OT: the tufat23 ramble

[tufat23]

I've been thinking a lot about poker usually around 420...

Anyway recently it's been a lot about optimal and unexploitable lines.

In poker there's always gonna be a perfectly optimal line, as well as an unexploitable line. This means bet size, bet speed, etc etc.

The clearest example is bvb <10bbs in SnGs and MTTs where the game has already been solved and deviating any way from the unexploitable line usually means sub optimal, because you cant do much else but shove/fold without getting exploited as villain can play unexploitably. However in 100bb+ poker the game still hasnt been solved so its very often not clear what line is optimal and/or what line is unexploitable, especially when the two are very often not the same.

An example in 100bbs poker is when we have a decision vs an unknown, and no history and we use the 'in a vacuum' thought process. However if we have reads/stats/hostory suddenly the hand changes rediculously.

Different people will actually lean closer to one or the other. Like a good solid TAG that people think are 'solid grinders' etc are very liekly to be leaning much closer on unexploitable lines. People who are good LAGs or sLAGs are probably leaning closer on more optimal lines. Now this isnt to say good tags wont play optimal lines, actually they probably do most of the time, or close enough.

However from this assumption, it would be logical that their winrate is capped at x amount. This is gonna be calculated bascially by how bad the others are. A good LAG or even a good TAG whos looking for the optimal line actually has a much higehr cap in their winrate, however it might never be actually found, and also at a certain point they wont be playing a WR that much higher than an opponenet searching the unexploitable line since both lines will be so close as all the players play very clsoe to one or the other, both lines converge to one.

The unexploitable line is the long run optimal line ldo.

I searched the interwebs and editted a bell curve.




ok this is what i have concluded. Imagine the max point of the bell curve is the unexploitable line. Then the optimal line in a given hand is to bet/do the line on the left, and villain is playing the line on the right hand side.

See it makes sense that the optimal line can make much more money than the unexploitable line, since it makes a lot more. However the skill is obv realising what the villains line is. If say u get it wrong and villains line was to the left of the unexploitable line, you're up [censored] creak cos you're gonna lose monies. That's also the in built problem with seeking the optimal line, because poker is a game of imperfect information, we will make mistakes so a lot of the time the winrate of someone seeking the optimal line is very similar to someone seeking the unexploitable line.

It's also probably good to say here this is very basic, since a lot of the times people will realise theres two such lines that are close together and play a line in between the two, but then take the optimal line sometimes because sometimes its very obvious what the optimal line is.

The unexploitable line here has a lot less variance, cos it can never be 'wrong' but the winrate can be much lower. However in the long run, the optimal line has to normalise to the unexploitable line so it would make sense that when u play higher you play closer to unexploitable than optimal, or at least aim for something in between the two lines. The biggest disaster in any hand is to play line when the villain is on one side, say the right hand side and you play any line that is on the right hand side too. Then you've immediately lost value from not playing the unexploitable line because you've made a mistake and you're playing more suboptimal than you could have.

Also in the graph, you cant play too far to the left, since that means that villains like will then be 'optimal' and taking advantage of the fact that ure a fish. ONe example is when opening UTG and then getting 3-bet and then decide to 4-bet. at 100bbs u should always always always 4-bet leaving a psb behind and never be flat shoving which is either -EV or less +EV than 4-betting smaller.




note: the optimal line can be so crazy accurate that it makes a difference down to the exact cent sometimes exacltly how much you open whether its 3x 3.5x 4x or 3.6653x





edit: players that start their poker as nonrational players as defined here
might actually have a much better chance of being optimal than rational players.