a DERB hand

[mike l.]

3 betting the river would be more correct if it was really right for him to call the river raise so much in this hand. which it cant be.

[newhizzle]

[ QUOTE ]
"How does the flop check make him unreadable? If he had pocket kings, he would have bet. He flopped nothing, so he checked."

right except for the part where he 3 bet pf. if he would never check KK or TT, A5 or AK (all defendable as a varying your play weirdness) here than youre right his flop check is awful. but i was assuming he would sometimes check those hands, since youve all said he plays erratic.


[/ QUOTE ]

i could see him checking QQ here, maybe, i dont know if DERB would, but his friend Kukavica is checking it close to 100% of the time

[Paluka]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
"How does the flop check make him unreadable? If he had pocket kings, he would have bet. He flopped nothing, so he checked."

right except for the part where he 3 bet pf. if he would never check KK or TT, A5 or AK (all defendable as a varying your play weirdness) here than youre right his flop check is awful. but i was assuming he would sometimes check those hands, since youve all said he plays erratic.


[/ QUOTE ]

i could see him checking QQ here, maybe, i dont know if DERB would, but his friend Kukavica is checking it close to 100% of the time

[/ QUOTE ]

Checking QQ here isn't that unusual.

[mikelow]

that's why he's running so well...he is so unreadable.

Heck, I thought you might value bet bottom pair. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

[elindauer]

[ QUOTE ]
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.


[/ QUOTE ]

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

great post. Wouldnt surprise me at all if DERB kept notes like this and thats why his play seem so strange at times. He is just testing his opponents like Maverick in the saloon.. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[elindauer]

[ QUOTE ]
i was willing to give him some credit for the flop check being a strange change up, but the river bet-call is atrocious here.

[/ QUOTE ]

Atrocious? With no read given on the hijack, no idea of the history of heads up play between these two players, you are ready to condemn this play as definitely terrible? Seems to me that you may be jumping the gun here.

I mean, this is 50/100, so it's very reasonable to assume that these guys may know each other well. Perhaps villain usually calls with ace high and worse, but bluff raises often enough for a call to be good. Is this so hard to imagine?

my 2 cents.
Eric

[Paluka]

Who thinks DERB calls the turn even if it misses him completely?

[elindauer]

[ QUOTE ]
right but that river call there is clearly -EV once derb bets and gets raised. the play then would be check-call, not bet-call. that's not a bet-call hand or board.

[/ QUOTE ]

Mike, would you agree that if DERB always folds to a raise here, then calling might eventually become +EV? Can't he call and then fold the next 20 times in this situation, only to then call again?

-Eric

[Turning Stone Pro]

My experience with DERB (and it is extensive) leads me to believe he will fold to a river raise.

I like his river bet - no one except someone well-versed in PP (who is familiar with the turn and river donk-bet tendencies as another poster mentioned) will have the balls to raise him, so he perhaps gets paid off by high cards and he could possibly get a middle-pair type hand to muck. For sure, he has to call (or, more aptly put, is gonna call) a river bet if he checks, so why not bet?

TSP