Re: a DERB hand
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im pretty sure derb calls a river raise right? and that's why he's a donk and will be broke soon. if you all say he'll bet fold that river then im wrong and he's a genius. but in that one street lies the answer. that flop check could be hints of genius. talk about unreadable.
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I've been thinking a lot about these heads up metagame strategies recently, and have a few thoughts on your claim, mike.
First, we need to note that he doesn't have to handle the river the same against everyone. Maybe his default strategy is to bet and call a raise. Why? Well, to understand this you have to back up a bit and think about what the other guy is going to do.
Will the opponent call with ace high? Will he bluff raise? If so, how often? Will he fold a pair below queens? If so, how often? All pairs, or just the weaker ones? Will he call with 22?
By default, we really don't know the answers to these questions. A good default line is to bet / fold, as has been suggested here. But constantly bet / folding is an exploitable strategy, as I have said over and over on this board recently. So the ideal strategy is a mixed one, where we fold to a raise some of the time.
How would anyone know if DERB was using a mixed strategy here? We'd see him bet / call sometimes and might assume he was always calling, right? What effect would that have on our game? We'd be inclined to stop bluff-raising the river, right? Isn't it possible that he keeps notes on his opponents and sees starts folding more often to the river raise after he gets shown 3 winners in a row by a player? Perhaps after 3 straight folds, or when his opponent raises more than 3 rivers in 25, he goes back to calling again.
How would you recognize this kind of advanced strategy? Wouldn't it look just like a donk for the most part? You'd probably see the one bad call, and then assume that future folds were just missed club draws, right?
This is exactly why we need to start talking about mixed strategies on these boards. I think there's a great depth to the game that is being overlooked here. I suspect that the best players understand this intuitively and do mix their strategy but either don't conciously recognize what they are doing or don't discuss it here. The closest we come is to say something like "I was mixing up my play" and leave it at that. "I'd do that sometimes" is considered a complete answer here. Huh? How often is sometimes? How do you decide when? Why those percentages and not something else?
my 2 cents.
eric
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