29 Jul 2024 bluff catching moving up stakes blockers UTG / EP ranges These mistakes could be costing you money. Which ones? Let’s find out with today's TOP 3. #1: You try to be balanced in every spot This includes trying to achieve the perfect ratio of value and bluffs, as well as always calling down the top of your range when facing a bet. You’re basically trying to play like a human solver, but for some reason, it’s not working out. The problem with being balanced is that you leave no room for yourself to exploit weaker players. Regardless of what stakes you play, there are a ton of spots that your opponents are constantly messing up. If someone is overfolding the river, you just want to be bluffing all your air. If someone is overcalling, you want to give up all your air. It might sound really obvious, but somehow, the more time we spend grinding solvers, the more we forget about this simple fact. Would we be better off without solvers then? Well, not really! Solvers are incredibly useful tools that can give us a huge edge over our opponents — but just like any tool, we need to be using them correctly. Take this hand for example. UTG raises, and we defend the BB with AT. UTG c-bets the flop and turn, and we make a pretty standard call with the top pair. The river is a T, giving us two pairs, and our opponent goes all-in for 2x the pot. Here’s how NOT to use the solver — we input the hand, and look at what AT does facing a jam. The solver is calling most of the time, so we conclude that calling is the right decision. Maybe we even think about why the solver is calling: here AT is one of the strongest hands we can have, and we even block some of UTG’s value. But the fact is, none of this will improve your winrate in practice. Instead, here’s how a good player would use the solver: they input the hand, and notice that AT is indifferent when facing a jam. They understand that indifferent hands are very sensitive to villain’s mistakes, and that it’s necessary to look at UTG’s side of the strategy, in order to better understand how an actual player might be deviating. They see that UTG needs to bluff all of their Tx, and even hands like Kx/QQ to be balanced. They conclude that no one is doing this in practice, therefore AT has to be a fold. In short, solvers are not there to tell us how to play a hand. Instead, they are there to show us how our opponents are messing up, and what we can do to take advantage of that. On the river, even a small mistake can open up a big exploit. So the way to make money is not to try and be balanced ourselves, but rather to go all out and exploit our opponent’s mistakes. #2: You focus too much on blockers You fold when you have bad blockers and make big hero calls “because you have good blockers.” But for some reason, you’re always running into the nuts. The thing is, blockers aren’t something that magically makes any call profitable. Instead, you want to think about them as a kind of juice. For a pot-sized bet, our opponent needs to have two value hands for every one bluff. If they can do that, then the EV of our call is exactly zero. If our hand has good blockers - that is, we block value and unblock bluffs, then this adds a bit of juice to our call. This juice can be worth anywhere from a fraction of a big blind to five or even ten big blinds — it really depends on how strong our blocker effects are. Occasionally, blockers can turn a losing call into a profitable one. But this requires your opponent to only be slightly underbluffing. If the extent of the underbluff is large, then no matter how much juice you add to it, there is no way that the call can be profitable. Let’s take a look at the same hand and see how this works. We previously concluded that AT should be a fold because most players will not be balanced when betting the river. But what if we account for our hand’s blockers? We block AA and AK, so this should increase the EV of our call, right? Well, it turns out that there is nothing special about AT. Even though we do block some value, we also block a lot of the QT/JT that need to be bluffing on the river. So our blockers don’t really add any juice to our call. With a hand like A6, we would have a far more interesting decision. According to the solver, our blockers give us about 3 big blinds worth of juice. This is because the 6 blocks more value hands than the T and also unblocks more bluffs. So it would still be a reasonable hand to call with, even if our opponent was under bluffing slightly. But of course, if we thought our opponent was massively under bluffing, then we should just be folding all the time — regardless of how good our blockers are. #3: You always bet big on wet boards You’re terrified of getting outdrawn, so your entire strategy revolves around charging your opponent the maximum when you think they have a draw. Your hope is that they fold, but if they do decide to call, then at least you made them pay for it. The problem here is that we are focusing on a relatively small part of our opponent’s range. Flush draws typically make up 10-15% of ranges, so we shouldn’t be basing our entire strategy around them. Instead, we want to choose a size that works well against the villain’s overall range. Generally speaking, big bets have the effect of narrowing our opponent’s range. The bigger we bet, the more they can fold, leaving behind a range that gets progressively stronger. This is fine if they have a small proportion of nuts: in this case, they either have to pay us off with plenty of bluff catchers, or overfold and allow our bluffs to make a profit. Take a board like 962 for example. Here, we can bet quite large with our overpairs and still get plenty of value from hands like the second and third pair. The caller cannot avoid paying us off with these weak bluff catchers because on such a dry board, they don't have anything better to defend with. But as the board gets wetter, the proportion of nut hands in the caller's range starts to increase. On top of that, the hands we beat also have more equity on average. It's tempting to size up and charge these hands the maximum, but there are a couple of problems with doing this. Firstly, we lose a lot of value against the weak part of the villain's range. Secondly, we lose a bigger pot the times we run into the nuts. And finally, because of how often the draws will get there by the river, sizing up doesn't actually generate that much more value against them. So on the whole, it's better to size down and get called by more weak bluff catchers. As an analogy, imagine if you had to choose between $100 in cash, or a $150 cheque — but the cheque has a 50% chance of bouncing. The prospect of an extra $50 might be tempting, but anyone who understands expected value would go for the $100 cash. This is exactly why the solver sizes down on wet boards like 865 two-tone. Not only do we lose less the times we run into two pairs or a straight, we also secure more value against weak bluff catchers like Q5 and J6 — hands that we are almost guaranteed to make money against. Instead, betting big to charge hands like 78 would be like choosing the cheque over the cash — we might win a bigger pot the times that it doesn't get there, but the times that it does, we are left with absolutely nothing. So that was an intuitive way to understand why solvers sometimes size down on wet boards. Of course, there might be other possible signs that you're a losing player. For example, you lose more money than you win; you struggle to pay your bills; people want to play with you, and so on? If you want to share more thoughts on this topic, leave comments with your ideas below. GL!