For this week's WF, I decided to post a few excerpts of strategy Q & A from the FastTrack Forum on HUSNG.com.
The FT Forum is a private strategy message board. Students can participate in the forum with a full access membership (ask unlimited questions, start a personal thread, post in other threads) or read-only access (no posting, read only). The FT forum was originally run by Mersenneary - I took over in July 2011 and have been running it since. The forum is archived (the same as 2p2), so there is a lot of value in reading through all the posts over the past year or so.
More info on FT program: http://www.husng.com/content/fast-track-2012-open-thread#comment-27865
***Students questions bolded
DONKBETTING:
one more thing that Ive noticed is that good regs seems to fold alot when I DB my value/semibluff hands on semiwet boards that I dont expect them to CB wide. Have they come to unserstand that a DB there is strong so do you think its better to check and hope they CB it?
i would only donk if i know they are checking back their air along with marginal sd value/draws that will likely continue vs a donkbet. there isn't much value in donkbetting if they are going to cbet most of their sd value/draws when checked to, it's not like you are giving up a ton of free equity when they check back their air.
i think this is a key thing that people aren't getting with donkbetting. basically, if you donkbet on a wet board that villain doesnt cbet wide and he folds his air...what did you accomplish really? you only did better than checking to c/r when you start getting value from a decent amount of hands that call your donkbet that would have checked back if checked to.
so if i start seeing villain check back flops instead of cbetting and showing down hands like:
QX on JT8
T7 on JT8
AQ on JT8
etc
then it's v likely a donkbet is going to fair better than a c/r, since their are clearly quite a bit of hands that villain will continue vs a donk with.
cbet frequency is really important when considering donking, but so is the range that villain is cbetting. we won't always have enough info to know the range, so i'd go with pop tends (i think the pop tend is to cbet most marginal sd value still...tho i'd expect villain to check back some 8X hands on average prob)
i wouldn't donk these boards as a standard for value.
most importantly, donking this board as a bluff is really bad imo.
if the avg villain is checking back most of his air, then we can lead pretty wide into a really weak checkback range on the turn profitably. when we donk, we are leading into an undefined range...we should check and let villain define his range by checking back, and just lead the turn a lot on average (some kind of equity tho).
CBETTING:
You said you would CB [Kx on QJT], [Tx on QT9ss], [K8 on T97]. But doesnt these board hit villains calling range really hard? Do we have enoughEQ/FE? Would you ever consider a smaller CB size vs fish with these hand? I think these spots are better to CB then the above:: [A8 on K76ss], [K8 on A53], [Kx on AK5] but you recomended checking behind and stabbing turn. Arent they dryer and better to CB?
villain still has air in his range on those examples, and you aren't getting c/r'd that much! think about his whole range like i said, how many hands are really c/r'ing us? we have good barrel opps on turn/river. it's not like i'd tell you to cbet total air on these boards, but we have an oesd/2nd pair/oesd respectively (good equity). if villain was c/ring us with a wide range, all of these hands would be checkbacks.
where are you getting the last 3 examples from? i would check that back vs someone who is c/ring a wide range (polarized cbet range). we do not need to polarize our cbet range vs the avg player tho bc they are too passive and fold to cbets/barrels too much.
vs fish, weak KX on AK5 can be good to check back tho just bc its hard to get value on the flop and it's a board where you aren't giving up free equity a ton with a check.
the only boards that i'm checking back readless are boards where i simply don't think cbetting is profitable bc villains range hits it too hard and we don't have enough equity to cbet. i don't worry about how often i'm getting c/r'd at all, bc the avg player cr's a really fit or fold range a lot of the time.
SOME MENTAL GAME ADVICE:
Basically, in my current job, I have to constantly give my absolute very best - but the challenge is not beating other people, I merely get extremely complicated computer problems that I have to solve in the best way possible - and I do not only seek to just solve the problem, but to find the best solution possible. And I think that sometimes translates to the tables a little bit. So often, I find myself playing against some other reg of about the same skill-set and I strive to find a way of beating him.
why don't you just forget about the fact that their is a human being on the other end of the game, and just pretend it's a smart/adaptive computer program that he have to learn to beat (obv it has human nature elements you need to consider)? if you look at it this way, what is the difference between this approach to poker and what you do in real life? frequencies, ranges, etc...it's all a big math/strategy problem. this is mainly how i approach it tbh.
there is now limit on how much time it will take for me to master this game. there is no such thing as mastering poker. you should always be in the learning process. - i'm being nitpicky though :)
Of course, the downside is that I'll have a lot less time for poker, so variance could actually become a problem for me again - running bad over 1k games, that isn't over after just a few days anymore
definitely! just remember that you can't think about poker in terms of "time", only in terms of "games played". it sounds like you know this though - it's definitely a huge leak of the avg player i have found.
THEORY TANGENT:
we 3bet someone at any stacks with any range, range villain calls with doesnt matter to us, flop is 987 and we have a very accurate read that villain perceives our check on this board as overs/air giving up and will bet at this board with any pair or decent equity. we should not have a cbetting range vs this player. we should just be check/raising or check/folding. we allow villain to have bluffs in his range, noone seems to respect check/shoves on these type boards much (and hes pretty commited once he stabs at the pot) so he wont make any hero folds hardly ever. it maximizes our value. allows us to much more comfortably check our AK/AQ type stuff in this spot in the future and actually see a turn bc villain will perceive our range then as having more value in it (we should cbet our value then if we think villain has adjusted, as having seen us check/shove value will make our cbetting range appear weaker). we aren't worried about giving free equity to villain because we know he stabs such a huge amoutn of hands on a board he perceives us as missing. so basically having a leading range with this dynamic is not max EV.
you need pretty specific reads for this though. cbetting your AA as a standard is obv best here,b ut if you find that every time you check a board like this with your air/AK/AQ type stuff that your opponent is betting/overbetting, then it's def going to be good to adjust to checking your value as well.
