Week In Review #42 January 18th-24th:
Nothing this week caught my attention enough to spin out a whole essay. So just going to drop one piece of poker advice before dumping one-sentence sports takes. Don’t play on Ignition. Hoping you can win enough to outrun blatant systematic cheating is usually a fool’s errand, especially for low-stakes players, where there is no shortage of soft games. Here are my takes:
The Bills should have fired Sean McDermott and Brandon Beane. [I don’t understand how Beane got a promotion when the roster has degraded to this. That’s the only opinion I have on any of these. -ed]
Mitch Marner should get booed.
Bo Bichette should not get booed, but the Jays made the right decision to let him go.
Tennis grand slams should be best of three sets in early rounds and best of five sets from the round of 16 onwards for both genders.
The Raptors should trade for Ja Morant.
The Patriots making the Super Bowl this year would be a million times worse than the world where the Chiefs won with Taylor Swift performing at the halftime show.
Bill Guerin is doing a great job with the Minnesota Wild and a terrible job with the US Olympic team.
Leicester City winning the EPL is more unlikely than Indiana winning NCAA Football Championship, but less likely than Indiana going 16-0 and clearly being the best team in the country.
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Housekeeping
For those who missed it, we have launched a new feature, the Sunday Special, where hobbyist poker players write about hands they played and I add my thoughts via footnote. We are looking for submissions, and if you are interested in being the subject of a future Sunday Special, let me know. Do not be shy if you lack poker skill or accomplishments. No solver analysis is required from you, and I’d much rather have amateur poker players who are good writers that can produce clean copy and clearly articulate their thought process, than editing the writing of 99% of accomplished poker players.
If you’d like to sign up for Octopi, Run It Once, or GTO Lab, you can get a discount using the following codes.
Run it Once use code: POTD for 10% off
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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 PIO sim that forced me to play my incorrect flop size for POTD #211
A vanilla PIO sim that was fully converged for POTD #212
A PIO ICM sim and a cEV sim using ICM preflop ranges for POTD #213
A fully converged sim for the Blind vs Blind pot in POTD #214
An HRC preflop sim and a PIO ICM for POTD #215
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 #214, where I write about exploiting and counter-exploiting tendencies blind vs. blind.
POTD #214 onemorething More than any other node the initial flop decisions in limp-check depend quite a bit on your opponent’s tendencies. If the BB is overfolding to your stab, you should bet a lot. If they don’t raise over a block enough you should bet. However there is a flip side to this coin, what if they don’t bet enough when you check? Then the scales start to even out. Betting a weak hand is higher EV vs the over-folder, under-raiser, but checking is also higher EV vs a player who will let you showdown too often. This is why, within reason, I try to play solvery in these nodes. It’s rare for someone to be too tight defending too c-bets and too loose vs checks.
When you are OOP your betting range is supposed to to be linearish–you’re not betting 3s2s on QhJhTh and you might bet Tc5c. However the BB uses their position to showdown middle of range for cheap and might bet a very polar range, including never betting Tc5c, but occasionally betting 3s2s. The current meta involves most BBs betting too often, but too linearly. Trips checks 15% of the time and a 6 checks 43% of the time. It’s common to face a player in the BB who might hit the 50/50 bet frequency of the solver on 644, but they do so by betting too strong and too much middle of range. Those are great players to check/fold a hand like mine versus. Instead of “betting” because I don’t want to check/fold, the best exploit vs many opponents is probably check-folding because they’re betting range is too strong. I don’t remember who my opponent was in this hand, so I don’t know if it was the right exploit in this exact hand.Media
I have yet to see Marty Supreme or enough movies to have a strong opinion on the Oscar nominations, but I think once I see Marty Supreme, I will feel that Daniel Lopatin’s score will have been snubbed. I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to Lopatin’s other 2025 album Tranquillizer, and I like it a lot, with one caveat. He appears to be sampling notification sounds from various apps, and when I listen to certain tracks I think my phone is going crazy. I like the album enough to be generous and say this is a genius move, and Lopatin is making a point about how we’re all addicted to our phones.
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