Week In Review #48 March 1st to March 7th
Fire this Man
I remember reading an article on Gawker by, I want to say Alex Pareene, about how no one should write a weekly Op-Ed column. His argument was, that no one has 52 good takes a year and any publication expecting someone to have that many fresh ideas is ultimately not good for readers or the writer. I couldn’t find the article— Googling variations of “Gawker Op-Ed” gave me a lot of false positives—, but this preamble is all to say I was not inspired to write a lengthy introduction this week because I had nothing to write about (unless POTD subscribers want to read me write 4000 words about why Brad Treliving should be fired)
This week I also read a post on Twitter about how things like light stretching, reading a book or preparing for the upcoming week are work and not recovery. Like the Gawker article I mentioned above, I’ve been unable to locate the original post, but I am happy to pass the sentiment along. Light work is still work, not rest. Sometimes you need to be productive and don’t have the energy for hard work, but sometimes you do just need to rest. This week is a week where I am doing some recharging, hopefully by next week someone will have done something that has incensed me enough that I will be able to write a scorching hot take for all to read, until then we have our normal Week in Review. Feel free to subscribe by clicking the button below.
Housekeeping
As you can read here there will be some changes coming to POTD. We are shifting from five punts, a Week in Review, and a Sunday special to three punts, a Week in Review and a Sunday special. The change will come in effect in a couple weeks.
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Run it Once use code: POTD for 10% off
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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:
Three HRC sims and two PIO ICM sims for POTD #241
A vanilla PIO sim for POTD #242
Three PIO sims, two that force Richard to check for POTD #243
Two PIO sims looking at different board textures for POTD #244
An IOU to premium subscribers since POTD #245 the hand was a PLO hand
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 #243 where I write about nodelocking
POTD #243 onemorething
I am going to use this hand as an example to go on a little rant about nodelocking. A way to look at my flop strategy is my hand mixes c-betting, Richard will check-raise less often than the solver, therefore I should bet. Obviously if he folds the flop too often or raises the flop too rarely the EV of c-betting goes up. However that type of player tends to bet the turn less often than the solver and bluff the river less than the solver. They might also value bet tighter than the solver. Facing this type of player your EV should increase at all nodes, so saying c-betting the flop is higher EV than it should be does not lead to the conclusion you should c-bet 100%.
One gripe I have about node locking in general is that after nodelocking on decision the solver corrects and plays great poker afterwards. There are not many poker players who don't check-raise the flop often enough, but then play appropriately aggressively on the turn and river. If you're playing a hand vs a weak player the correct solution is not the solver solution, but it's also not the node locked solution, unless you correctly lock all of their actions further down the game tree. Both node locked and unlocked solver solutions are very good ways to teach you mechanics about how you should play vs weaker players. E.g. If a player doesn't check-raise enough, you should pick a smaller c-bet size with middle of range hands. But a node locked solution is also just a jumping off point to find the best exploit vs a weaker player. In this hand, I actually think I should have c-bet range. I think Richard might bet 8x and draws too often on the turn after the flop checks through and he might not check-raise them or top pair enough on the flop, which means a small c-bet buys me a cheap river a lot more often than a check back does.
Media
Okay, so I won’t give you the whole 4,000 words, but I’ll dive a little into the Toronto Maple Leafs lackluster deadline/season here. Brad Treliving’s first move as a GM was signing a 37 year old Ryan Reaves, who had been waived the previous year, to a 3 year contract that was large enough it could not be fully buried in the minors. At that point it was clear he was a terrible GM and would drive the Leafs into the ground, unless their star players could overcome the idiots running the team. He’s a bad player, but brought some intangibles, but there was no reason to give him a contract that could have led to the Leafs incurring a cap hit if they wanted to get rid of him.
I knew Treliving would make the Leafs worse and thought last year’s success was fool’s gold. I did not think they’d make the playoffs this year, but I still did not imagine they’d collapse this quickly. While I often write about punts here, poker at a high level is mostly a game about consistently making correct decisions that positively compound. Treliving’s tenure as a GM shows what happens when you don’t make too many disastrous moves, but fail to make any good moves. Things slowly deteriorate, until everything is in shambles. That he was employed to run two NHL teams for 12 straight years (and counting) gives me hope that I one day might be paid millions of dollars to do something I am terrible at. I’ll throw a party the day him and Craig Berube are fired.
Have a nice weekend, and as always I can be reached on