Pokerazor analysis 2: cbetting against a loose fish

This will be my last pokerazor post on the forums until other people start posting them. I just want to show how powerful it can be when you figure out your opponent's entire range distribution in all the different scenarios. I'll be saving the rest of my pokerazor stuff on my own PC, probably in pdf format or something so I can refer to them later. I'll happily post them here if other people get off their asses, start doing the work and sharing too.

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Straight maths can't decide whether or not cbetting will be the best EV play since metagame, gameflow, and a whole lot more than our opponent's pf calling range would have to be taken account for, but finding out how often our opponent hits the flop is easily the biggest factor in deciding whether or not to cbet against a fish who plays his hand for face value.

Scenario 1: Fishy villain defends roughly the top %40 (minus JJ+,AK which would reraise most of the time), flop comes 234 monotone. How much of his range hits this flop?

(villain's range for all the scenarios is {TT-22, AQ-A2, K8+, K7s-K2s, Q8+, Q7s-Q6s, J9+, J8s, T9, T8s, 98, 97s, 87s, 76s, 65s})

Not posting pics this time since it's a pain in the ass...

Only %20 of the time will he have top pair or better but a whopping %24 of the time he'll have both ace high and a gutshot, and some flush draws in there, meaning he'll peel with those hands often. Draws are calculated separately, meaning you wouldn't add these %s on top of the % of time they'll have pairs or sets or whatever, so keep that in mind. %35 he'll have a gutshot, %2 he'll have an OESD, %25.5 of the time he'll have a weak FD, and %7.5 he'll have the nut FD.

No need to really go into too much detail with this one - if he's a fishy player who doesn't fold often postflop, this is not a board you should continue on without a hand of your own.

Scenario 2: 789 mono flop.

Even worse as more of his range is weighted towards middle and higher cards.

%38 of the time he'll have second pair or better, %29 he'll have top pair or better. Draws make up the majority of his range though. %19 gutshots, %22 oesd, %8 nut FD. Definitely among the nastier flops against a fish, of course assuming you don't have a hand.

Scenario 3:4s5sJx (flush draw on board)

Pretty good board to cbet. He'll have top pair or better only %15 of the time. A good chunk of his range has just missed completely (overs, over/under, unders etc). A good chunk of his range (~%16.4) will be pairs under the jack (both pocket pairs and 5x/4x), but those hands won't be too hard to shake as we can barrel them fairly easily on scary turn cards. It's debatable whether we can push those off, but even if they peel with all of their underpairs, it's still not all that much of his range.

His draws aren't too strong and aren't too likely either. He's only got an OESD %1 of the time and flush draws %7 of the time. This is actually a great board to cbet, don't let the flush draw scare you into thinking he'll peel lots. He won't.

Scenario 4: 8s9sAx

Made hands: %35 top pair or better, %31 underpairs that will probably peel (excluding 77-22, debatable). Note that now there are not as many scare cards to barrel since the highest card is already out there. Someone who peeled with 9T is probably less likely to fold on a Q turn here than in scenario 3. Lots of those hands could also have draws, or pick up draws on the turn, and are therefore less likely to fold, like 9T on a jack turn for ex.

Draws: %11 strong draws (OESDs, FDs), %8.9 gutshots.

Debatable flop. A surprising % of his distribution is top pair hands that will virtually never let go, especially to a single cbet. Looks like this is a flop you should probably slow down on. I'm pretty surprised - thought this would be one we could cbet.

Scenario 5: A92

Made hands: %32 top pair or better. Almost %30 underpairs which aren't likely to fold to the cbet. I think barreling those hands would depend largely on our reads. High turn fold % and low wtsd and then we can barrel him. Otherwise we shut down.

Draws: non existant, which is great.

Looks like this isn't as great of a board as we'd usually think for a cbet, but it's still good. No draws, only 1/3 of his range is top pair or better, and a good portion of those underpairs can be barreled off, debatably.

Scenario 6: K92

A much better board, mainly for the fact that his range is much more weighted towards Ax hands than Kx, so obv he'll miss this board more often.

Made hands: %18.5 TP or better, %27 underpairs. Underpairs aren't too much of a concern again, as most of them can be barreled, or will fold outright depending on how often our fishy peels the flop.

Draws are almost non-existant. There are QT/QJ/JT gutshots, and whether or not those will peel is debatable.

Scenario 7: KK2

%12 trips or better, %14 underpairs. He has like nothing, ever on this board. One simple reason is that his unpaired hole cards form 16 combos, where as his pocket pairs form 6 combos each. Also the fact that the board is paired means that there are much fewer ways for him to pair the board as well.

No draws. This is basically the best kind of board you can hope for. Fire away! Also don't be afraid to barrel J/Q/A turn cards either. Just because he calls the flop doesn't mean he has trips.

Scenario 8: TxTs9s

Made hands: %8.1 trips or better, %25 9x or worse pairs. Pretty good. I have a feeling the draws will be significant though...

Draws: %12 strong draws, %12 gutshots. I guess this time his gutshots are a little more significant since they'll include overcards sometimes, but even so there really aren't too many combos of hands that hit this flop.

This one looks pretty good. There are a few draws, but if he's loose enough to peel with 9x or an underpair, then he'll have a hard time calling a double barrel on a lot of turn cards. With ace high you could effectively be value betting against his draws, and could check back the river knowing he won't fold underpairs or 9x.

Scenario 9: 6x6s4s

Made hands: %9.5 top pair or better, a few middle/underpairs.

%6 strong draws, not much else.

A fantastic board to cbet. Even better with no FD.

Scenario 10: AQK

Top pair or better %39, %30 Qx or better. Those hands will often have redraws with gutshots and won't often fold.

Draws: mostly gutshots, but they show up a whopping %30.

Not a great board. The more your opponent's range is weighted towards suited connectors and smaller cards and the more likely he is to fold underpairs and Qx/Kx hands here, the more likely you should be to bet. Not a great board though.

Scenario 11: AAT

%23 trips or better (surprisingly high), %27 middle and underpairs

Some gutshots (KQ/QJ/KJ) that might peel as well, so barreling might not be a good idea if thos cards pick up a pair (or the broadway straight) on a K/Q/J turn.

Good enough to cbet once, but shut down when called.

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I'm pretty much done. Can't really think of many other flop textures, though I'm sure there are more. Overall it looks like what we should be looking for against a fish is mostly uncoordinated, rainbow, non-ace flops.

Thanks for this post, Chuck. Went looking for your first post on this. Thought I'd link it since its not stickied and is close to falling off first page. I see this is free while in beta, so I have no excuse not to use it. Could actually remember most of the starting hand percentages and do this kind of analysis with just a few quick estimations while in a hand (for live play). Something I'm going to start thinking more about.
http://www.cardschat.com/f50/pokeraz...ight=pokerazor

yw D'wilius.

I think memorizing the %s would be insanely tedious and unnecessary. The purpose of these kinds of calculations is just to give you a general idea of what flops hit your opponent in what way, and how hard they hit.

True enough, just need to run through a bunch of scenarios to know what kind of flops work best for different kinds of villains in advance. Downloading now...

Thanks, Great Info!
Have a Wonderful Holiday Season and best of luck at the felts.

I have found Pokerazor to be quite interesting since Chuck put me onto it in one of the other threads. I downloaded the software about a week ago and have found it quite valuable - I am actually thinking more about this stuff when during my cash games post-flop.

I think that I am pretty good at putting someone on a hand or small range of hands, but I have not thought the entire process through and calculated my equity or true percentage of being ahead.

This software has made me think about this more - if you spend some time putting in various scenarios, as Chuck has already shown through many examples; it really starts to hit home. I have just been using the basic calculator and entering hands and ranges to help determine my actions post flop, turn and river.

Question - what percentages are you putting for various player types? I am using a Villian preflop hand of 20% for the TAP/TAGs I often encounter and 35% for real LAGs.

Good example - Preflop you have KQo. Relative Tag - I assume 20% of preflop starting hands. Flop comes down J J 2. I feel pretty good in this situation. However, with PokerRazor, my hand is best only 23.59% of the time and my equity is 31%.


Maybe not a great example; I can post others that I think are relevant, but all I am saying is that it is quite useful for looking at hand strengths and how flops will hit an opponents range.

Attached Images

PR KQ.JPG (62.9 KB, 230 views)

So I'd love to get off my ass and use it (particularly today I was looking at a few hands flopping 2 pair on 3-flush boards), but I can't download it. The site you linked in the first analysis now doesn't come up. Any idea if there's somewhere else I could find it?

It's just pokerazor.com

http://pokerazor.com/

Interesting stuff Chuck, I guess I will have to start looking into this once I get home and have some free time on my hands.

One interesting thought while I was looking at this. On the A high flops that don't look so good to cbet, a delayed cbet looks like it will work a good portion of the time. Especially in position, if the fish checks to you twice it is likely that he doesn't have the A portion of his range and is giving up as most people will bet their ace after you check behind the flop. A turn bet here would take the pot down fairly frequently I think. And if you know that he is the type to peel turn with any pair since u didnt bet the ace, just fire the river and he should be folding. I do this when I flop the ace a lot of the time just to try to get added value from the ace. Never thought of using the play as a bluff.

This may be true, but you can easily barrel a TAG off of smaller pocket pairs here. When I'm in this situation and a TAG peels flop on me he is basically turning his hand face up into pocket pairs smaller than a J and it is extremely easy to double and triple barrel them off their hand since they will have an extremely difficult time calling 3 barrels with just 77 here for example.

This looks really interesting, im just downloading the .net 2 framework.

Think it might be interesting if we worked on this as a kind of project.

oh it's there now, was giving 403 forbidden earlier. Will check it out.

Ya man I'd really like to see you guys do some of these. Mine have been pretty simple, and I know most of you are tons better at me on the theory side of things so I'd like to see some stuff posted. I mean essentially this is standard HA, but made easy through the program, so when it does all the work you can find some pretty interesting stuff with it.

Hi Chuck.

Well I download pokerazor and am starting to get to grips with it.

Im going through the scenarios you posted earlier .. sort of using them as a template / tutorial on it.

Anyay on the cumulative total, some of the fields are dark green, some light green and some a portion of each. What does this mean? I cant find anything in the tutorial about ths.

Well I dl'd right away but it didn't auto dl'd the .net like it said it would. Where do I go to get this, Stu?

\/\/\/ Thanks for the link.

No mine didnt either!!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Download that and then run it mate.

Again, great stuff, Chuck.

But this is where I feel limited in how "good" of a player I can be. TBH, I suck at math. And although I understand the basics of hand ranges I'm at a total loss as how to come up with them.

If anyone knows of a good spot to read up on an easier way it would be appreciated. Because this is my weakest subject in poker.

Dark bar = the frequency, faded bars = the cumulative frequency. They just overlay the cumulative over the individual frequency in the right column.

Ax needs a five for a straight, so A-high + gutshot.

Mostly our ranges come from our huds. The ranges have little to do with math though, and you really don't need to be good at math to figure out what ranges represent what %. The program does that for you. You either input a percentage and it shows you the top X% of hands, or you input a range of hands, and it shows you what percentage that range represents.

I just put in a random figure (%40) for a loose fishy big blind. You could get exact figures for different opponents depending on their defending %ages or more specifically their cold calling range vs a stealer, which can be found in your tracker of course.

You're asking a pretty general question ('a spot to read up on stats'), not really sure where to send you.

The strategy analysis looks even more interesting..yet i can't operate it atm. Btw, its worth using this alot atm before they put it out on the market. I wonder how much it will cost.

Interesting chuck..it especially shows how i overlook fishy guys peeling my cbets with gutshots etc.

It's already being sold, for $50 or so. They're kind enough to let the free beta run indefinitely as freeware, with the option to buy.

Strategy analysis is an EV calculator in tree form, same as the Stox EV program (which is also in free beta). That's the other side of the program I haven't touched yet because I'm a little lost in knowing how to use it.

Actually, this is absolutely amazing to analysis your hands from HEM. I'm going to use this exclusively to look at hands i lost and see where i went wrong. ie was i right to cbet.

Pricless program. Even that alone is interesing for FR and players limp/calling with PP on low boards. 20% of the time they hit a set on a low flop.

I actually meant %ages, not stats. I've used a HUD enough to be able to tell a fish from a tag player.

Now, if I can just get the program d/led. Last time I tried to d/l the .net framework it wouldn't work.

I'm pleaed to see i'm not the only one lose with the advanced aspect of it. Ye i thought it would be the same as Stox EV..but i haven't been able to run that program for some reason.

The percentages are stats, and vice versa. A %20 vpip means he's playing %20 of total hands, usually the top %20. Plug that into something like pokerstove/stoxEV/pokerazor, and it will show you what that range represents.

Some stats don't represent ranges obviously (like wtsd or aggression), and I can understand some of those may be hard to indentify.

Remember you guys can get stoxcombo here http://www.stoxpoker.com/stoxshop/main_page.php which is similar, and also free.

A note about EV trees is that they're extremely hard to use in complex situations (namely postflop NLHE situations) since the possible lines are so wide. I think they're best used for simple decisions where you (or your opponent) are all in before the flop or on the flop.

Chuck lol I dont C-bet against a loose fish on less I have the goods becuase your likely to get reshoved with a loose fish opponent you have to watch table texture and unless you have top pair top kicker and a nice draw or more then I wouldn't be c-betting the loose fish if he has position on you now if you have top pair or better then I would do a 5x BB into him and look to shove if he comes over the top of you if he has a set and you dont improve then it's rebuy time thems the breaks when your playing unpredicable opponents.

No offense, but I don't think ChuckT really needs much advice.

There's always room for more advice. I don't take it if it doesn't make sense though.

just found out about pokerrazor, interesting software...will try to learn it, thanks for the post!

In pdf format, broken down into >=TP, <TP, weak draws and strong draws. No notes this time since I think I expanded on it enough in the OP. Some of the %s were a little off, not by much though.

Attached Images

Range distributions.pdf (31.8 KB, 9 views)

I don't play ring HE and I don't know what this is, but if Chuck is posting something long and well thought out like this, I am saving it in my poker file for later.

Nice thread. Didn't know about this software. Thanks.