Week In Review #37 December 1st-6th
Punt of the Year Submission Thread
NB: We are one week past Thanksgiving, but the POTD sale is ongoing. If you missed the sale last week, you can get 40% off an annual subscription or 50% off 12 months of a monthly subscription here.
The new normal for the publication of Year’s Bests lists and Christmas decorations going up seems to be right after American Thanksgiving, December 1st, and/or the first snowfall of the season. This year, those three happened within quick succession, so it’s officially time for publications like mine to start recapping the year. Unfortunately, December has already started and I have not prepared any sort of list of superlatives, so I am asking for some help from the POTD readership. Comments to this post will remain open, and I would like submissions for the Punt of the Year and the Hand of the Year. They can be hands I’ve already written about; they can be online poker hands, live poker hands, streamed poker hands, hands you played yourself, or hands you heard about from a friend. I am accepting any and all submissions, but the selection committee would like hands to be legibly transcribed, and when possible, we would like links to supporting evidence— live reporting updates, YouTube links, raw hand history files are all acceptable. Submit your hands in the comment sections below, or if you’re shy, you can message me directly on Substack, Instagram, Twitter, or Bluesky. The winners will be written about at a future date. Send your submissions in.
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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:
A 200bb deep three-bet pot PIO sim for POTD #181
An IOU as I analyzed POTD #182 using GTO Lab’s new cEV sims
Two Rocket Solver sims for POTD #183
An IOU as POTD #184 was a PLO hand
A PIO ICM sim for POTD #185
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 #181, where I wrote my grading rubric, but in a POTD first, I will also include a preamble to the #onemorething:
Last week, subscriber Mike Watson texted me about the 99 hand in POTD #180, “This 99 is fine. A. A- if you must be harsh with yourself.” I explained to him that when grading hands, a question I’ve asked myself is, if the SB shoves and I call with AA, what grade should I give myself? I played the hand as well as I could, but A+ does not feel appropriate for such a simple hand. I’ve decided that a hand with no mistakes will get a B, but hands I grade B+ or better need to show off some poker skill beyond “I played the hand perfectly.” Similarly, I want to balance grading how I played my hand with how I played my range. If I back into a “perfectly” played hand, but my thought process was terrible, giving myself an A+ feels like giving myself an A+ for calling a shove with 72o and flopping quads— well, I won the hand, how can I get a bad grade? With that out of the way, in this week’s #onemorething I dove into my grading criteria using a specific hand I played.
POTD #181 onemorething
I touched upon this in the blog, but one way I could have given myself a worse grade in today’s hand; if I were dealt AA instead of 65. AA is a high frequency check-raise on the flop, raising around 60% of the time. I would have played pure call, so I dug into it a little, after facing a quarter pot bet AA raises has 71% equity and 65 has around 73% equity. So AA can still push some linear equity on the flop and it is a trickier hand to play in any node where we need to check-call three streets. There is no board where AA doesn’t improve where it can check-call down, where bare bottom two is happy to do so because it blocks top two and sets and it will always have four outs to a full house.
On the river I would have likely always checked AA because I would have prioritized inducing bluffs from his total air because it seems like you can’t get called by anything when you block all his top pair. However, he has a bunch of potential bluff catchers that would never value bet, hands like QQ. I correctly noted I block all his top pair, but that actually means I need to bet AA because he bets so rarely vs a check. Checking 65 on the river cost me a tiny amount of EV, checking AA costs almost 3bbs. My mistake today, might not be C-worthy, probably closer to B-, but given my range strategy was so off I am accounting for the chance I might have made a D-worthy mistake with AA and giving myself a C.
Housekeeping
If you’d like to sign up for Octopi, Run It Once, or GTO Lab, you can get a discount using the following codes. I am not sure which of these will work with Black Friday specials, but if you’d like an even better deal than what they’re offering, sign up.
Run it Once use code: POTD for 10% off
Octopi Poker use code: PUNT for 50% off 1st month for monthly subs and 2 free months for annual subs
GTOLab use code: POTD for $25 off any product. It can be used multiple times
Media
Pitchfork released their albums of the year list, and their number #1 choice was the self-titled album from Los Thuthanaka. I have not listened to this album or heard of this album. [Me neither, and I am and was the perfect age to have been a Pitchfork hipster. -ed] Quentin Tarantino was on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast and counted down his top 20 movies of the century thus far; number one was Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, a movie I have seen that is not one of my top 100 movies I’ve seen this century (it’s pretty good!). These picks would not be my picks, but my endorsement today is that if you are making lists this year, follow your heart. If your choices are sincere and weird it makes your list much more interesting to read. This is not like voting for an MVP in sports, where picking Jorge Polanco over Aaron Judge makes you an annoying attention-seeker. One Battle After Another is a great movie; I’d rather read a list like John Waters’s that doesn’t mention it at all. Next week I’ll report back and tell you if I like the Los Thuthanaka album; you can do the same by buying it or streaming it.
As always you can reach me