[rzk]

ILP,

i think some of our disagreement comes from semantics but some is conceptual.

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"whenever you are considering such a big deviation from optimal strategy, you better make sure your opponent is exploitable."


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i think your disagreement with this statement comes from our different understanding of the word optimal. whenever i say "optimal" i always mean it in the formal game-theoretic sense. with this in mind, i think you'll agree that the above statement is pretty obvious.

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Also your idea of exploitable is flawed. Remember exploitable plays are potentially the most profitable plays of all. Your goal should be to find as many players/spot where you can be as exploitable as possible and get away with it. If you think there is a natural dichotomy between "exploitable" and "expert" you are dead wrong. In other words, If you think these two terms are mutually exclusive you are dead wrong. So when you say "b/f'ing this river wouldn't be an expert laydown, but rather a very exploitable play" you really dont know what youre talking about.


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i think i do. i understand that an exploitable play is not the same as a bad play. when you are playing against a bad player the best strategy is usually a very exploitable one. but for this hand it's important to keep in mind that (a) heis is very far from the type of player who you would want to find "where you can be as exploitable as possible and get away with it", and (b) he himself shouldn't consistently be making such exploitable plays as folding to a river raise with 39% of his range against observant opponents because they will start bluff-raising him to death with any two cards. this second point is what my quoted statement was about.


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" Quote:2) Is the river card unlikely to help your opponent? Yes.
disagree. heisen could have picked up a flush draw."

Just becuz Heisen could have a flush draw doesnt mean the river card is likely to have helped him.

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my point is that his play is consistent both with a top pair type hand and a flush draw, so i think it's misleading to say that a river card that completes a flush is unlikely to have helped him. i guess "unlikely" could mean very different things.

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" Quote:8) Do you already have a calling hand on the river? Yes, you beat JTs/QJs/ and you tie KJ. Thats enough to call. having a calling hand should make you less inclined to raise, not more."

Again this statement is dead wrong. The fact that we already have to commit one bet on the river means we are now getting much better odds on a bluff raise. If we didnt have a calling hand on the river our bluff/raise odds would be cut in half.

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"in general, it is game-theoretically suboptimal to raise with calling hands."

Another statement that is dead wrong.

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these two quotes are really about the same thing and may be our biggest point of disagreement. it is easy to show that (unless you are planning an elaborate b/3b bluff) _in a optimal strategy_ you should reserve your bluffs for hopeless hands. indeed, when you are bluffing, an optimal opponent will fold just enough for the ev of a bluff to be exactly 0. so as long as there exists a play with ev>0 you should make it instead. in our case that play is calling.

the perspective "that we already have to commit one bet on the river means we are now getting much better odds on a bluff raise" is flawed because compared to bluffing with a hopeless hand there are now less _better_ hands that will fold. against a non-optimal opponent sometimes bluff-raising with a calling hand may be better than calling, but in that case bluff-raising with a hopeless hand would be _way_ better than folding.

overall, i wanna say that one _should_ care what optimal plays are, even if the correct strategy is to sometimes make non-optimal ones. if you have a good idea where optimality lies you can make more informed decisions about how, when, and whether to deviate from it and you will also be much better equipped to find exploitable traits in your opponents.