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Nate’s away this week, but Leo Wolpert and Andrew take advantage of the opportunity to answer some listener questions that have been lingering for too long in the mailbag queue.
0:30 – Hello and welcome; impressions of WSOP final table
18:23 – Playing Kings
42:17 – Barreled on a paired board at the Lil’ One for One Drop final table
1:07:40 – Game selection: tournaments vs cash games
Thanks for letting us know not to waste our time with this episode.
XOXO
the Ladies <3
P.S. Come back soon, Nate!
Brutal. Totally going to cancel my upcoming voice acting and opera singing auditions now.
In the A-4 hand, is there not a case that this is one of those situations where it is worthwhile to pass up what is likely to be at best a fairly small edge in order to preserve our stack? If I’m at the final table and in possession of one of the biggest stacks, then I’m inclined to be very reluctant to play a marginal hand out of position against another big stack, most especially when it’s a player known to be tricky and aggressive. I want to have either a hand that I’m happy to 3-bet and then get all in pre-flop with, or one with potential to make a really strong made hand or draw but which I’m happy to discard on all but very favourable flops (suited connectors and small pairs are the obvious candidates).
A-4 seems to me like a hand that, the times we hit, is almost always going to make a marginal hand that we can bluff-catch with, but will hardly ever make hands that we can play strongly ourselves. If I’m going up against an aggressive chip-leader out of position, I at least want give myself a *chance* of hitting a hand I can play strongly. We may sometimes end up making marginal call-downs when we play 10-9 suited, but it’s also a hand that can make nutty hands that we can look to double up with.
In this specific hand, we got a pretty good flop, a pretty good turn, and a pretty good river, and yet at no point in the hand did we feel particularly comfortable, and at no time were we in a position to play our hand strongly for value. Even if there is profit to be eked out in this scenario, I think in a final table situation the small benefit is just not worth it compared to the significant risk of losing an excellent chance to end up in the big money of a top 3 place.
It may be that I’m just too nitty in these spots (having been burned in the past) but I’d generally allow the big stack on my right to exploit me a little as a “privilege of position” if it means I can happily continue to exploit most of the rest of the table. I just don’t see the need to butt heads with this type of hand at this time in the tournament.
I like and agree with Chris’s point. Andrew discusses how to play a similar situation (a final table bubble) in one of his TPE videos. Playing out of position against the other big stack is not a good basic strategy.
Yet, pre-flop I still think this is a decent spot. Against this player, I think hero can consider this a profitable opportunity.
So the issue, one I cannot answer, is how to reconcile these two ideas. How can hero avoid losing a big pot? Is it still profitable if hero folds whenever he misses the flop? Doubtful. I don’t use a lot of strict rules, but here, maybe a determination to get out by the turn if unimproved would be useful.
I do think that A4 is far too good to fold preflop. I also think that the situation might make A4 rather easier to play than it otherwise would. You’re not so likely to give three streets of value against an opponent is likely to pot-control more often that he otherwise would (given tournament considerations).
I think Leo makes a great case for folding the turn here–the key point is that you have so many better hands in your range. (I’d add that it’s not clear how many double-barrel bluffs Mr. Tran is really willing to put in his range here.)
Anyway, I do think we don’t want to lose too many chips with this hand, but I also think the situation will make it pretty easy not to put too many chips in bad.
Commute ended with the end of the discussion of the first email, where author had Kings in early position. I really liked what Andrew and Leo had to say. It sounded just like Expected Value, but they never had to use that phrase. Learn to think about how much you will win or lose, when you win or lose, not just about your probability of winning. Very good segment. Excited for the rest of the show, even if dreamy Nate is on hiatus.
Doesn’t the answer to whether to play satellites depend on how much of an edge you have? There has to be some sort of break-even point based on the double rake and -ROI in the larger tournament you are winning an entry into (or if you can sell the entry at a discount – I thought there was a way to do that online).
This will sound as if I’m being facetious, but there’s another reason that some people have for playing satellites – and it’s one that I’ve heard poker players give in the past – and that’s the “partner factor”.
There will be some poker players – almost entirely recreational ones – who aren’t remotely bankrolled sufficiently to fly out to Las Vegas (for example) and play a $10,000 poker tournament. Nonetheless, if they binked $15k or so in a poker tournament, they’d happily fork out that money just for the experience of going to the WSOP, even if it means spending a considerable chunk of their poker bankroll in order to do it.
However, if you are married with kids – or just in some sort of committed long-term relationship – it’s potentially very difficult to explain to your wife or husband that you want to spend that $15k windfall to go off and play poker in Las Vegas. The partner may justifiably ask why, if that money is available for recreation, the poker player isn’t taking everyone away for a dream holiday in Disneyworld or to a luxury resort in Hawaii.
That problem goes away if the player can instead say that they’ve won a package to go and play in the WSOP. That reasoning only applies to certain satellites for certain tournaments, of course ( wouldn’t work for online tournaments, for example), but it is a rationale I’ve heard used before!
There are lots of “justifications” for negative EV behavior. I think Andrew’s point is to guide folks on how to think about the decision to play these sattys, so that they don’t end up justifying away a bad decision. Remember, Andrew was answering a question from a reader about what is best for his poker bankroll. In that case, I don’t see much that counter’s Andrew’s point.
As Chris points out, many players have other goals besides bankroll growth. People play lotteries for lots of reasons. It is a behavioral bias. Sattys are kind of like a minor league baseball contract. Even those who don’t win at least get to say they played professional baseball. Utilities go way beyond just bankroll growth.
Of course, if Andrew keeps upgrading the decision making of the recreational poker player, he’ll be lowering his own EV in the WSOP Main Event (which is filled with satty winners), so maybe there is a grander game here that we all fail to see. Well played Andrew.
Oh yeah, absolutely – I fully agree with the reasoning Andrew and Leo give for not playing sats, and I almost never play them myself. I’m merely saying that for some people it makes a certain sort of sense, particularly if the chance to play in a big tournament (life EV?) is worth more to them than the $EV of the gamble.
Of course, sometimes you’ll find satellites that are so full of terrible players that playing in them can be +EV by any measure.
I am sure I have said this before, but bring on more Leo!
Really liked the discussion of live MTTs and bankroll management.
RE Snowie Training:
The counter strategy that Snowie trains against is complicated and proprietary according to Johannes.
I know that the University of Alberta team that does limit hold ’em heads-up bots has spent a LOT of time and effort in generating pseudo-perfectly exploitative strategies to measure how exploitable their bots are. They have published several papers about generating nemesis strategies to maximally exploit a known strategy. I think they use them to measure how close to GTO (how exploitable) their bots are.
Thanks for the comments on mucking the best hand …
In a tournament, this happened to me for the first time ever recently: Obsessed with the KK in my hand, the board came 23456. The guy flipped over and ace, I saw the wheel, and mucked. It was a small mistake chipwise, yet the entire tbl got a chuckle at my expense. Bright side … Sometimes the tbl thinking you’re a fool isn’t a bad thing.
Hey Andrew and All,
I’m pretty sure that the discussion of the A4 hand contains a significant mistake.
You say several times in this episode that if villain makes a half-pot bet on the turn we should be folding less than 1/3 of the time in order to not be exploitable. You say this specifically when discussing the hand from the one drop tournament.
However, I’m pretty sure that this is not quite true. The reason is subtle, but very significant.
The point is that turn cards are not all created equal. Some turn cards help your range more than villain’s, and some turn cards help villain’s range more than ours. On the latter turn cards, it would often be game-theoretically optimal to fold more than 1/3 of the time to a turn bet. Similarly, on the former, we’d be folding less than 1/3 of the time to a turn bet. Overall, on average over all turn cards, we’d be folding less than 1/3, but on certain turn cards we’d indeed be folding more.
“But how does this make sense?”, you may ask. “If villain can bet half-pot on such turns with all of his range and get us to fold more than 1/3 of the time, aren’t we being exploitable?”. The answer is no: some turn cards are so good for villain’s range that he doesn’t have the required number of bluffs in his range. The turn card simply made his range very very strong relative to ours.
I’m not 100% sure that what I wrote pertains to GTO: it’s possible that GTO strategies actually make sure to have enough bluffs in our range for any runout. I think they don’t, but I’m not sure. But even if it’s not true for GTO, it’s probably true for actual play, because in actual play ranges are not optimal, so villains will often find themselves with ranges that are super-strong on some turn cards, and on such turns we should be folding a huge amount of the time: villain can’t exploit this because his range is so strong and doesn’t have enough bluffs to exploit us.
P.S. I’m pretty sure that if you show the winning hand and accidentally muck it because you think you lost, you still win the pot. It depends on the casino and the floor, but from what I understand the correct ruling is that the cards are retrieved from the muck, as long as they are easily identified, and used to claim the pot. This is according to the “Brick and Mortar” 2p2 forum, anyway. The point is that the muck does not have the magical power to invalidate cards that is often ascribed to it.
I think that you are right, at least on a theoretical level – in the argument “you need to call at least 1/n of the time to avoid being exploitable”, the exploitating threatened would be villain betting all of his hands. It’s entirely plausible that in some spots villain _can_ bet all his hands profitably. If we’ve made a mistake in constructing our range on an earlier street, it seems as though that argument is likely to make us compound errors to avoid being exploited, so it’s potentially a dangerous line of argument.
When it comes to analysis of a specific holding, I’m much more convinced by arguments as to how/whether we can play a hand profitably, whereas this sort of game theory style analysis seems to me more useful for a more holistic analysis of general strategy. Obviously the two need to fit together somehow, but i’m still somewhat skeptical.
Moreover, I’m not sure what impact the Sklansky multi-street analysis that Andrew linked to a few months back would have on the 1-street analysis. It seems to me that it might make us need to fold seemingly exploitably because of the threat of later streets.
Ian,
I agree with all your points.
About the Sklansky multi-street analysis: Yes, one of the lessons from it is that sometimes we need to fold exploitably on early streets because of the threat on later streets. But an even bigger lesson of that analysis is that we need to construct our ranges to always have some fraction of nutted hands in almost all of our ranges on almost all runouts, so that we’ll never find ourselves with a capped range. Recall that Sklansky’s analysis only holds when our range is capped and villain has the nuts some fraction of the time. But when we have some fraction of the nuts as well, villain is highly limited in exploiting us. This is why you find expert players making weak-looking plays that seem like they can’t be optimal: they’re sometimes doing this to make sure their ranges are uncapped.
Take as an example the A4 hand from the podcast. A4 is considered a trouble hand because of reverse implied odds: if we play it too strongly we often end up value-owning ourselves, and if we play it weakly OOP we end up giving free cards, paying off, playing face-up, etc. . All of this is particularly true if we 3bet AJ+ pre, so the aces in our flatting range are A2-AT: this is pretty exploitable for the aforementioned reasons. But this is basically the point of Sklansky’s analysis as well. Good ournament players fix this by flatting a very wide range in the BB, which consists of also good hands. For example, people will sometimes flat hands as strong as AQ or AK in the same spot where hero flatted A4. This uncaps our range and allows us to play our A4 much better, because now our range is uncapped and it’s harder to take advantage of us.
You’re probably right about that as theoretical matter, but considering that all V has done so far is raise from late position and c-bet the flop, I doubt he’s in danger of not having enough bluff candidates in his range, so I don’t see it having a material impact on this spot.
Can’t give the strategy points justice in the limited time I have right now, but I just want to clarify that in both instances the cards were not retrievable from the muck (so yes, that could very well mean the guy was lying about mucking a queen).