The evolution of the mid-high stakes forum

[1800GAMBLER]

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I get the impression that you consider the idea of a mixed strategy to be rather theoretical and not of much practical value.

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is just a more hand wavy way of saying that you would employ a mixed strategy of sometimes raising and sometimes calling with the same hand in the same spot.

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I know that. There are two places to mix range your plays, on the offensive and on the defensive. You give the KQ example which was on the defensive so i took the majority of the time you do this strategy to be on the defensive, which is when i think it has very very little value because our opponents are playing so far away from perfect.

However, i still don't think the mix strategy will come to this board. This board is how to play one hand, we don't post 100 hand sessions or long history, only schiends does that with his 100/200 HU sessions which i think are great for the forum.

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Surely you don't mean that you'll either always raise the turn or never raise the turn, right?

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Yes, i did. There are just so many plain situations in which i have no reason to mix it up. I raise AA preflop. Big blind calls. flop comes Jxx. i get checkraised. There is pretty much never a reason to mix my strategy up here; never am i calling down and never am i raising the flop. The only time i will ever mix it up is if i do it and BB folds, the next time around or the next time after that he gets AK added to my range, which bluff theory wise would be over adjusting to his fold, since it's about 24 legit combos and 16 bluff combos in a roughly 4:1 bluff.

[Chris Callahan]

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Here's an example. You raise KQ and are called by the big blind, who is a good player. You flop top pair and bet all the way, and only to sadly get check-raised on the river. What should you do?

Well, this answer is almost always going to invlove a probability triple. Any answer of always folding, calling, or raising represents an exploitable strategy. Some are more exploitable than others, but all of them miss the mark of the perfect strategy.

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Your idea might be good, but I think this example is wrong. When defending against this raise, you should consider the whole range of hands you can hold at that point, and then call the correct percentage of the time. There will be a cutoff hand which will be the worst one you call with, and this hand is the only one that might need a mixed call/fold strategy. It makes no sense calling with KJ some of the time and folding KQ some of the time.

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Ok, boys. This is the mid-high forum. It's time for us to take the next step in poker analysis.

You may have noticed that SO many threads talk about points that are very close in EV. Most threads, and all good threads, have heated arguments back and forth. It's a call. It's a fold. It's a raise. Frequently, nobody convinces anybody, and everybody has a good argument for their position. Fold, because he'll never check-raise with a weaker hand. Call, because if you fold he can run you over. You get the idea.

Well, the reason for much of the debate is that there's a fourth option we're ignoring: none of the above.


What do I mean? What is this fourth option? The fourth option is a probability triple, which indicates that you should take each of the three possible actions some percentage of the time. I suggest we write these triples this way:

{fold, call, raise}


Up to now, this forum has allowed only three options:

Fold: {100, 0, 0}
Call: {0, 100, 0}
Raise: {0, 0, 100}


When the answer to the OP is some triple like {15, 80, 5}, as it so often is, then we end up yelling at each other about how clearly our answer is right and the other guy's answer is wrong, and how if you think that, let's play heads up some time, fish.


Here's an example. You raise KQ and are called by the big blind, who is a good player. You flop top pair and bet all the way, and only to sadly get check-raised on the river. What should you do?

Well, this answer is almost always going to invlove a probability triple. Any answer of always folding, calling, or raising represents an exploitable strategy. Some are more exploitable than others, but all of them miss the mark of the perfect strategy.


We're playing mid and high stakes poker, so it is inevitable that we are going to have to deal with good players. Even against bad players, situations where triples are important arise all the time. Even a bad player is capable of noticing that you have been folding to river raises a lot, right?



So, from now on, please consider answers in the form

{fold, call, raise}

to be valid. These will be most common when the hand involves an opponent who is tricky, so he doesn't play exactly the same way every time with the same hand, and is capable of some adjustments to our play. Hopefully, we can start dialing in some of these triples for common situations, and talk about simple ways to make the random selection at home.


good luck.
Eric

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"if you think that, lets play heads up some time, fish"


that was classic....PURE [censored] COMIC GENIUS.

I am still laughing.


God that was funny.


AND ACCURATE, TOO.....

[tonysoldier]

I absolutely agree with you, I tried to start a thread on this a few months ago, but nothing happened, I hope that this one is good. I give some more of my thoughts when I read the thread.

[jba]

this is very similar to a book I have been reading, How Good is Your Limit Holdem. In that book he has multiple choice quizzes, each answer is worth a certain amount of points. In OP's KQ example he might say ok the guy just check/raised you, what do you do?

A. reraise
B. call
C. fold

In the answers you would get 0 pts for answering A, 10 for B, 7 for C (he goes into much more detail about villain, prev hands, etc). The explanation will be "yadda yadda against many opponents this is an easy fold but because of X it isn't go great here".

I think it's definitely the right way to think about things and your tuple method is better than the currently very crude "X and it isn't close" / "it's closer than most are making it out to be".

so basically, that was a pretty long way to say I like it.

[elindauer]

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However, i still don't think the mix strategy will come to this board. This board is how to play one hand, we don't post 100 hand sessions or long history, only schiends does that with his 100/200 HU sessions which i think are great for the forum.

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But this is my point. Let's say a hand has an opportunity to semi-bluff. What you are saying is that your answer to what you would do in a post will be either fold, call, or raise, but that, at the table, this isn't how you would play at all. You would play a mixed strategy designed to keep him guessing, involving semi-bluff raising. How often should you semi-bluff raise over the hands that look like this? That's an interesting question we should be discussing, but aren't.

How you play and how you post are different. In the mid high stakes forum, this shouldn't be the case. We should have a vocabulary for describing what we really would do, which is not any of fold, call, or raise.

I agree that it might not catch on. It's different and it's challenging. We're not used to thinking this way. In my mind, the fact that it would be so hard to put anything but a broad range of numbers on these triples suggests just how much room there is for us all to improve.

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There are just so many plain situations in which i have no reason to mix it up. I raise AA preflop. Big blind calls. flop comes Jxx. i get checkraised. There is pretty much never a reason to mix my strategy up here; never am i calling down and never am i raising the flop.

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Well, that is your opinion. I personally feel that in this exact situation, a triple is absolutely necessary against any decent opponent. If you never reraise overpairs, then he can know that when you do reraise, you don't have a particularly strong hand. Further, by always playing your big hands slow, you give him more incentive to take shots at the pot with draws, since he knows he's unlikely to be forced to pay 3 bets to see the turn. He can just check the turn if he mises his draw and you call the flop.

AA is a particularly strong overpair that doesn't fear free cards generally, so I like the smooth call play often with that hand. Maybe {0, 80, 20}. But you see what's happening here? Talking about triples forces us to confront two questions. First, how should we play this hand while considering questions like metagame, etc. Not just this one hand in a vaccuum, but this hand in the context of many hands. Second, it forces us to consider how our strategy with this hand interacts with our strategy for playing other hands. If we always call, what hands does that leave us 3-betting? How can our opponent take advantage of this? Will he take advantage of this? What mixed strategy would be the "default" that could not be exploited? Would it ever include folding?

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The only time i will ever mix it up is if i do it and BB folds, the next time around or the next time after that he gets AK added to my range, which bluff theory wise would be over adjusting to his fold, since it's about 24 legit combos and 16 bluff combos in a roughly 4:1 bluff.

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Without getting into the specifics, this is precisely the kind of discussion we should be having in the mid high forum. Exactly like this. How to play the hand, then adjust our mixed strategy based on that play and our assumptions about their assumptions...

It all gets very complicated and very interesting fast. Let's save the "fold preflop" stuff for the low stakes tables, and move on.

Thanks for the discussion, you make well thought out points. I think our views of the world are closer than it would seem given that we appear to be disagreeing.

-Eric

[elindauer]

Hi Chris,

You're right and this is a very insightful post. I might disagree with your contention that folding KQ and calling KJ must be wrong. These hands are virtually identical in quality facing a check-raise, so our feelings about whether or not top pair is good at this particular time is much more important than the pip in kicker.

If you are not going to use judgment to make these decisions, ala Gambler's suggestion that you fold early and call late in the session, then yes, I agree that you should fold the weakest hands and call the strongest hands, using triple concept to discuss what percentage of your hand range to fold. I think you'll find that with any decent percentage, you're probably going to have to fold some pairs though. Maybe not, it depends on how much bluffing you do. See how we're talking about your whole strategy again? You have to for there to be any reasonable discussion of whether or not you should fold, yet this is almost never acknowledged in this forum. I think this is because we have, until now, lacked the vocabulary to begin the discussion.

-Eric

[elindauer]

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So, from now on, please consider answers in the form

{fold, call, raise}

to be valid.

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I think this implies a level of precision that just doesn't exist, at least not for most players. I'd rather see someone respond:

"You are almost never good here, I would fold. The pot would have to twice as big for me even to consider calling."

Or

"I'd call. If the pot was smaller, say 7BB, it's a fold, but I think you will be good more than the 13:1 you are getting".

etc.

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Hi AceHigh,

Your statement is clearly true, right now. Does that mean that, with the great poker talent and minds available on this board, we cannot change this?

I'd speculate that few players have ever spent much time thinking about this, and there's very little written in the literature. It's not surprising that we have no feel for the numbers. We have to start thinking and playing this way and getting experience and refining and playing and thinking... just like when we were working on the simple fold or call or raise model that has served us so well to this point.

Time to take the next step. We'll have stupidly broad ranges in the beginning. It won't be easy. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

By the way, the painfully bad (IMO) and hand waving analysis of DERB's play would be helped immensely by discussions like this. I happen to believe we're going to find that mixed strategies against good players are going to involve 3-betting some medium pairs on the turn, to try to exploit their tendency to fold to raises... Or, perhaps better, because they don't have the leak of never folding to raises, we have to stop leaking by never semi-bluff 3-betting. Or, perhaps, because they fold to raises too much, we must semi-bluff 3-bet more... or... well, what is it? How often should you muck AK unimproved to a turn donk bet? How often should you call? Raise? And how often DO you do it?


-Eric

[Chris Callahan]

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You're right and this is a very insightful post. I might disagree with your contention that folding KQ and calling KJ must be wrong. These hands are virtually identical in quality facing a check-raise, so our feelings about whether or not top pair is good at this particular time is much more important than the pip in kicker.

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I agree with this, but now you are talking about reads and psychology. It's not what's implied by the {fold,call,raise} notation. The way I see it, it says that you should randomize your action after you have taken all information into consideration. But it cannot be correct to use {50,50,0} for KQ and {50,50,0} for KJ, because you could simply improve on this by using {0,100,0} for KQ and {100,0,0} for KJ.

In terms of game theoretic optimal strategies it might not matter if you fold KQ and call KJ because it might not be exploitable (meaning that even if you do this it's never correct for your opponent to check-raise KQ or KJ). But in choosing between two optimal strategies we should of course use the one that has the potential to exploit mistakes (in this case raising with a hand that he should always just call with).

[Spicymoose]

The reason you need to vary your play is so that you are not predictable, and cause your opponents to put you on hand ranges as different as possible from what you actually have later on. If you have a hand where you want to {20,60,20}, I think randomly choosing your 3 options based on the percentages is ok, but I think it is better to consciously choose which option, after you have your mixed strategy.

The reason for this is because you currently have some image at the table. Lets say that your image is extremely tight, only bet good hands, never bluff. In this case, you want to people to keep that image, so your likely actions should be more inclined to do things that look weak/tight. Now, if you have something like {50,50,0}, maybe you will be more inclined to fold, to keep your image as is, rather then let people know that you might call down semi-loose. This can only be taken to an extent though, if you are pondering a {10,90,0}, then you can't just automatically fold to keep your image as is.

Basically my point is that when using a mixed strategy, you should be thinking about what your current image is, and where you want your image to go, and have that have at least some influence on your mixed strategy.