Week In Review #28 September 29th-October 5th
An update on last week and a some praise for Ethan Hawke
Last week, I went long on MLB Playoff Odds and how constantly looking at forecasts and measuring probabilities can obfuscate your overall understanding of how likely something is to happen. At any given time in a poker tournament, the chip leader is the most likely player to win the tournament; throughout a given poker tournament, something like 10% of the field might be the chipleader at a given point in time. Many of those 10% are going to end the tournament bemoaning their ability to convert a chip lead into a big score. There are currently 8 teams remaining the MLB playoffs, and the subjects of last week’s blog, the New York Yankees, the Toronto Blue Jays, and the Detroit Tigers, are still in the hunt. The Tigers squandered their 99.9% chance to win the division, but they did not squander their “100%” chance to make the playoffs that fell all the way to 80.5%, but made it and managed to beat the Cleveland Guardians in a three game series. The New York Yankees blew their 91.8% chance to win the division and their playoff odds fell to 78.1%, but that was as low as they got, they knocked out the Boston Red Sox and are still in the hunt. Last, but not least, my Toronto Blue Jays peaked at 100% to win the division on the final day of the season, when they beat Tampa Bay to secure their division crown. Their odds fell as low as 54.3%, but they won their last four games to fight off a charging Yankees team, whom they will play in a 5-game series starting tomorrow. As always, the lesson to remember here is, swings in probability are bound to happen; the final outcome is what matters. The Blue Jays did not blow a 97.3% chance because it fell to 54.3%, just as you did not blow a chip lead if you still end up winning the tournament.
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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:
Deep PIO blind vs blind sims that forces the SB to use Art’s sizes for POTD #137
Rocket Solver flop and turn sims and a PIO river sim for POTD #138
A lot of Octopi content for POTD #139
A PIO ICM sim for POTD #140
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 #137 where I wrote the problems with c-betting too often blind vs blind in the limp-check node, but many of the principles also apply to POTD #139, which takes place at the raise-call node.
POTD #137 onemorething
One of the biggest leaks I see from the population is stabbing too much in LX hands BvB. They often think they have a range advantage, but that is not true for a variety of reasons. Firstly, once you get shallow enough, the SB raises first in with a lot of their best hands preflop; this means both the SB and BB are empty in great preflop hands. Secondly, the BB raises a lot more offsuit trash, so they often have a much stronger middle of range in any LX node. The SB might have more AA than the BB, but they also have a lot more J3o.
Finally, ranges are so wide that the presence of individual hands rarely makes a whole range much stronger. If you raise UTG and the flop is KJT, you will have a straight almost twice as often as the BB, ~11% to 5.5%. If you limp the SB and the BB checks you will have a straight twice as often, 2.8% to 1.4%. Having a nuts advantage is nice, but if you have 30x pot to play, you can’t build an entire strategy out of having a certain hand class 2.8% of the time. What happens when the SB stabs too much is exactly what happened to Artur in this hand. He keeps putting money in the pot when there are a lot of ugly turns and rivers and there is still a lot of money behind. You might think that bloating the pot OOP doesn’t matter as much vs. weaker players, but it can still be quite costly because you will end up in situations like Artur ends up on the river, where he has a mediocre (well, to be fair pretty good with the Kh) bluff catcher OOP in a pot that is 2-3x times as big as it’s supposed to be. If only I punished him for it.
Housekeeping
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Media
I did two hours of commentary on the WCOOP 115-H $25,000 SHR stream earlier this week. It’s archived on Twitch and you can watch it here. My commentary starts around 27:00 in.
I watched the first episode of The Lowdown and found it funny and watchable with a great cast, including Ethan Hawke, who I thought gave one of the best performances of his career in the 2025 film Blue Moon. I also enjoyed the story he told about meeting Robert Redford on the Jimmy Kimmel show, which I’ve embedded below. He’s a great actor and has good performances on TV, in movies, and on talk shows; quite a 2025 for Ethan Hawke.
As always I can be reached