Strategy
If you’re a serious online cash game player, it’s very likely you’ve obsessed about your redline at some point, even if just a little bit. And for a good reason.
Despite what people like this might say:
You should absolutely care about your redline. Yes, it’s true that you can’t cashout redline, but the greenline that you actually cash out is significantly impacted by your profitability in non showdown pots. It’s not only silly but also couterproductive to close your eyes about your redline.
In fairness, I believe that most people that say you shouldn’t care about your redline come from the understanding that it’s totally possible to make money in poker with a poor redline. They may also fear that an excessive focus on the redline could lead to missing the point of playing and improving, which is simply to make good decisions.
I agree with all of those things. Your focus should be on improving your thought process and acquiring more heuristics, so that your execution in game gets better. You also don’t need a crushing redline to make money in poker – just like you don’t need to be good looking to be a hollywood actor. But if you do some digging you’ll realize that, amongst the most famous and succesful actors, most of them are not your average Joe. Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Ryan Gosling, Chris Hemsworth – these are the top guys, and they don’t look like you and me.
Whether you like it or not, the same principle applies to poker. While you don’t absolutely need to have a good redline to find success in poker, a quick investigation of the best players in the world will show you that their redlines also don’t look like yours. They look better.
This is the list of the Top 10 Players in the world over the last few years in online cash games, ranked by their pre-rakeback winnings on GG Poker.
Let’s take a look at some of their graphs:
Noticed something? Right.
This is why closing your eyes to your redline is not the way to go. Most of the best players in the world do not have disgusting -10 bb/100 redlines like you do (sorry). Ignoring this huge discrepancy is only going to be detrimental to your career.
In my experience as a player and coach, you wanna have your redline within the -3 to +3 bb/100 range. Lower than that and it’s extremely likely you’re leaving money at the table by playing too passively, folding too much, using too small betsizes and other mistakes we’re going to discuss further. Higher than that and it’s likely you’re being overly aggressive and calling down spots that you shouldn’t, and therefore you are trading redline money for a negative blueline, which is probably costing you EV instead of increasing it.
Can you make it in poker with a Danny DeVito looking redline? Sure. The Number 1 in the profit list above, Barak Wisbrod, has a –7 bb/100 redline, much worse than essentially all of his peers at nosebleeds. And yet he’s there taking most of the money at those stakes. That being said, your chances of big success are significantly increased when you can produce a Brad Pitt looking redline. That’s what we’ll cover next.
HOW TO BUILD A BRAD PITT LOOKING REDLINE
I’ve had all kinds of redline throughout my career. There were periods where it was -10, -5, +4, flat, you name it. I have changed my game and my approach many times over as I moved up in stakes. I’ve also personally coached hundreds of players that have displayed all kinds of redline graphs. I’ve recommended them changes, and I’ve seen their development. All of this to say that at this point I know very well what works and what doesn’t in the process of improving redline. And over the next few paragraphs I will condense all that knowledge to you in a list of Top 3 Tips to Improve Your Redline and Make more Money. Let’s dive into it.
TIP #1 – STOP OVERFOLDING
Overfolding is the most common problem in online poker when the topic is poor redlines. From 2nl to 40KNL, pretty much every single regular overfolds relative to solver, particularly on river nodes.
One instance of that is when playing as the caller OOP from the BB in single raised pots. The IP player goes Bet-Check-Bet with a small flop sizing and a 3/4 river sizing. While solver folds 48% to this river bet on average, Noseebled regs fold this much:
Overfolding is this huge thing in poker mainly because defending according to unexploitable frequencies, at all streets, is in fact hard as hell. It requires doing many hard things at the same time:
Slowplaying with your nutted hands sometimes so that you have a few hands that are snap defenses against any bet sizing;
Bluffcatching with some very marginal holdings like 4th pairs and A highs to sizeable bets;
Bluff raising with marginal bluffcatchers and even complete air to help in the defense strategy.
If you are playing midstakes or below, it’s very likely you’re not only overfolding against river bets, but also against flop and turn bets. For example, one line that almost everyone overfolds against is when facing a small bet from the SB as the BB in a single raised pot in position:
Low stakes players fold an insane 33% of the time, when solver folds around 19%!
To overcome the overfolding problem, I recommend you practice every single day with postflop drills. It’s the most effective way to realize where you are leaking – as you get immediate feedback on your mistakes – and then to memorize the defense patterns by doing lots of repetitions. If you’re currently not doing drills every day, or at least 3x a week, in my opinion you’re making a mistake as a serious player.
TIP #2 – OVERBLUFF AGAINST WEAK RANGES
Tip #2 is a direct consequence of the problem most people have, discussed above: if everyone overfolds relative to solver in a lot of different circumstances, then playing more aggressively than solver is the proper way to maximize your EV. Bluffing can make you a lot of money, if done right.
Because your opponents are unlikely to call you sufficiently to make your bluffs indifferent between betting and checking (as they should in theory), you can make more money by turning your bluffs into pure bets (instead of playing them a mixed strategies, like in solverland). By overbluffing you’ll capture more redline money, as every fold you get is money that goes directly to your redline.
The thing about overbluffing though is that it can make you quite exploitable quite fast. I don’t recommend blind aggression where you just close your eyes and blast off against people just because calling as much as a solver calls is pretty hard. Once your opponents realize you’re getting way too out of line with your betting strategy, their adjustment is extremely easy and profitable: they start moving their mouse from the fold button over to the call button. No need to even think about ranges. They just start overcalling and printing money against you. Let’s just say, this won’t be very fun for you.
What I recommend to my students and in my videos is for you to attack weak ranges. You want to focus your aggression in zones where your opponents have made their ranges substantially weaker than they actually should be. When your opponent’s range is a lot weaker than a solver range, not only your bluffs will make a lot of money, but also your opponent’s capacity to immediately counter you is low. They can’t really overcall, even if they want to, when their range is filled with an excessive amount of air. Air hands can’t call bets.
“Ok, so what are those weak ranges, Saulo? How can I identify them?”. I was waiting for you to ask.
Typically speaking, human players have substantially weaker ranges than solver when it was required of them to construct a betting range, but then they checked. Bonus points if that happened multiple timesi in the hand.
For example, a very typical weak range from population is when they have the opportunity to probe OOP on the turn as the BB against an IP aggressor who checked back the flop. In these circumstances, most human players will: slowplay less with the top of their range; will fastplay more with their natural draws; and will bet less of their complete air hands (often necessary inside betting ranges to keep it balanced across various board runouts). The combination of these 3 range construction mistakes leads to a much weaker than optimal checking range.
Imagine now that this OOP player checked on the turn, and you checked behind as the IP player. Getting to the river, OOP will be again faced with the necessity of constructing a betting range. They got to that node with more air than they should and less nuts than they should. Now, when constructing their betting range, they can make the same mistakes from before, for example failing to slowplay sufficiently with their (few) nutted hands again. This double checking range from OOP on the river is a much weaker range from the turn checking range, simply because the mistakes compounded over 2 streets.
If you want to make money bluffing and improve your redline, focus on applying pressure to these types of ranges. They are the low hanging fruit of exploitative poker.
I have studied how to exploit all of these weak ranges in depth using population tendencies from hundreds of millions of hands of data and using that data to build exploitative models. I did that for all of the spots of the game tree – PFR SRP IP, PFR SRP OOP, PFR 3BP OOP, and so on. And I did that using an specific study method – an easy, step-by-step process that you can replicate by yourself to figure out the max EV strategies against your opponents. I teach this method in-depth in my Lowstakes Secrets Masterclass. This is a free event where I teach you all about the study framework that can get you crushing lowstakes, with a crushing redline. I recommend you check it out here.
TIP #3 – PAY ATTENTION TO TIMING TELLS
Nothing can make your redline better – while also making you lots of money – than timing tell exploits. You could just call people down with any 2 cards in every spot and you would have a huge positive redline. You would just be a terribly losing whale though, so that’s not every advised. Timing tell exploits, however, can make your redline skyrocket – while it drags your green line along. Timing tell exploits are simply the most powerful exploits in online poker. Period.
If you don’t believe, that’s your loss. The amount of money you can make exploiting timing tells is insane. I’ve made a few videos on my channel about this topic. And the craziest part is, you don’t even need to do anything fancy or complex to capture that money. At least when it comes to preflop, it’s all very simple.
Increase your 3bet and 4bet frequencies when people take too long to RFI or to 3bet against you. That’s it. When someone takes more than 9 seconds to open preflop or to 3bet, data shows that they’ll be folding to a reraise way more often than their average. This means A LOT of redline money for you to take.
The issue about timing tells is that there is no structured material out there about them. As of right now, the only way to improve on them is by watching my youtube videos and trying it out on your own, in a sort of trial and error approach.
My desire is to change this very soon with my upcoming course Timing Tells Made Simple. It’ll give you a complete blueprint, based on real data and models, on how to exploit population based on timing tells, for most spots in the game tree. I’m really excited to bring this to the public, as I believe there’s never been anything like it in the market.
It’s still gonna take me a few months though, so while this is not out yet, I really really really recommend you at least try to attack those tank RFIs and tank 3bets. I guaranteed you you’re not going to regret it.
The most important thing about exploiting timing tells though is not necessarily how to do it. If you know how to do it, but didn’t develop the habit of paying attention to people’s timings, then it’s not useful knowledge.
If you watch my YouTube Play & Explain videos, you’ll see that I constantly use the timing information of my opponent’s actions to make my decisions. It’s already an unconscious habit for me to absorb how long my opponents took to act, and use that information to decide what I want to do next. I do it effortlessly in most spots, and it allows me to make several exploits per session.
It wasn’t always like that though. When you don’t have this habit, your opponent’s timing information will simply go to waste. The information is there, but you are not really paying attention enough to use it. My advice to you, if you really want to improve your redline and make more money, is to force yourself to develop the habit of absorbing timing information.
In the beginning, this will require a lot of effort and energy. You will literally have to force yourself to count how long people took to act. Obviously this will reduce the amount of focus and energy you can develop to your other tables and decisions, and that’s why most people give up on their pursuit of this type of exploit. It’s just really hard to keep up with everything in the beginning. So what I recommend if you’re really invested in it is to reduce the amount of tables you play for a while. Make this effort for a few days or weeks, and the payoff is gonna come very shortly.
SUMMARY
The best players in the world have Brad Pitt looking redlines. You can find success in poker with a Danny DeVito redline, but the truth is that there are way more Brad Pitt’s and Leonardo DiCaprio’s in hollywood and Danny DeVito’s. It’s just statistics and probabilities. If you want to make more money in poker, don’t neglect your redline. It gives you information about what you could improve in your strategy.
If you’re convinced you should improve it, then try these 3 tips:
Stop overfolding, something you can achieve by practicing a lot with drills;
Overbluff weak ranges, which are ranges where people checked in the middle of the hand (the more times the better);
Pay attention to timing tells, particularly long RFIs and 3bets. Attacking those tells with increased aggression will skyrocket your redline and your greenline at the same time.
| For detailed demonstration of how to improve your redline, check out the Play&Explain below from my channel.
REDLINE SECRETS REVEALED | $200z Play & Explain
Thanks for reading. See you next week.
Until then – don’t play the game. Play the Metagame.
Saulo
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