[The Bryce]

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Ive been told you like to calculate the best strategy in a lot of sitautions away from the table.

Do you find by putting in this work youve come to a lot of valuable insights that couldn't have been found any other way?

I did a calculation for an article im currently writing for the two plus two magazine. I was blown away by how long it took to do the math. The math consisted of enumerating all hand combinations for every possible turn card.. About 7 pages of work in total. The time invested didnt seem worth the result.

Is there any techinques/methods youve been using to speed up the calculation process?

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While I'm sure a lot of the stuff I've come up with isn't unique to just myself I would say I've discovered a lot of uncommon points / methods I can leverage for "solving" hands (based on what I assume my opponent is likely to do).

Sometimes the math can take a long time. One thing I've started doing a lot of, however (particularly as I fiddle more and more with HU NL) is to just input common calculations into an excel spredsheet, so that in the future I can just fill in a few fields and get the question answered in no time flat. I've also figured out a few ways to tinker with pokerstove and get it to output data types that it normally isn't used for (like weighting my opponent's range on the flop) and am currently looking at having a program written that will do a faster / more accurate job of this.

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Limit holdem

Suppose you defend the BB agaisnt a raise from BTN. If you miss and rags fall you need to try to steal some of the time by CR? How do you decide how often you need to do this?

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One thing that comes up a lot in limit hold'em is that there are a lot of flops where your opponent won't have a "made" (including things like ace high) hand often enough to prevent you from showing a profit by bluffing if he just calls down. What happens, then, is that the constraint on how often you can bluff is (% make same action with "made" hand)x(opponent's price to re-bluff in relation to the pot size).

So let's say you have a 665 flop and you check-raise this with a hand that is going to showdown 30% of the time. Say on the turn your opponent's price to raise as a re-bluff is 5:2, meaning that it will need to succeed 28% (2/7) of the time to show a profit. What this basically means is that if your ratio of made hands to bluffs is 5:2 it doesn't matter whether your opponent calls or raises. If you're bluffing less he should fold, and if you're bluffing more he should raise, and if he fails to get it right it's money in your pocket. Another way to look at it is you should be bluffing the flop 9% of the time [30x(2/7)]. The more often you check-raise the flop with a made hand the more often you can bluff.

Note that all of that is about how things work in the theoretical sense, and when you're at the table it's important to tailor your play somewhat to how you expect your opponent to react, on average. It's often handy to know how these sorts of spots work, however, and to know at what point you have to start fighting back, how much "invincible" bluffing you can do, etc.