Week in Review #11 June 1st-June 7th
In last week’s post I wrote about attending the Hands Helping Hands charity poker tournament, a tournament I won. It was my first live tournament win since the $20k Short Deck Turbo I won at Triton Vietnam in 2023. I’ve had to skip a lot of stops recently for personal reasons and I chopped a tournament heads up, so my drought isn’t that long, but it’s always nice to get off the schneid. The heads up match was interesting because I was playing a very inexperienced poker player and I wanted the trophy and bragging rights, but we were playing shallow stack heads up, a game with a pretty low skill cap. I was extremely tired and a little drunk and tried to concoct a max exploit strategy before I realized I was too tired to accurately count our chip stacks and was actually playing poorly. Luckily, I made a full house, got three streets of value and won.
Unfortunately, I was not just tired and a little drunk, but I was also sick and have been fighting some sort of mystery ailment for most of this week. So the Week in Review post will be a little shorter than usual.
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Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
In the POTD Discord for Premium Subscribers I wrote about Monday’s hand POTD #51
I debated running a four way sim to see how this hand “should have” played if played by experts, but concluded that was a waste of everyone’s time. Instead I will add one more sim to the IOU pile. Don’t be shy. If you suggest something, I’ll probably run it
At the same time, Victoria Livschitz posted a hand in the #postyourpunt channel it was an unusual inequal stack spot, so I ran it for her that very day and posted a video of me going over the sim as well as uploading the file to the Google Drive folder
On Tuesday I uploaded four PIO sims that showed how different flop strategies could lead to different turn/river strategies
On Wednesday I uploaded two PIO sims, one forcing myself to bet the size I actually did on the flop and one using appropriate sizing from me
On Thursday I uploaded two PIO ICM sims giving Jason different preflop ranges
On Friday I ran an HRC calculation FGS-6 for an entire orbit to see how the results would differ from a one hand Malmuth-Harville sim, the answer… quite a lot.
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today I’ll share #onemorething I posted about POTD #51
When talking about play style, the classic spectrums people are placed on are loose-tight and passive-aggressive. Too often I think people think of “aggressive” players as being players who often bluff, when they’re more accurately defined as players who bet and raise a lot. Pique and Tilly and Handrich are all players who play very loose preflop, whose most common bet size is around 50% pot to 75% pot, but rarely overbet or three barrel total air, but how would I classify their play? Loose-Aggressive. No question. If you’re constantly raising second pair, often cbetting pure checks or betting twice as large as you’re supposed to. You are an aggressive poker player. If you’re regularly playing 32s preflop, you are a loose player. You are loose-aggressive. Not every LAG plays the same and you don’t need to be so restrictive as bucketing all players into one of four archetypes, but based on their play in this cash game, it’s clear what bucket they belong to.
Media
I was on the Thinking Poker podcast, discussing all things poker theory, study, solvers, etc. It was a really interesting deep dive and a fun conversation. You should listen to it
I was on theDouble Pivot podcast talking about Poker, Sports analytics and what should be of the most interest to POTD subscribers the Canadian National Soccer Team. That podcast is behind the paywall for now, but if you are a fan of soccer (or football) you should give it a listen.
Last week I wrote in this section
I am currently watching Severance and am midway through Season 2. I am starting to get impatient with the show and I am worried it will not stick the landing. Next week, I’ll let you know if I thought it did.
I was very annoyed with most of S2, but that ending was dynamite. I wish it were a series finale because I think it would be a very fitting end to the series and I am skeptical that S3 will be any good, but we will see.
Speaking of sticking the landing, I have run out of superlatives to describe the work of Nathan Fielder and The Rehearsal, what a show. HBO please keep giving him a giant budget.
Have a good weekend and if you aren’t a subscriber, please consider becoming one I can be reached on