This Hidden Skill Will Make You Improve Faster

In the last post of this newsletter, we talked about how winning more big pots out of position can be a game changer for your winrate, and to demonstrate the concept we actually went deep on a hand played by PR0DIGY, considered by many the best No Limit Hold'em player in the world at the moment.

He definitely has the results to back that up. In the last 2 years, Coin Poker organized 2 world championships at their 10KNL 6-max tables, and PR0DIGY played in both of them. Aggregating his participations, he played 78,275 hands and won an incredible figure of $1,014,178.23. That's over 100 buy-ins in this sample, which puts his observed winrate at an insane 12.96 bb/100 - all of this while battling the toughest players.

It can definitely be argued that 13 bb/100 is not his true winrate in these lineups, as the sample size is not big enough to guarantee that. But does that even matter? Regardless of what his actual true winrate is, with such sizeable evidence we can say that the probability that he has a significant edge over the other high stakes regs is very, very high. Pretty much guaranteed.

Now, why does that matter to you? It'll become obvious from this next hand we're about to review.

This was a hand played by a student of mine, in one of our recent weekly coachings.

The hand starts off with Hero opening from the CO with AhTh and facing a 3bet from the BTN. Action goes back to him and he makes the call. ATs can go either way here, both calling or 4betting are fine in theory. Hero opted to call.

The flop comes JsTs5c. Hero checks, opponent cbets with a small size, and Hero decides to continue calling.

If you have read the previous post of this newsletter, you'll remember the JhTh played by PR0DIGY, in which he check-raised the flop with his 2nd pair on KTX.

While AT specifically doesn't do it this time (likely due to the A kicker blocking IP's folding range vs XR), 2nd pair is once again a part of the GTO flop XR strategy, precisely for the 20% bucket from my GTO Blueprint, which I gave you for free last time.

Hero calls instead and we see a turn.

The turn is the 2c, making the board double flush draw. Villain double barrels for 3/4 pot.

What would you do in this situation?

This is a tough spot for the OOP player. We have middle pair with no draw on a board texture where 26 out of 46 cards are terrible for us: 11 spade runouts, 11 club runouts, and 4 King/Queen runouts. Not to mention that even when all draws miss on the river, we're obviously still behind the huge amount of Jx or better in our opponent's range.

For this reason, solver already folds 60% of the time with this hand facing this bet on the turn. The sole purpose of this 0EV call for our strategy is to help prevent the opponent from being able to profitably barrel any 2 cards against us.

My student didn't fold.

The hand ended in a very anticlimatic way. The river completed a flush and my student check-folded - which is correct, as played.

This line is a pretty terrible one to bluffcatch against other regs in 6-max cash. On average, you'll be burning 15% of the pot by calling down with a pure bluffcatcher in this line. If you try to call down on a 3rd to flush river, it gets even worse: -17% of the pot in EV.

The initial discussion in my weekly coaching call revolved around the idea that Hero should probably just fold the turn in this situation. It's already a 0EV investment against a perfectly balanced opponent, and there is no money to capture by calling down, since the triple barrel line is underbluffed. On top of that, it's very likely that the IP player constructs an excessively equity-driven double barrel range on the turn, which would make calling even worse for us. In fact, when we look at the GTO double barrel strategy for IP on the turn, draws like OESD/Flush Draw/Combo draws should slowplay the turn about 40% of the time in aggregate, while garbage hands like A8dd or 76hh should barrel 100%. An inversion in those hand classes would make calling turn terrible, and it's exactly the type of inversion that humans make.

So why are we talking about this hand? What is there to learn here?

Well, do you remember how we ended the last post? We ended it with this hand:

What do you see in common here? Same spot, same line, similar board dynamic and similar hand classes. We call a 3bet preflop, check-call the flop then face a 3/4 pot bet on the turn with a mediocre bluffcatcher. Looking at GTO, this JJ hand from PR0DIGY is actually a pure fold on the turn. But he didn't fold - instead of losing 12bbs of redline, as most people would, he was actually able to win almost 30 bbs of redline in this hand.

Sir Isaac Newton wrote in 1675: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". What he meant by this was that his progress and discoveries were only possible because he relied on the work of great thinkers before him.

I don't know the real motivations of PR0DIGY for taking the above line with JJ against Linus, but his play is a great opportunity for us to learn something new. He made this play for a reason, and by digging deeper into the whys, we might make some new discoveries.

And I did.

Donk betting the river on flush completing cards against regs is a super profitable exploit. Population folds 64% of the time against a pot sized river donk shove on flush completing cards. A pot size bet only needs 50% folds to break even. With 64% folds, a pot sized bluff makes an incredible 28% of the pot in EV - which is more than most of your bluffcatchers will make by checking and trying to get to showdown. This means JJ will print money by donking in PR0DIGY's hand.

I don't know if PR0DIGY made this play because of this overfold. Maybe he just thought JJ was a GTO donk shove on a card that favored him. But it doesn't matter: by studying his game and trying to find new ideas, I was able to discover a new exploit I wasn't looking into. I evolved my own strategy by getting inspiration from the works of someone before me.

Learning from your opponents, and other great players, is one of the fastest ways to evolve. This is because these players have worked a lot on their games, trying to find new ideas, new exploits, new implementations. They have tested their strategies in the real world, and they are winning with them. When you go deep into their games, with a mindset to learn, you are essentially doing what Sir Isaac Newton did almost 350 years ago: you are achieving progress by borrowing concepts and ideas from the people who already did a lot of the work.

If you want to progress faster and learn new concepts that can change your results, I strongly recommend you separate some time in your studies to go deeper into the strategies of other great players. It doesn't have to be nosebleed crushers only - even the players at the same limits you play at will have something you can learn from. If you can approach this process with a curious and humble mindset, you'll see that there are opportunities to learn everywhere. You just gotta take them.

WHAT ABOUT THE AT HAND?

We still didn't close the loop in my student's hand. We saw how he ended up check-calling the turn to check-fold the river. Now my question to you is: what should change in our turn strategy when we know that flush completing rivers get substantially overfolded when the flush completes?

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that, if we can exploitatively overbluff the river when the draw completes, now our turn call starts making more money. The close hands which are just begging for IP to give up a bluff and get to showdown now have an opportunity to win the pot more often. This increases the EV of calling for those hands, completely changing our turn defense strategy.

Using my proprietary auto-lock program, I can simulate this leak into the IP player's strategy and then calculate the Max Exploit response for the OOP player. The answer you can see below.

We go from folding 43% of our range to the double barrel in GTO-land to folding only 18% of the time when we can exploit the river. The river exploit is so profitable that now most of bluffcatchers can make money by calling the turn. We just crafted a redline printing machine.

Don't neglect the power of learning from other players - especially when you seemingly don't understand what they are doing. It might be that great exploits are hiding underneath.

Thank you for reading, my friend! I see you next monday.

Saulo