply play a few hundred $10 regular speed games on Stars and only concentrate on post-flop decisions.
Part of my fear of getting exploited also comes from the fact that a few regulars at Carbon actually did that and I lost a lot of money before I realized what they were doing. What you describe as a default strategy only works if you're playing against random opponents - which is true on a site such as Stars - but if there are only a handful of different opponents, things can go horribly wrong if you don't figure them out quickly enough.
There was one guy in particular who had his stats blocked that exploited me pretty hard - he played very aggressively in his buttons and then suddenly switched to a complete nit at 50/100.
At the beginning, I defaulted to shoving very wide over his minraises until I realized that he only seemed to do that with very strong hand and limp everything else. I dropped at least 5 buy-ins against him because I couldn't fold hands such strong as ATs / KQs or JJ. I kept telling myself that it doesn't make any sense for him to only minraise so strong and limp all his trash and lost even more money.
Then, I tried to play back at him in limped pots. He seemed to attack these limped pots really wide for full pot every time I checked to him and fold to most of my leads, so I tried to exploit that by check/shoving whenever I hit middle pair or better and lead into him with air. Well, he showed up with all kinds of super strong hands that you'd never expect in limped pots.
In the end, I had the feeling that this guy blocked his sharkscope because he's actually very good and only made a few very weird moves in the first games to make me thing he's a fish and thus keep rematching him.
At the moment, I'm just so extremely frustrated because I keep making the wrong decisions over and over again. Every time I see my opponent do something that's exploitable and I actually try to exploit him, things go horribly wrong.
Maybe I'm really overthinking things too much. Now that you mentioned that, I suddenly remember many situations where I was thinking things like "oh he can't have a hand here, etc." or "this line doesn't make any sense at all with that particular hand" and then - instead of doing the obvious - I was overly creative and levelled myself.
I have a lot of time to play at the upcoming holiday weekend, so I think I'll simply play as many $10 regular speed games on Stars as I can and fully focus on post-flop play. Maybe I should even single-table them, or at most two-table.
Hopefully, this'll give me back confidence in my game, and I shouldn't run into too many end game scenarios while playing regspeeds.
Jack
"At the beginning, I defaulted to shoving very wide over his minraises until I realized that he only seemed to do that with very strong hand and limp everything else. I dropped at least 5 buy-ins against him because I couldn't fold hands such strong as ATs / KQs or JJ."
One major word of caution here. You're almost never folding ATs/KQs and I've never even thought about folding JJ 15bb or shorter.
If I had to bet right now, I would bet that this player just ran incredibly hot. Think about his open minraising range, and how tight that has to be for you to fold JJ. Was he really raising like one out of 25 buttons? If this was really the case, wouldn't you notice him not raising for 10-20-30 buttons in a row? If this guy has a strategy to only minraise 4% of his hands or so, you're only going to see him raise once out of twenty five hands on average, so if he picked up JJ then KK then AA in a row, he's just lucky. If he did not, then you should be seeing a ton of limps and folds between his open raises. However, in the 50-100 level, in just one or two games, I can't imagine having any sort of nit read 10-15bb deep to make folding KQs or ATs correct facing a minraise. Other players can definitely weigh in here if they disagree, but I'm pretty confident in this.