Week In Review #51 March 22nd-March 28th
Reminiscing about the good ole days
The hand of the week is Kristen Foxen’s fold of KK at the Triton Jeju Main Event Final Table. I have finished writing about that hand and am posting it early, you can read all my analysis for free here. While that hand is being talked about as being a Kristen Foxen hand, in that post I will also be discussing the play of Felipe Ketzer, Elton Tsang, and Phillip Sternheimer, as well as some of the meta-discussion of the hand. If you are currently not a subscriber and would like to read all about that hand, click the button below.
Earlier this week, Jeremy Ausmus tweeted:
I really do miss pre-solver poker. Back then, everyone was in the streets trying things with no answer keys. It led to tons of pure exploits and incredibly interesting decisions. You actually had to figure out your opponent in real-time, which created so many distinct, unorthodox playing styles that you just don’t see much in the modern game.
It got a lot of positive engagement on Poker Twitter, so as a resident grouch, who is extolling the values of sometimes being a hater, It’s time to take Jeremy down a couple pegs. But before I do, I will toss my hater hat aside and concede Jeremy has some points. High-stakes poker has gotten a lot tougher and more regimented, and he knows this firsthand. He is still someone who is battling at the highest stakes in many games and uses solver tools. He is not a dinosaur who has refused to adapt and is complaining about his glory days. Jeremy’s glory days are right now. His post is not just nostalgia bait.
My gripe is mainly this: I think people conflate nostalgia for a different style of poker with nostalgia of making easy money. The argument also reminds me of an argument frequently made by political commentator Jane Coaston: You don’t miss the old days because everything was better, you miss being young. Granted, things were better back then: Games were better, there were more of them, and you were probably making more money. You had privileges such as access to global player pools and high-stakes public cash games, PokerStars support would respond to your e-mail in minutes, you could send 100k on Full Tilt Poker in one click with no KYC. And if you were like me, you were also 21 with no dependents; you did not worry about putting money in savings. I never grinded until 3 AM and woke up at 7 AM to take a sick child to the pediatrician the next morning. Playing poker back in the old days may have been more fun because, for many people, their lives were more fun. I would never trade in the joys of parenthood to have more Fun, but do I sometimes wish I could binge-watch a season of The Sopranos while hung over instead of rooting through my freezer to find something a toddler might want for dinner.
Was the play style more fun? To me, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This argument exists in every sport nowadays. Was basketball more fun to watch or play before the three-point revolution? Was football more fun when teams ran the ball more?1 Baseball with fewer strikeouts? Soccer with less set-piece hunting? I find solver poker to be very elegant and challenging, and studying has made me reconsider how to play exploitative poker. As a player and a spectator, I think solvers have made the game of poker more entertaining. I understand others will disagree, but I think it’s easy to be nostalgic about the old style of play, when it’s linked with being young, making money, and having freedom.
I think Jeremy is giving far too much credit to the average player in the early online days. There were a lot of “pure exploits,” but most people still had their rules-based strategy that they tried to execute when they didn’t have a particular reason to exploit their opponents. It’s just that those rules-based strategies were not very sophisticated or good. Opening 72o because the BB will fold A5o is a good exploit, but it didn’t always lead to thrilling postflop play. There was a lot more going all-in, preflop and postflop. I have found it fun to play more single-raised pots 20bbs deep or limp-check BvB hands 12bbs deep. Those are fun technical poker hands that are much more common now than they were in the past.
Sure, there were some battlers like Vanessa Selbst, who treated every hand she played like it might be her last and tried to come up with a perfect max-exploit strategy every hand. There were also people who were playing 24 tables that flatted opens exclusively with suited broadways and set-mining pocket pairs. Jeremy is repeating an unfair criticism of modern players, that they’re too by the book, but in my experience, they do a lot more exploiting than they’re given credit for. Run a random hand from CoinPoker’s Cash Game World Championship through a solver and tell me that these guys are bots copying solver strategies. From my own perspective, it’s rare to find a situation where I am actively deviating from a solver strategy to exploit someone like Ben Tollerene, but it does happen. I certainly wouldn’t play a hand the same way versus, to use other Jeju Main Event final tablists as examples, Felipe Ketzer, Tom Fuchs, Punnat Punsri, or Kristen Foxen.
Poker is still a game of exploiting your opponents and being prepared for them to counter-exploit you. The difference is, the baseline of normal solid poker has gotten much stronger. While I can be a hater, I try not to be a crank, and whenever these sorts of “remember when”2 posts go viral, I want to be a counterweight. Things are good right now. You adapt and survive; progress does not stop and you need to move along with it, like Jeremy himself has consistently done.
I already have a subscribe button at the top of this post, but I am adding another one because visually I like how the subscribe button breaks up the essay portion of Week in Review with the housekeeping portion. Apologies for the spam.
Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium Subscribers are given access to a Google Drive folder where they will also be able to download 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. This week I uploaded
Two PIO sims that look at responses if Danny c-bets range for POTD #256
Octopi graciously provided the sim used in my High Stakes Duel for POTD #257
A Rocket Solver flop sim and a PIO turn sim for POTD #258
A deep stacked blind vs blind PIO sim for POTD #259
A PIO sim using inequal stack size preflop ranges for POTD #260
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 #257, where I wrote about why the BB doesn’t lead a turn that seems pretty good for their range.
POTD #257 onemorething
The GTO Wizard sim has a tiny amount of flop leading that I assume would totally converge out if ran for longer. It also has a tiny amount of turn leading, that I also assume would converge out if ran for longer. However in both sims you’d see a ton of leading on offsuit 2x and offsuit 4x turns. The reason for this is pretty simple, the BB has a straight a lot more often than IP, on those turns, but on 2s and 4s turns the flush advantage is so extreme that the BB doesn’t want to blindly lead the turn with a straight. The deeper you are “having a range advantage” becomes less and less reason to lead, because the downside is you might play a monster pot when you don’t want to.
In the Octopi sim you actually check-fold a straight to an overbet from time to time. In the GTO Wizard sim if you find the rare lead a straight will often fold to a turn raise. A bare straight is a very good hand on this board, it begins the turn with ~80% equity, but with no way to improve and no strong blocker qualities it can turn into a neutral EV bluff catcher after facing just one bet or raise. Those are not the types of hands you want to build a pot with, even if it is the class of hand responsible for giving you a range advantage. To put it another way bare straights almost all realize around 100-102% of their equity. They have a lot of equity and can realize basically the exact amount of it, when they play passively. If they start bloating the pot to the degree they risk getting bluffed off it, they under up underrealizing their equity. Which means their strategy from the jump should be to play cautiously.
Media
I was the inaugural guest on Captain Nath’s Cards Speak podcast. I had a great time talking to Nath and if you like POTD, you will like the podcast. Nath is also the copy editor of POTD so you can thank him for the lack of run-on sentences in the post above. Nath is also looking for guests, so if you are a poker player reading this and would like to be on Cards Speak, don’t be a stranger and reach out to him.3
Paul Seaton interviewed me, and you can read it on Pokerati’s website.
As always, I can be reached on
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Bluesky
I know the pendulum has swung back the other way and now teams run the ball more.
“Remember when is the lowest form of conversation,” but referencing TV shows is the highest form of poker blogging.
Nath here. You can use the contact page on my website to reach me, or the social media links on the “links” section of my website. The unedited first episode is available now for Patreon subscribers, while I will have something for the general public later in the week, as a good-faith example of what the show is doing to encourage people to subscribe.