Week In Review #54 April 12th-18th
I recommend some other Substacks
I don’t have any hot takes to write about this week. Well, more accurately, I don’t have any hot takes that I feel I’ve sharpened to the point where they’re ready for public consumption yet. So in lieu of that, I will share a couple of poker-related Substack posts that I’ve enjoyed this week.
Blaise Bourgeois wrote about the end of Card Player Magazine. It was an honour to have Punt of the Day published in Card Player, and it was very cool to be on its cover. It’s sad what happened to Card Player, and I feel bad for the people working for Card Player who have to deal with their publication being gutted. If you are interested in the poker economy and the media economy, Blaise’s article is a must-read.
Most of the winter in Toronto has been cold, snowy, or both. This week has been not-cold and rainy and even occasionally sunny. Spring is on the way, and I’m feeling great about it and doing a lot of walking. If you’d like to read Maria Konnikova write about Kurt Vonnegut extolling the value of walking, you should read her excellent post, which is embedded below.
If you like actual content written by actual humans, and not websites whose sole purpose is to find the content that is the most cost-effective way to get you to click on ads, you should subscribe to the Substacks listed above, but also the one you are reading right now. Click the button below.
Finally, in some sort of poker news, the New Jersey Devils hired former poker player and poker author Sunny Mehta to be their general manager. That a guy who I interacted with on Two Plus Two over a decade ago is running an NHL hockey team would be wild to imagine, if there weren’t already several similar examples in a variety of different arenas. I wish he took the Toronto Maple Leafs front office vacancy, and now I am filled with dread that they are going to hire someone dumb, but on the bright side, if Sunny turns the Devils around, it obviously means that all people who write poker strategy content are fit to run professional sports teams. [NFL teams who need a draft expert, call me! -ed] So I guess market forces will force me to end POTD to take a seven-figure annual salary to run a professional sports team.
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
A fully converged blind vs blind postflop sim for POTD #267
A Rocket Solver flop sim and PIO turn sims for POTD #268
HRC sims for POTD #269
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 #267, where I wrote about how to adjust your BB raising strategy vs SBs who might not be playing a solver strategy:
POTD #267 onemorething
In the normal CEV GTO Wizard sim the BB raises 42% of the time and picks 3.5x and 82o raises 38% of the time and 83o raises 60% of the time. If I node lock the SB as being too tight to VPIP playing only 65%, never RFI you will see a lot less raising from the BB— only 20% of the time and I pick a more polar raise size, something like 4-4.5x. 82o raises 15% of the time and 83o pure checks. If the SB can’t RFI, but plays a very wide range, in this case the solver limps in 96% of the time and even mixes hands like 83o. You will see a smaller raise size from the BB, mostly in the 3.5x range and now hands like 82o go back to raising a lot, because they want to knock out hands like 83o. However, you still raise less often than the the normal cEV sim.
The general lesson here is a much simpler poker lesson, if someone is playing too tight at one node and they put money in the pot, even if it’s just completing the SB. You should tighten up in response because they have a tighter range. When I node lock the SB to limp a tight range first in, they limp folds hands like A3o, K9o and T5s to a 4x or 4.5x, it’s very unlikely that someone is limping too tight first in and also folding to a raise too often. The way you make money vs a tight player here is not them limp-folding too much, it’s from them open-folding too much the first time and also from them likely playing bad in LX BvB pots. You don’t need to raise all your garbage versus this type of player.
The other lesson here is a sizing one, the weaker the limping range the smaller you can raise. If he’s completing 96% of hands, a 3x or a 3.5x to knock out 93o is sufficient. If they’re playing very tight first in a 3x to knock out A2o is probably not going to work that well. If you’re opponents limping range is so strong you can’t comfortably raise call a shove with KJs or A9s then you don’t want to pick a 3x type size either. You’re too polar to size that small. It’s rare for players to be too tight everywhere if you suspect their tight, raise less often, however you should also size larger and bluff more polar into that type of range. Raise less, bet bigger is the exploit vs the type of player Rustam is, so I am happy with my preflop check.
Media
I’ve been recommending less music in this space recently; one of the reasons for this is that the podcast where I got most of my non-rap music recommendations— Indiecast— was cancelled by Uproxx. It has since been picked up by Amazon Music and is back; if you like listening to two guys talk about indie and indie adjacent music while “hashing out trends,” you should listen to Indiecast. You should also subscribe to co-host Steven Hyden’s Substack Evil Speakers and co-host Ian Cohen’s Substack Something On. [Speaking of indie music, I saw Melbourne’s own Belair Lip Bombs a couple of weeks ago at a small club in Denver. Amazing act; you’ll want to get in on the ground floor of this one. -ed]
If you want some rap recommendations, I recommend subscribing to the newly launched POW Mag, which takes the indispensable and long running Passion of the Weiss blog and turns it into a Substack magazine. It’s free for the first month, check it out.
As always, I can be reached on