Hello TPE Nation! Today's post is going to be a bit of a long one as some things have coallesed in my mind of late and I wanted to share everything with you to hopefully speed you along the learning curve a bit faster. So what are we talking about today, well the topics are the two most fundamental aspects of No Limit Hold'em.
1. Hand Reading
2. Pot Control
There is a tremendous amount of misconception around these topics and not understanding them and why they are important will be an anchor around your playing journey that you cannot escape. I have been watching a lot of vids (specifically Wein's Theory vid from yesterday and the Hand Reader series from DeucesCracked by Orange and Terp) and reading a ton on these two topics and last night for the first time it clicked and really made sense as to how it all works. I'll start with the second idea and its importance first as it will lead very nicely into the first. So hold on tight, here we go into my EUREKA moment.
Now after thinking a lot about the idea of pot control, I am convinced that the current definition and the general understanding of the concept was something that really good players developed and perpetrated to minimize their losses against the rest of the poker playing universe. Pot Control is the colloqueal universe is understood to be managing the size of the pots you play and keeping them small and in control when you play (it is pretty accurate to a lot of the discussions that I have heard, + or – a few variations). Well I am here to dispell that theory. Pot Control is actually exactly what it claims to be. Your mission and purpose is to control the pot and specifically the actions of the other player(s) in the hand to conform to what you desire. You are controlling the pot. There it is. Plain and simple. Pretty powerful though isn't it. Something that stems from this is the concept of position. Basically unless the player(s) you are involved with border on being completely braindead this is impossible to do from out of position. Can't be done. You can't really manage the other players actions and manipulate what you want him to do because the information you are working with is always 1 street old (this will become huge in the next sections ideas). Unless you are the amazing Kreskin or the villain is that bad, 1 street old information is just about as good as no information at all or perhaps more dangerous. Wrapping up Pot Control then, the idea is to control the pot to what you desire. If you have the nuts you want to control it to be as big as possible. If you have a marginal hand and are unsure of where it is and his range is ambiguous you want to control it so that you don't have to make huge bets and you can protect your stack. The overall idea is pretty simple once you see it for what it is.
Hand reading on the other hand is a very complicated affair and in general a pretty bastardized concept as well. Everyone know plays NLHE knows that you need to be able to apply a range to an oppenent so you can understand how to play your hand against them. In principle that is about 50% right. So what is this really all about and what are we trying to accomplish here. Everyone has heard all of the pro's here preach…"You have to have a plan for the hand". We have heard BigDog say when you develop a plan you need to follow through on it. We all nod our heads in agreement. But how many times have you had an A or a K peel on a turn, with JJ when you were ahead on the flop and say oh that hits his range so well, I must be behind and then give up on the hand when the villain bets or raises you. We have missed the point of what they were saying and we have misapplied Hand Reading. Simple as that. Fix that, those leaks close up. Pretty straighforward in theory (pretty hard in practice, but we'll get there!). So what am I talking about. Hand Reading as a process breaks down into something along these lines
1. Identify your opponent
2. Develop an idea about his potential holdings at the start of the hand
3. Incorporate the actions thus far to adjust your understanding of the villains holdings
4. Determine what your desired outcome from the hand is
5. Refine your plan and understanding with each street of information
Okay, so how does this work. First things first we are going to junk the idea of generalized ranges. Why would we discard these ranges as they are fairly effective in the micro/low stakes. We want to toss this because it is a crutch. We grab other peoples understanding of the game and then use it to justify our aggression when we play and it works most of the time (or at least enough so that we win and become confident with it) and when we start to move up it breaks down and we don't know why, sending us in a pretty nasty spiral back. We are dumping the crutches. So how do we go about identifying our opponents and knowing what sits in their ranges. Gotta use the tools you have. If you run a HUD use what is showing you (with a grain of salt, but use it), observe the table make sure you make mental notes of what you see at showdown (this is the single greatest source of information). Look at how they bet, think about other players you have run into and what you have seen when they have bet like that. Look up how many tables they are playing to see if they are on autopilot (if a guy has 10 tables up pretty good chance he is playing pretty tight). Use what is available and put something together about the villain. Once you have an idea about how he plays stylistically and what kinds of things you would expect to see use what actions you have seen to refine your understanding. I am going to make a big statement now on reading and everyone who is learning is guilty of this (I know I have done it a lot and I am stopping it, you should too).
— NO PLAYERS HAND RANGE EXPANDS AS THE HAND PROGRESSES —
I can't tell you how many times an A or K has come on a street and I have instantly shut down because "that card smashes his range" when given all of the information I have and the prior actions there could be no way he has an A or a K. Players ranges do not grow as the hand goes on, they get more specific. It is a huge concept and it is difficult to teach yourself. It requires a lot of discipline, but when it starts to click things make a lot of sense. You will see yourself not folding a lot of middle pairs that are ahead just because an oppenent tried to bluff a scare card and your value will go up a lot. The 4th step is probably the biggest of all in the Hand Reading universe and it is the least implemented. The whole and I mean the WHOLE point of trying to understand what a villain is holding is not to know whether or not the hand you have is ahead or behind so that we can fold, it is to understand what is the line where I can get the most desireable outcome for myself. What do I mean when I say this. The core of the idea is that we want to understand where the villain is in the hand and how to manipulate our image to make him believe what we want him to believe. Don't get confused there isn't a ton of Leveling going on here. No he thinks that I think that he thinks. You don't need it. All you are trying to do is understand where he may be in the hand and where you are, if you are in a position where you believe that you should be ahead of him, it is time for value and you need to understand how to present your hand to him (through checking/betting or any of the other tools we have) in order for him to feel like he is ahead and to give you the max value for the hand. If you understand his range and you are behind it with very little or low equity then the plan is simple, fold and don't give him value, that is the easier side of this. So what do I mean with the first part, how do we plan this. Here is a quick example of what I am talking about.
Assume: 100bb stacks, early no antes.
Hero (BTN): JsJc
Villain from MP open limps for 1bb, folds to the Hero and we raise to 4bb, folds back to villain and he calls.
—- Okay here is our first opportunity to do a little thinking. Villain is in middle position and he limp/calls. Have we seen him do this before, what hands have we seen at showdown from this player when he has done this. Putting yourself in his shoes what hands do you think you would limp/call with. Some things we can discount here and apply to his range right away. Probably not JJ-AA or AJ-AK. Players love to get into betting wars with those guys. So what limp/calls here lots of middle pairs, suited connectors, maybe unsuited connectors depending on how loose his play is.
(11bb pot) Flop: Ad 5h 6h
—- Second opportunity here. A lot of times our first response is, "oh crap there is the A, I am done with the hand". I this case given what we know A2-AT is probably not a dominant part of his range. What is more interesting is the 56 that appeared. The Ace presents a really big point to think about here though because he may be more nervous about it that we are. We need to think about how to construct a line here that is going to get us paid as we don't think the A hits him in this situation and we don't want to scare him away. We have 2 options, check or bet. In the current NLHE environment virtually everyone knows that it is expected you c-bet an A high flop so you are probably going to get floated at a minimum here a ton. We could check to and make it look like we are scared of the Ace as well, but given the propensity of people to float flop c-bets, we elect to go with that line.
Villain Checks. Hero bets 5bb. Villain Calls.
—- Okay we have some more information. He check/called the flop bet. What do we know about him now. He could have air and floated us to float. Is this a set, probably not as most of the time we could expect a check/raise. Two Pair, probably not either for the last reason. Based on a check/call and what we know from preflop the best fit here looks a lot like Straight Draws, Flush Draws and overcards (JT, QT, QJ, KQ, KJ). So we aren't terribly concerned that we are behind here, but what we need to do is understand how we are going to construct the rest of our lines to make sure that we are getting value.
(21bb pot) Turn: Tc
—- Interesting Turn card appears. Time for some more re-evaluation. We have c-bet and we are very confident we are ahead of our friend here and the T gives us some new thoughts. From our prior understanding where do we think he is now. Well is draws just got him happier as his broadway cards now picked up a draw. His flush draws are still chasing as this didn't do anything for them, but it did take a bunch of his air that he floats with and give him a second pair type hand. Time for the critical part. Since second pair and draw hands make up a lot of his range here what is the line we should take that makes them feel most comfortable. Lets look at our options. If he leads we can call, which looks a lot like a draw as if we had an A (especially a big A we would re-raise him in this spot), we could re-raise him and represent a big Ace but that will probably close the action right there (which in some situations would be highly desireable, but since we believe we are far ahead we might as well continue for max value) or we could fold (not a likely outcome give we are ahead or so we think). If he checks it becomes more interesting, because now we need to decided how to proceed to make his draw/second pair hands feel comfortable. We could fire a second barrel and if he does have a combo draw he could call, but more likely we would take the pot down. Better though we could check, look like we want the free card for our draw and then play it out like that on the river.
Villain checks. Hero checks.
(21bb pot) River: 2s
—- Okay last set of information to compile and time to finish the plan. So the line we have been running looks like a c-bet stab at the pot on the flop to try to steal the A high board, he floated we both checked with a couple of draws out there looking like we wanted to snag a free card and the river basically was a bust for all the draws out there. The river card is really nice as it is basically a total blank. If he is holding 34 then gg, but does it really fit, probably not. So we conclude it is basically a blank and we have him sitting on a second pair/busted draw type hands. We need to think about what he may do here and how we can respond based on what he thinks we are holding. Our line remember looks a lot like we are sitting on a busted draw. So what can we do to get max value based on that. Since we think he has caught a piece here and that he should think we are on air if he checks we should stab at it, expecting to get check/raised a lot of the time. If he bets, we can call as the re-raise in that situation looks a lot like a huge hand and probably doesn't get us any more value. So our decision is to call a lead and bet into a check. Remember…gotta follow through here as based on his holding and what we have presented as our hand it is going to look freaky if he does what we expect.
Villain checks. Hero bets 10bb. Villain raises 30bb.
—- okay here we are…he did what we expected him to do. Based on that we have two last options here. Re-pop him and see if he will go all the way with it or call. If we Re-raise him here what are we telling him. We are basically showing that our hand is huge and is he really going to go to war with is T if we make a move that looks so much like a huge hand here slowplaying. Probably not. If we call however we get 2 things. One we get the money he put in and we don't give him the opportunity to muck his cards silently. If we call we get the most important part of this hand, his holding which is a critical piece of information in shaping our understanding of him and future interactions.
Hero Calls. Villain shows 9h8h
The outcome of the hand isn't important, but the thought process throughout is. Remember the most crucial part in the Hand Reading sequence is manipulating the action to get your desired result (be it win the most or lose the least). Okay so this has been a long post, but I hope that it is informative. This is something that is really starting to gel for me and I am really excited to work on the ideas and to develop my skill here to really make the jump. I'll post tomorrow how the session went! This is the Gman signing out!