Spoonitnow homework (Making Our Strategies More Robust and Avoiding Auto-Pilot)

I'm really glad to see somebody doing this work. The last person I can remember actually working through this type of thing on my suggestion was m2m about two or three years ago.

Originally Posted by spoonitnow

I'm really glad to see somebody doing this work. The last person I can remember actually working through this type of thing on my suggestion was m2m about two or three years ago.

Thanks, your strategy articles and particularly the way they give people _specific_ things to go away and do for themselves are excellent. I think often people are right when they say "you've got to do the work for yourself" but they then leave new guys without anywhere to start, because they don't know enough yet to know what to work on. Thanks for the articles.

Here's another hand for this thread:

Villain here we have only quite a small sample on (66 hands), but IME that is normally enough to get PFR to converge, and here he is 20/11 suggesting someone who is not a complete drooler but who does call too much preflop and is likely to be somewhat tight-passive overall. Now obviously someone could have been dealt a few nice cold-calling hands in a row, but as a preliminary read I think saying he's likely to be weak-tight is not a bad start.

Hero (BTN): $49.20 (196.8 bb)
SB: $33.52 (134.1 bb)
BB: $46.21 (184.8 bb)
UTG: $44.25 (177 bb)
MP: $31.45 (125.8 bb)
CO: $31.81 (127.2 bb)

Preflop: Hero is BTN with A K
3 folds, Hero raises to $0.75, SB folds, BB calls $0.50

First adjustment: Make it a little bigger on the button because I have a great hand. It's not a read based adjustment, just general exploitation - I wouldn't do it if I had 500 hands on both blinds (ie. they have 500 hands on me), but here I didn't have much history with either blind, so I can assume they won't notice too often if I just bet bigger with my value hands and smaller with my bluffs. I could probably have even got away with 3.5bb here.

Against people who I thought might notice my varying sizing, I would still vary my sizing sometimes, but now not according to my cards (hidden information) but instead according to who is in the blinds (information already available to the table) making it bigger against someone who'd defend lighter and smaller against someone who was tighter in the blinds. So now I'd be betting the same size with my entire range, but varying the sizing according the the opponents tendencies.

Flop: ($1.60) 4 A 8 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $1.25, BB raises to $3.75, Hero calls $2.50

WTF - we've been raised. Quick - stack off. Hold on though, is someone who we think is likely to be weak-tight raising his draws? Is he raising AQ or even AJ BTNvBB because of the loose aggressive dynamic those spots often involve? Often, against regs, I'd be happy to stack off here and chalk it up to a cooler when they show up with 88/44/A8/A4/AA, but against this specific villain I think I'd now prefer to play a small pot.

EDIT: I only just noticed how deep we were in this hand, so in any case I wouldn't try to stack off on the flop against a more aggressive, standard TAG. However, the general point about making the adjustment of deciding I'd prefer to play a small pot still stands.

Turn: ($9.10) Q (2 players)
BB checks, Hero checks

So I check back the turn.

River: ($9.10) 2 (2 players)
BB bets $5.25, Hero calls $5.25

A bigger bet could make me go two ways.

1. I might fold to it, believing it to be for value and therefore bigger
2. I might call it, believing it to be an attempt to push me off more of my value range.

I'm not entirely happy about why I have those tendencies when considering the size of a river bet I'm facing, and I'm not saying they are correct, but they are my thought pattern so I might as well admit to them.

Given his sizing though, giving us about 3:1, I figured he could still have been raising a draw and that my read could have been incorrect, so I called.

Results: $19.60 pot ($0.88 rake)
Final Board: 4 A 8 Q 2
Hero mucked A K and lost (-$9.75 net)
BB showed 8 A and won $18.72 ($8.97 net)

And lost a lot less money than I would have done against someone who I was sure would raise their draws inclining me to just stack off on the flop.

So, I'm not happy that on the river I didn't stick with my read, but I also figured I might have induced a river bluff from a bricked diamond draw by checking back the turn, so that also inclined me to call. He could also be good enough to thinly value bet like AJ here but I wasn't thinking that at the time.

Comments on the hand in general are welcome as well as comments on the adjustments made - I'm not holding this up as an example of how to play a hand, and in some ways I don't like it too much, but I did think it was a good hand to post to illustrate where I'd deviate from my standard line because of a read.