common lines flowchart

I'm interested in putting up a 'flowchart' of the most common lines we run into as small stakes poker players.

A lot of very common situations come up here, and I think we could consolidate many posts.

Anyone interested in helping me build this?

Off the top of my head, here are my hardest decisions:

Top pair raised on flop
Set hits w/ monotone board
overpair against drawing low board,resistance
overpair against big broadway board (AA hits KJT)
top pair on paired board
trips on paired board w/ high pair (AJ hits JJ6)
trips on paired board w/ low pairs (A6 hit Q66)

What other common situations do you struggle with?

[beavens]

wouldn't this get a bit out of hand when you toss in reads, table image, stats, etc?

[Isura]

- Overpair or top pair on the river out of position.
- Top/2nd pair on turn against passive player - is he drawing or does he have me crushed? i.e. pot control vs hand protectin.
- When to fire 2nd barrel on the turn HU.

i think we'd have to assume against unknowns, but we could always add in comments for other specifics.

[WhiteWolf]

I would add what I was asking about here (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=4187479&an=0&page=4#Post 4187479) ... How to play an overpair vs a PF raiser.

[GrunchCan]

I have to say that, in my opinion, createing a flowchart with strategy advice is a bad idea. The game is too complex to reduce to a flowchart with less than 3 trillion bubbles.

However, here's another idea. How about a flowchart (or something) with a list of common situations and links to threads discussing those situations? Something like this could be forum gold if its done well & is fairly complete. You'd be famous. Cheering in the streets...

[beavens]

[ QUOTE ]
I have to say that, in my opinion, createing a flowchart with strategy advice is a bad idea. The game is too complex to reduce to a flowchart with less than 3 trillion bubbles.

However, here's another idea. How about a flowchart (or something) with a list of common situations and links to threads discussing those situations? Something like this could be forum gold if its done well & is fairly complete. You'd be famous. Cheering in the streets...

[/ QUOTE ]

that's quite a project..

That sounds pretty good grunch....

I also considered doing it in a database format with columns such as:

- starting hand
- flop type
- opponent type
- specific action

hmmmmm.... grunch...if you have AOL AIM, let me know, and we can work on this a little

(aim name is same as my nick here)

[GrunchCan]

It is quite a project, but if a bunch of people worked on it, I think it could be done. And it would be spectacular.

Add some draws maybe, nutflushdraw on flop, flushdraw against raiser. Same for straightdraws. Maybe under thoose headings different scenarios styles could be grouped ex:
LAG where lag lines could be collected.
TAG where tag lines could be collected.
HU for HU lines
etc.
ALL for all posts under heading

Outstanding idea! That would be great to be able to browse tons of postings on a scenario. It would improve this forum by adding moore structure. It would perhaps demand much administrative work but, excellent idea!

Sounds fantastic!
A while back I made an excel sheet showing odds of win at showdown for a whole bunch of common playable flopped hands, broken down by flop texture and number of opponents. I would be happy to contribute that if you think it would add anything.

[4_2_it]

Not to put a damper on this because it is a damn fine idea, but it this were remotely doable, I am certain there would be several books published by now. Even 2+2 doesn't have a cash game NL book out.

The problem is that you would need to break each situation down from pre-flop, flop, turn and river.

You then need to look at position.

Next comes the cards you hold. Even using shortcuts like small pps and SCs still means a dozen or more situations.

Next, you would have to look at each potential action (bet, check or fold).

Penultimate is number of players in the hand.

Finally, reads on all villains in a hand.

I am no mathematician, but I think you easily have a couple of million of scenarios to cover. I think a better use of time would be to explore ten situations that give you the most trouble and focus on those. I think some of the topics already mentioned would make fine threads in the vein of AJ's Check Your Line series.

[GrunchCan]

4_2_it is, of course, correct.

What we need is a wiki...

[ QUOTE ]
4_2_it is, of course, correct.

What we need is a wiki...

[/ QUOTE ]

wiki2+2 would be great... and I really really like the ideas behind this thread. But seriously, NL cash is probably the texas HE game which contains the most variables and even creating a flowchart for ONE of those situations would be really really big.

I am not sure that 4_2_it is correct. It is true that I woundn't attempt to break down the whole of small stakes no-limit holdem like this. There are quite a lot of relatively common, simple situations, that frequently come up though. For instance: Hero raises from MP with QQ pre-flop then bets pot heads-up into an unknown LP caller on a ten high double suited flop. What is a good line for the turn and river if called?

[4_2_it]

[ QUOTE ]
4_2_it is, of course, correct.

What we need is a wiki...

[/ QUOTE ]

That's a good idea.

[ QUOTE ]
I am not sure that 4_2_it is correct. It is true that I woundn't attempt to break down the whole of small stakes no-limit holdem like this. There are quite a lot of relatively common, simple situations, that frequently come up though. For instance: Hero raises from MP with QQ pre-flop then bets pot heads-up into an unknown LP caller on a ten high double suited flop. What is a good line for the turn and river if called?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'll make a flowchart for that one right here:

[above situation] --> [???] --> Profit!!

Seriously, it's read dependent! This is why NL cash games don't have books like there used to be.

Thanks I'll study that one /images/graemlins/wink.gif

[4_2_it]

[ QUOTE ]
I am not sure that 4_2_it is correct. It is true that I wouldn't attempt to break down the whole of small stakes no-limit holdem like this. There are quite a lot of relatively common, simple situations, that frequently come up though. For instance: Hero raises from MP with QQ pre-flop then bets pot heads-up into an unknown LP caller on a ten high double suited flop. What is a good line for the turn and river if called?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm really not trying to discourage this (and hesitated before I posted), but I think it is dangerous to try to make generalizations, even if you throw in some specifics.

For instance, in your example, does villain call or raise? What if the turn completes the flush draw? What if a Broadway draw appears? What does hero do if an overcard appears? What is villain's probable hand range and what is hero's move if villain calls or raises (or beats if checked to)? I could go on, but I think this illustrates my point.

It would be better to post an actual situation with reads and assumptions and then discuss possible actions.

[ QUOTE ]
All generalizations are false, including this one

[/ QUOTE ]
-- Mark Twain

[poincaraux]

There are a lot of categories .. even general ones. Would this be a reasonable way to organize things?

<ul type="square"> Only look at NL25 and NL50 6-max, as that seems to be what most people play here.
Break hands up into the ones fimbulwinter uses in his preflop stragety post (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&amp;Board=ssplnlpoker&amp;Number=162295 5&amp;Searchpage=6&amp;Main=1618086&amp;Words=-RE%3A&amp;topic=&amp;Search=true#Post1622955). Those categories should be good for pre-flop considerations. So, all threads talking about how to play AA,KK pre-flop go in the same category.
Each article gets the post/thread title and people can assign keywords and/or descriptions.
Flop, Turn and River get broken up into categories like overpair, TPTK, set, OESFD, etc. Again, keywords/descriptions can be added, so "short stack set on flop" can be distinguished from "deep stack set on flop"
[/list]

This won't give you a complete flowchart of what to do, but it'll be pretty good. If you're asking "hero raises from MP with QQ pre-flop then bets pot heads-up into an unknown LP caller on a ten high double suited flop. What's a good line for the turn and river if called?" then you can paw through the flop-&gt;overpairs articles and see if there's something relevant. I suppose you could split it up by preflop hands at each level, so that you'd be looking at BigPocketPairs-&gt;Flop-&gt;Overpair, but that seems like too many things would hit too many categories post-flop.

It seems like a fair number of 2+2 folks use firefox. If we set up a wiki, it should be pretty easy to write a firefox extension to help out with this. If you're reading a good thread, you go through 2+2Wiki menus and click on Flop-&gt;Overpair and it pops up a little window asking you for keywords and a description of why the thread was interesting. Then, it adds the thread to the wiki page. For extra grooviness, the wiki page should order threads based on the number of people who suggested it. It should also aggregate keywords and descriptions.

That actually sounds pretty cool to me. If people want to help me hash out the details (how things should be categorized, etc.), I might want to write it up in my spare time.

[Isura]

[ QUOTE ]
Not to put a damper on this because it is a damn fine idea, but it this were remotely doable, I am certain there would be several books published by now. Even 2+2 doesn't have a cash game NL book out.

The problem is that you would need to break each situation down from pre-flop, flop, turn and river.

You then need to look at position.

Next comes the cards you hold. Even using shortcuts like small pps and SCs still means a dozen or more situations.

Next, you would have to look at each potential action (bet, check or fold).

Penultimate is number of players in the hand.

Finally, reads on all villains in a hand.

I am no mathematician, but I think you easily have a couple of million of scenarios to cover. I think a better use of time would be to explore ten situations that give you the most trouble and focus on those. I think some of the topics already mentioned would make fine threads in the vein of AJ's Check Your Line series.

[/ QUOTE ]

People at U. of Alberta are going serious research in poker AI. That is probably that this project would be headed.

[Isura]

I suspect the original poster is building a poker bot. /images/graemlins/laugh.gif