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Theory exercise again

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  1. #1

    Default Theory exercise again

    Very simple scenario.

    You are playing 6 max against with two opponents directly to your left, A and B. You have been opening your button 100% of the time for a minraise when A is in the SB and B is in the BB. As you continue to play you notice these identical stats from A and B. They never cold call, and 3bet 24% of the time to your open. Versus 4bets they spazz 5bet air a lot, sometimes cold call the 4bets, and rarely fold. And when you have called their 3bets they have shown very high aggression. They fold the rest of their hands preflop.

    How do you adjust your play from the button when its folded around to you when these opponents are in the BB?
    Last edited by IowaSkinsFan; 12-23-2010 at 10:34 PM.
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  2. #2
    Will they stop their crazy play if we stop opening 100% of the button?

    If we can open less and still have them play just as crazy, I'd probably just start opening towards a range that I'd be happy 4bet-calling off.
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  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by griffey24 View Post
    Will they stop their crazy play if we stop opening 100% of the button?

    If we can open less and still have them play just as crazy, I'd probably just start opening towards a range that I'd be happy 4bet-calling off.
    I'd just make your best assumptions based on your experience with players who 3bet a ton.

    My guess would be that they would still 3bet that much, probably for a long time without noticing that you've been opening the button less.
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  4. #4
    They are still folding the blinds fairly often, so I would continue to open a wide range on the button. However, I would drop the worst hands from my range. I would widen my 4bet value range a lot and increase my 4bet sizing to deter them from just flatting 4bets.
    What are your thoughts on just 4bet shoving 100bbs to avoid making a mistake postflop and guaranteeing ourselves a showdown? I think that would be okay with hands like AQ and 99.

    Are they 5bet shoving or 5betting small? If they are 5betting small enough, we could add a 6bet bluffing range.

    Because they are 3betting and going crazy postflop, I would just flat their 3bets with my premium hands to trap.
  5. #5
    Assume 100bbs and any 5bet is a shove.
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  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by JL View Post
    Because they are 3betting and going crazy postflop, I would just flat their 3bets with my premium hands to trap.
    Given this:

    Versus 4bets they spazz 5bet air a lot, sometimes cold call the 4bets, and rarely fold.
    I don't see why we should flat our premiums. Very aggressive (I assume) doesn't mean they're going to be auto-spewing tons of boards or anything, but we do know that they rarely fold to 4bets so I think 4betting our premiums is required.

    I wanna merge our 4b/calling range a bunch & tighten up our opening range to mostly hands we wanna continue to a 3b with. Call 3bets with the range below our 4b/calling range and chop off the dogshit part of our opening range. That should work until they adjust to the fact that we're like never 4b/folding, but if they're anything like most multi-tabling regs, this adjustment will be slow so we should be able to get away with this for quite a while.
  7. #7
    I'd be cutting down my opening frequency and widening my 4 b/c range.
  8. #8
    I think aside from the adjustments others have stated developing an open limping range from the button seems like a reasonable option.
  9. #9
    Edit: Nvm
    Last edited by IowaSkinsFan; 12-23-2010 at 10:33 PM.
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  10. #10
    Ugh.

    I'm really embarrassed to say I was thinking about this more today and realized I totally boofed this thread up. I had a miscalculation and I'm pretty sure it makes the answer I was going to give be wrong and therefore mess up the point I was going to make.

    I have fixed OP to contain the right numbers. Those who see the change will likely get what I'm getting at.
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  11. #11
    Well it sounds like this situation basically puts us in a game with shallower stacks, more akin to a SnG or something. In which case the previous points mentioned such as tightening up a bit, widening the 4b/c range and even limping some buttons would seem to be valid. We also are obviously going to have a much smaller SPR on average and are thus going to have to station a lot more.

    I'm not really sure about the math part of this but the change from 29% to 24% is a fairly significant # of hands that we are now stealing with again? It wouldn't seem like losing 2BB when trying to steal 2.5BB 24% of the time would be losing in the long run even if we continued to open a massive range. but we obviously have to account for both of their 24% so the chance of a 3bet increases.

    Not really sure where I am going with this...
    [00:29] <daven> dc, why not check turn behind
    [00:30] <DC> daven
    [00:30] <DC> on my hand?
    [00:30] <daven> yep
    [00:30] <DC> because I am drunk
    [00:30] <daven> nice reason
    [00:30] <daven> no further questions
    [00:30] <yaawn> ^^Lol

    Problem officer...?
  12. #12
    I would drop the bottom end of my opening range from the button and widen my 4b/c range. Given that they are 3b 24% they have a lot of garbage in their 3betting range so i would be 4b jamming air and my value range at a pretty balanced rate. Similarly i would widen my 3b calling range and it would contain a speculative hand range as well as a premium value range with which i would be shipping over their cbets on good flops for my perceived range.
  13. #13
    So they are folding their blinds 76% of the time to our minraise, which means that we can continue to open 100% of our hands and show a profit.
  14. #14
    We pretty much break even on the initial minraise, we'll win the blinds 58% of the time. Assuming they don't adjust then it really doesn't matter whether or not we open hands that we plan on folding to a RR...
  15. #15
    is the point you are trying to make that you can fold to 3bets a high frequency and still win?

    58% of the time they don't 3bet and you win 1.5 bb and if you folded to 100% to their 3bets you still make .0216 BB per open. Obviously you can defend against their 3bets with at least a very tight range and crush them.
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  16. #16
    nutsinho's Avatar
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    flattin ur 4bets, makin u tilt
    i have a pretty precise strategy against this but i feel like this is something everyone should have to work out for themselves. i mean i think this strat is pretty optimal in todays games by A but not so good by B
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  17. #17
    I narrow my BTN opening range to like 30-35%, and I'm almost never going to 4bet unless I have specifically JJ,TT or AK. I will call anything playable though.

    I'd just keep peeling multiple barrels with like AJ high, or any pair expecting I'm just value calling really often. I just keep calling. Usually after they realize I make this adjustment, its pretty easy to pick up on timing tells because they start to hesitate about bluffing me because they end up thinking I'm such a station.

    I hate 4betting against these types that never fold because I think it plays into their game plan of trying to increase variance.
  18. #18
    Let me just say what the answer I think really matters here is and what it says about how we should adjust to other players.

    The ostensible right answer on what to do vs A and B is to open 100% otb. After the 3bet part I think there were some good points but all I really cared about is not folding.The answer could also involve a mix of limping, which actually could be better. What the correct answer could never be is folding the button more than 0% of the time.

    While people 3betting you 24% of the time may seem like a lot, with each player folding 76% of the time to an open make every single open +EV (It actually helped me a lot to realize that in this same scenario if you make the 3betting frequency 25% it makes every open where you are not calling or raising a 3bet -EV, which is going to make your opening frequency much lower). Despite the fact that us tightening our button opening range makes their strategies more of a mistake, it doesn't make tightening our button more optimal.
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  19. #19
    I have more to say about this but I'm currently not finding the right words so I'll post later.
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  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by IowaSkinsFan View Post
    Let me just say what the answer I think really matters here is and what it says about how we should adjust to other players.

    The ostensible right answer on what to do vs A and B is to open 100% otb. After the 3bet part I think there were some good points but all I really cared about is not folding.The answer could also involve a mix of limping, which actually could be better. What the correct answer could never be is folding the button more than 0% of the time.

    While people 3betting you 24% of the time may seem like a lot, with each player folding 76% of the time to an open make every single open +EV (It actually helped me a lot to realize that in this same scenario if you make the 3betting frequency 25% it makes every open where you are not calling or raising a 3bet -EV, which is going to make your opening frequency much lower). Despite the fact that us tightening our button opening range makes their strategies more of a mistake, it doesn't make tightening our button more optimal.
    I'm pretty confused. Are you saying you still want to minraise 100% on the button regardless of their 3betting and then you don't want to fold to any 3bets? This seems like we are going to be playing with much much weaker ranges than they are holding in inflated pots more frequently without the initiative.

    I think this also causes major problems for us if villain starts to adjust (which I expect any reasonable player to do) by 3betting 10-12% instead of 25, it will be much more difficult (and take longer) for us to pick up on his adjustment than it will for him to pick up on ours.
  21. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by Marshall28 View Post
    I'm pretty confused. Are you saying you still want to minraise 100% on the button regardless of their 3betting and then you don't want to fold to any 3bets? This seems like we are going to be playing with much much weaker ranges than they are holding in inflated pots more frequently without the initiative.

    I think this also causes major problems for us if villain starts to adjust (which I expect any reasonable player to do) by 3betting 10-12% instead of 25, it will be much more difficult (and take longer) for us to pick up on his adjustment than it will for him to pick up on ours.
    I think he means in general, once we've decided to play our hand after they have 3bet.

    If however, we were playing against someone who opened 100% of BTN's and called 100% of 3bets, the adjustment of reducing our 3betting to 11% would seem to benefit the BTN rather than us? They'll have a far more profitable initial open if we're folding so much, personally I would start to 3bet a much wider range. Even if we 3bet 90% of our hands, we'd have a stronger range than villain going into the flop.
  22. #22
    min open 90% of hands

    call 3bets with some % larger than their 3betting range, but not that much larger, call it 35% of hands

    4bet if u want too
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  23. #23
    When you minraise, you risk 2 to win 1.5, so it breaks even if they together fold 2/3.5 or 57.1% of the time.

    If they're folding 76% of the time independently, then they're both folding together .76*.76 or 57.8% of the time.

    So min-raising 100% is slightly profitable even if we never continued with a hand. Given that we have position etc, we should be making a good profit otb. This might not be the most profitable strategy tho. Would opening less significantly affect their 3-betting frequency? If not, it's probably best to just find another table.
  24. #24
    As far as 3bet/4bet, you could probably 4bet shove alot of second tier hands against their wide range profitably, even if they never called with worse, because you'd get alot of folds. With super-premiums, just call and let them bluff it off.
  25. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by sauce123 View Post
    min open 90% of hands

    call 3bets with some % larger than their 3betting range, but not that much larger, call it 35% of hands

    4bet if u want too
    But what if we aren't in the top echelon of NLHE players and aren't able to play as well you postflop? Is this still the correct strategy?

    I find if I am raising this many hands that my opponent knows how much air I have and is able to take advantage of me on later streets.
  26. #26
    Lukie's Avatar
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    note: in the first part of my reply i'm responding under the impression that our 2 opponents are playing their 24/24 strategy while we're opening on the button as a direct result of our 100% attempt to steal. specifically they are adapting, not necessarily ideally.

    Quote Originally Posted by IowaSkinsFan View Post
    Let me just say what the answer I think really matters here is and what it says about how we should adjust to other players.

    The ostensible right answer on what to do vs A and B is to open 100% otb. After the 3bet part I think there were some good points but all I really cared about is not folding.The answer could also involve a mix of limping, which actually could be better. What the correct answer could never be is folding the button more than 0% of the time.
    this is inherently flawed.

    let's ignore limping for now because it's hard to quantify and we're not actually going to limp our button.

    raising every hand is profitable in this situation but not necessarily ideal.

    example: say instead of stealing 100%, we use sauce's strategy and fold our worst 10% of hands. our opponents instead now 3-bet us with their top 20% of hands and makes the large majority of our hands more profitable and likely our range more profitable as a whole.

    ---------

    part 2: if we are actually playing bots that don't change their strategy depending on what we're doing, we could probably engineer a specific strategy to take advantage of these players.

    it might go something like the following (totally winging this off the top of my head):

    - raise any hand that we would eventually call a 5-bet shove with (they are each 3-betting 24% and 5-bet spewing a decent amount, so we'll say something like TT+AQ+. Note: similar to the above concept of profitable but not necessarily ideal, just because 4-bet/calling is profitable does not necessarily make it better than another strategy, such as calling a 3-bet).

    against this opponent there is absolutely no reason to ever 4-bet bluff (or to polarize your range or whatever you want to call it); just 4-bet call the top part of your range and be done with it.

    - raise any hand that we can profitably call a 3-bet with. these are mostly your good but not great hands. yeah we're predictable but so what

    - call (limp) drawing type hands that are likely profitable to limp with but not profitable to call a 3-bet with (raising would be just a tiny shade above positive expectation and the exact same as our worst hands). this might include stuff like 75s but of course it depends a lot on their strategy (2-bet frequency, 3-bet bet amount, post-flop strategy)

    - raise garbage, folding to a 3-bet. this is probably the majority of our hands, unless limping our button is a lot better than i have always had the impression of. who knows

    While people 3betting you 24% of the time may seem like a lot, with each player folding 76% of the time to an open make every single open +EV (It actually helped me a lot to realize that in this same scenario if you make the 3betting frequency 25% it makes every open where you are not calling or raising a 3bet -EV, which is going to make your opening frequency much lower). Despite the fact that us tightening our button opening range makes their strategies more of a mistake, it doesn't make tightening our button more optimal.
    nit point to make: the sb 3-betting can/should/does affect the bb's range, but that's not really in the spirit of the thread. see above.
  27. #27
    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    note: in the first part of my reply i'm responding under the impression that our 2 opponents are playing their 24/24 strategy while we're opening on the button as a direct result of our 100% attempt to steal. specifically they are adapting, not necessarily ideally.


    this is inherently flawed.

    let's ignore limping for now because it's hard to quantify and we're not actually going to limp our button.

    raising every hand is profitable in this situation but not necessarily ideal.

    example: say instead of stealing 100%, we use sauce's strategy and fold our worst 10% of hands. our opponents instead now 3-bet us with their top 20% of hands and makes the large majority of our hands more profitable and likely our range more profitable as a whole.

    I see your point. In my experience people tend to not adjust to small frequency changes, such as here, so I think 100% open is likely better than 90% open.

    ---------

    part 2: if we are actually playing bots that don't change their strategy depending on what we're doing, we could probably engineer a specific strategy to take advantage of these players.

    it might go something like the following (totally winging this off the top of my head):

    - raise any hand that we would eventually call a 5-bet shove with (they are each 3-betting 24% and 5-bet spewing a decent amount, so we'll say something like TT+AQ+. Note: similar to the above concept of profitable but not necessarily ideal, just because 4-bet/calling is profitable does not necessarily make it better than another strategy, such as calling a 3-bet).

    against this opponent there is absolutely no reason to ever 4-bet bluff (or to polarize your range or whatever you want to call it); just 4-bet call the top part of your range and be done with it.

    - raise any hand that we can profitably call a 3-bet with. these are mostly your good but not great hands. yeah we're predictable but so what

    - call (limp) drawing type hands that are likely profitable to limp with but not profitable to call a 3-bet with (raising would be just a tiny shade above positive expectation and the exact same as our worst hands). this might include stuff like 75s but of course it depends a lot on their strategy (2-bet frequency, 3-bet bet amount, post-flop strategy)

    - raise garbage, folding to a 3-bet. this is probably the majority of our hands, unless limping our button is a lot better than i have always had the impression of. who knows


    nit point to make: the sb 3-betting can/should/does affect the bb's range, but that's not really in the spirit of the thread. see above.
    All the rest sounds pretty good. You're right about the sbs 3betting affecting the bb's range. In fact in this situation described bb is 3betting more often than sb when he's hu with BU, right?
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  28. #28
    Quote Originally Posted by Marshall28 View Post
    But what if we aren't in the top echelon of NLHE players and aren't able to play as well you postflop? Is this still the correct strategy?

    I find if I am raising this many hands that my opponent knows how much air I have and is able to take advantage of me on later streets.
    uhm, it just doesnt make a lot of sense to be folding the same range as he chooses to 3bet when you are getting 2 to 1 or so and are in position. if he is playing overaggro after the flop, then you may need to pitch a lot of flops, or vice versa.
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  29. #29
    Lukie's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by IowaSkinsFan View Post
    I see your point. In my experience people tend to not adjust to small frequency changes, such as here, so I think 100% open is likely better than 90% open.
    maybe. maybe not. this is an entirely different issue.

    re-quoting your post that i responded to:

    The ostensible right answer on what to do vs A and B is to open 100% otb. After the 3bet part I think there were some good points but all I really cared about is not folding.The answer could also involve a mix of limping, which actually could be better. What the correct answer could never be is folding the button more than 0% of the time.
    bolded part is wrong. ducy?
  30. #30
    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    maybe. maybe not. this is an entirely different issue.

    re-quoting your post that i responded to:


    bolded part is wrong. ducy?
    Yes, you are right, I was wrong about that.
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  31. #31
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    example: say instead of stealing 100%, we use sauce's strategy and fold our worst 10% of hands. our opponents instead now 3-bet us with their top 20% of hands and makes the large majority of our hands more profitable and likely our range more profitable as a whole.
    I'm not sure I agree with the bold part. I don't see why there's any reason to believe that folding the bottom 10% of hands changes the EV of raising AA since we're assuming he won't adjust to our change from opening 100%.
    Last edited by spoonitnow; 01-06-2011 at 10:39 PM.
  32. #32
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    My post was split up into 2 parts.. the first (which you quoted) I assumed they were adjusting, the second not adjusting.
  33. #33
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    My post was split up into 2 parts.. the first (which you quoted) I assumed they were adjusting, the second not adjusting.
    Ah, k. I retract my disagreement. Carry on.

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