[sirgasleak]

Not sure why you’d x/r that flop.

[monkiesystem]

I had top trips. Wanted to build the pot with a strong hand.

[eanderson85]

If you were villain, what hands are you check raising a big stack all in with?
Pocket 6s, trips, 2-pairs, BDSDs, and nut flush draws?
If MP opened a King, how many are worse than yours? Are they opening K8o, or the 3 K8s (1/3 of those having a flush redraw)?
Are they donking enough to bet AJ, AQ, QJ, or QT on a two tone paired board? Spades or all 16 combos? If not, do they have the testicular fortitude to check raise all in with these?
Which pocket pairs (if any) are doing this?
Is villain willing to take a 36% bluff shove with a flush draw during the last level of rebuy with a top 10% stack?
I don’t mind the check raise multiway on a two tone board, they are probably assuming you missed and betting small to take the pot. But getting 3-bet really puts you in a bind. You are 2/3rds against the flush and almost always losing to the one king available.
If you have some history and can put villain as aggro and willing to try and get a fold with their flush draws, then I would probably call, hoping they had a pocket pair or a draw. The deciding factor being there is only one king left in the deck for him to have, and if they have 6s, good for them. If you put them as more of a pot controller with their draws and not raising them, I would fold. What’s the solver say?

[monkiesystem]

Eric, this was difficult to simulate with a solver that does not support multiway pots. There was a third player involved. Any abstraction that removes the third player is problematic because the third player acted during the flop.

The big 3-bet put us in a bind as you say. What does he do this with that we are beating? Not much.

Trips are a strong hand, but we must play it cautiously. That’s been a leak of mine for quite some time, and I mean to plug it.

[binkley]

It’s a cooler in that when you flop trips but are out-kicked, you’re going to lose a lot of chips. But the 3-bet jam shows a lot of strength. When we call, do we think V is doing this with K8? Is it ever AA or a flush draw? Seems more likely that it’s a better K. V has AK in range and we do not.

I think the XR allows V to fold out their misses and doesn’t allow them to continue with their bluffs.

[sirgasleak]

Exactly. When you x/r that flop, you’re basically value-targeting exactly AA and flush draws. Everything else you beat folds, and you lose to better Kx and are behind 66.

[monkiesystem]

The moral of this story is, when we hit trips, we don’t reflexively go for broke. We have to put our thinking cap on and Range our opponent. Top trips with a mediocre kicker might get folded in a runaway pot.

[misclickdonkey]

So I looked at this spot in DTO 3way, something new they’ve put out. Your hand is a check raise here because you’re on the weaker side of your kx combos, and when check raised the co can jam but note they’re only jamming the best kings and some draws in the range. But when they jam you still call. Looks fine, just a crap spot that your supposed to go broke in.

[misclickdonkey]

meant mp not co, was looking at the range while typing

[monkiesystem]

DTO 3Way says my calling the jam was unexploitable. But given what we know about population in low stakes, is there an exploitative fold to the jam here? Is there an exploitative call instead of check-raise?

[sirgasleak]

Yes. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think we’re in a phase of poker where people are putting way, way too much faith in solvers. It’s become a kind of crutch – it seems that we’ve moved away from analyzing hands and just relying on the solver answer.

[monkiesystem]

Properly used, GTO strategy is the foundation of a solid understanding of poker. It is NOT a prescription for the right way to play every spot.

We use solver solutions to show unexploitable strategies. We then use that as the baseline for first identifying opponents’ exploitable GTO deviations (leaks) and then determining the optimal GTO deviations to exploit the leaks. The leaks can be from a read on a specific opponent, or they can be a population trend.

For example, the solver solution says that the unexploitable decision in this thread was for me to call off the big jam. But the reason the decision to call it off is unexploitable is because Villian would unexploitably be bluffing enough to make me indifferent to calling or folding. However in real life is Villain ever bluffing here, or bluffing enough to make me indifferent? Not likely. So my GTO deviation would be an exploitative fold.

We’re really cheating ourselves in some spots if we take the solved GTO line instead of using the exploitative play. For example, in a Midwestern casino tournament OMC opens UTG and we 3-bet QQ. It folds around and OMC insta-jams. Do we call that off? The solver would. But we know OMC will show us KK+ if we do. With such an egregious population trend as that, one could almost think of the solved GTO play as an expensive leak itself.

[sirgasleak]

Agree 100%. Learn the equilibrium strategy, then deviate to exploit. The reality is, even if we don’t have any info on an opponent, population tendencies won’t come close to GTO.

I’m not suggesting there isn’t value to discussing the GTO solutions in the hand discussions, but it should just be a starting point. I see so many threads in poker forums where the poster asks about a situation, and someone inevitably responds with a solver output as though that is the end rather than the beginning of the discussion.