The last number of Week in Reviews went a little long, as I wrote essays on: Why pros never celebrate, if poker needs a Drive to Survive?, what “winnings” means, and Ossi Ketola’s heads-up matches vs. Daniel Cates. This week, I am keeping it short. I am only sort of a public figure, but I, like many, have a public profile. I think it’s important to recognize when you have nothing novel or interesting to add, especially when the topic being discussed is out of your area of expertise— keeping your mouth shut is often the best course of action. In private, amongst friends or family, I am happy to provide half-baked opinions about any topic under the sun, but I am not going to subject a paying audience to my ill-considered musings. When one writes a dissertation to earn a PhD, they are supposed to provide a “significant original contribution to knowledge.” I am not suggesting the same standard should hold for posting things online, but if you are feeling emotionally charged and want to post your thoughts publicly, ask yourself “has someone said this better than me? Am I adding to the conversation?” If you are not, it’s not worth posting, summer is almost over— go get some ice cream.
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Testimonials
This testimonial was technically last week, but Norman Chad wrote some very nice things about POTD and my writing.
I never expect poker pros to be as thoughtful as @SamGreenwoodRIO is — I apparently spend too much time with @themouthmatusow — so I am always surprised at how thoughtful (and insightful) that Mr. Greenwood ends up being.
If you’d like to read some ill considered musings from a non-expert, may I suggest reading Mike Matusow’s twitter feed.
Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium subscribers get the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries, videos of me walking through the sims, and a text summary of how I ran the sims. This week I uploaded
PIO sims that account for inequal preflop stacks for POTD #121
PIO sims that account for the 1/2.5k BB level POTD #122
PIO sims that force me to check range on the flop POTD #123
PIO sims that look at my response vs a forced c-bet for POTD #124
Postflop ICM sims for POTD #125
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today I’ll share #onemorething from POTD #123 where I write about “offsuit combos”
POTD #123 onemorething
A common heuristic I hear is people referring to one player having “offsuit” combos of a hand, which implies they have a certain class of hand more often. Generally that is true, but it’s always important to consider the denominator of how many total combos you have. On J93r, UTG/7 has full combos of AJo and KJo preflop, which means on J93r, they have 12 combos of AJ and KJ on the flop. By comparison, the flatter never flats KJo and only flats AJo 28% of the time and flats AJs and KJs pure; this means that on a jack high flop they have 3 KJ combos and 5.52 (3+9*.28) AJ combos. 24 combos vs. 8.52 combos appears to be a large advantage, if you ignore that UTG raises 22% of hands and the flatter’s calling range is only 6.3% of hands. 24 of UTG/7’s 258 combos are KJ or AJ for a total of 9.3% of the time, while the flatter has KJ or AJ with 8.52 of 74.63 combos, for a total of 11.4%.
In this hand, the preflop raiser has a massive edge in offsuit combos, but since their whole range is much wider, they do not actually have an advantage in strong top pair. They do have an overpair more often, and they have more QJ/JT suited (which sometimes three-bet as the LJ) and J8s (which mixes opens as UTG7 but always folds in the LJ), which gives them a marginal top pair advantage, but the edge comes from them having more suited combos, not more offsuit ones.
Housekeeping
POTD has given a group discount to the members of Pocket Queens. If you are in a study group or stable and would like to discuss group rates. Please reach out to me, all the ways to contact me are listed at the bottom of this post.
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Media
On Wednesday, I did an AMA in r/poker. The first question I was asked was “If you had to bang a face card which one would you pick?”, but the quality of questions improved from there. If you are reading this because you liked my AMA on reddit, thank you for joining POTD. You can read the AMA at the link above.
The Toronto International Film Festival started this week and I’ve managed to see three movies with plans to see two or three more. The movies haven’t had a wide release yet and I will give my very quick reviews below:
Blue Moon (Linklater) - An excellent movie, with one of my favourite Ethan Hawke performances. It’s fun to watch a talky Linklater movie that is also a period piece, and as someone who has been doing a lot of writing recently, I enjoyed watching a movie about wordcraft.
Nouvelle Vague (Linklater) - I have not seen other films in competition at Cannes, but I can’t believe this one won the Palme D’Or— well, I can believe it, because it’s about the making of Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless, and film festivals love awarding movies about movies. It’s a fun movie, but the easy, but accurate review is that I wish I watched Breathless instead.
The Blue Trail (Mascaro) - I knew nothing about this movie going in, but I liked it quite a bit. It’s in wide release in Brazil, so if any Brazilian readers want to check it out you can do so. I am tired of seeing the same visual tropes in dystopian sci-fi, and The Blue Trail upended several in a way that I liked. Instead of the movie following a chosen one, the protagonist is a 77 year old woman, and I liked that the dystopia looked like a remixed version of the current world that was unfamiliar, and they did not fall for the usual trap of making every authoritarian dystopia look like an airport concourse.
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