You Probably Never Took This Line

You get dealt A ♣ K ♥ on the Button, in a $1/$2 online game. The action folds to you, you open to 2.5x and only the Big Blind calls. The big blind is a short stacked recreational player.

Flop comes Q ♦ 8 ♣ 2 ♦, and the fish checks to you. Here you already have a genuine decision: to c-bet or to check back? Both have their merits here. Recreational players are unlikely to check-raise too often, which gives you extra equity realization. At the same time, they may probe too much with random air on the turn, which gives value to a strong bluffcatcher like A ♣ K ♥. I don't mind either play here, and this time I decided to check.

The turn comes the 7 ♥ and the fish bets 30% of the pot.

As expected, our opponent takes a stab into the pot. And recreational players MASSIVELY overdo this.

While in theory they should be betting turn here around 33% of the time, recreational players probe 48% of the time on High-Low-Low Two tone textures, when the turn comes a medium card.

The excess of bets must come from somewhere. Compared to a balanced strategy: are they betting more for thin value? Are they fast playing their nuts instead of slowplaying sometimes? Or are they exaggerating with air hands? What do you think?

The answer to this question makes a big difference. How we are going to respond to this bet depends on how exactly their range is being constructed.

A range that's too heavy on thin value bets will cause us to overraise for thinner value and overfold the close region. If they bet too many 8x, 7x or 99 type hands, then all of a sudden a mediocre hand like Q5s becomes super strong - it can get lots of value from this excess of middling strength hands. At the same time, marginal floats like 33, A9, AT, AJ and KJ lose EV - by the time they call, they have a lower chance of getting to showdown and winning, because OOP's range has a lot more hands that beat them at showdown.

A range that's too heavy on the top pair or better region will cause us to tighten up the raising range and still overfold the close region. The difference now is that the excess of bets comes from hands that are super strong, and for that reason, instead of overraising for thin value like in the previous example, this time we have to be very careful with our raises because the excess of strong hands reduces the equities of all of our hands.

Thanks to mass data, we don't need to guess at what exactly they are doing. We don't need to make assumptions or run the risk of projecting too much or too little onto our opponents. Sure, our intuition and perception can be really good at times, but it can also be really off in many counterintuitive situations. Instead, we can compare a balanced range composition to the actual range composition of players of similar type, on similar boards, over hundreds of millions of hands, so we can determine the average and expected behavior of these players in these circumstances. With this data in hand, we can then come up with the most accurate possible exploit against their imbalance.

A GTO range composition for the 33% pot size bet on this node would look like this:

Notice how the range is constructed around the thin value hands - second pairs and third pairs account for 45% of the range. Since it's a small size, OOP is not allowed to bluff much: only 28.4% of hands worse than Ace high. Facing a small size, IP is getting great pot odds, which means that if OOP starts bluffing too much, all of IP's floats and raises will print money.

Now compare this to the actual range composition of fishes in this spot, exactly for the 30% pot size:

While fishes are using a similar amount of pure bluffs (27.9% of King high or worse hands, vs 28.4% from GTO), Recs are notably probing a lot more with Ace Highs and Low pairs. While GTO has only 6.8% of those hands in the B30 action, fishes have an incredible 20.8% of Ace Highs and Low pairs in their B30 range. That's almost exactly 3x more of these weak hands than a balanced range can support.

Looking through the whole distribution, we can see that they are making 3 deviations at the same time:

• Huge excess of Ace Highs and Low pairs (what we just covered)

• Huge lack of Thin Value region (26% of 2nd/3rd pair vs 45% for GTO)

• Small excess of 2pair or better (9.4% vs 7.3% for GTO)

Given this range composition - a lot more weak hands than solver, a lot less middling hands and a small excess of nuts - what do you think should be our adjustment? Pause for a minute and really think about it. This is going to help internalize what we'll see next.

I took my AK and decided to raise. This play is already part of the equilibrium strategy, so there isn't something immediately fancy about this. By raising with AK we can already get folds from 8x, 7x, and our hand is supposed to block strong hands from villain (AQ, KQ) and not block many bluffs at all (villain shouldn't bluff with Ace high, as we saw in the GTO range composition). All of that contributes to our fold equity.

But imitating GTO play was not the reason I made this play. There are 2 main reasons.

The first one is that bluff raising small bets from fish is incredibly profitable. While GTO would fold only 43% of it's range vs a 2/3 raise on the turn, recreational players are folding an insane 57.5% of the time. That's a crazy 14.5% overfold.

The cause for this is of course what we just saw in their range composition: fishes put way too many weak hands (Ace Highs and low pairs) in the small bet range, and when faced with a raise, then can't continue enough of the time to prevent IP from bluffing a lot.

By this leak alone you should already raise turns like a maniac vs small bets from fish. But you can do even more - because the icing on the cake comes next.

My opponent makes the call, and the river is the Qs. With $43 in the pot, and $68 behind effective (1.6x pot) I decided to bluff all-in.

What do you think of this play? You can be honest, that's ok :D

I'm not going to lie, this raise turn into river jam looks spew at first. It's not the type of strategy we're used to seeing on a regular basis. But let me tell you: it's this type of hyper aggression, in the right spots, that can make a huge difference to your winrate.

Recreational players overfold to turn raise, and after they call, they are still folding river enough of the time to make it a super profitable bluff.

A 2x pot river bluff needs 66% folds to breakeven. The math is very simple - optimal fold frequency is equal to alpha, and alpha equals betsize/1+betsize. For 2x pot, alpha = 2/1+2 = 2/3 = 66%. If villain folds more than 66% of the time, the bluff makes money.

Recreational players fold 75% of the time vs a river 2x pot bet after calling a turn raise.

That's a massive overfold.

Recreational players are extremely imbalanced with their leading range on the turn, and they are not capable of calling down sufficiently vs both the turn raise and a subsequent river overbet. What this means for you, in simple terms, is: hyper aggression prints money.

But how much aggression is hyper aggression? How exactly do you construct your turn response range based on these leaks?

I have the answer for you.

Powered by my proprietary auto lock program, I can node lock multiple nodes automatically based on real data from population, to derive the most precise and advanced exploitative strategies possible.

Against an opponent who overfolds to a turn raise, and subsequently overfolds river against an overbet, we should raise almost our entire range on the turn, and even start checking flop with air just to raise turn:

Bluff raising turn to overbet river against a fish is something that very few people are doing right now. It's the type of exploit that has been kept hidden inside CFP programs for years, and for a good reason: it is a super easy, instantly executable money printer. Hope you start applying it in your game to crush your opponents.

Thank you for reading my friend! I see you next time.

Saulo