How do you play out of position? (TL;DR)

[stealthmunk]

With 100bb stacks, several cash game players have figured out ways to overcome the positional disadvantage of playing from the blinds, to the point where some of the best players even profit money from the blinds. (or come real close)

After railing the end game of the WCOOP ME, the game has gotten so sick aggro that I feel that I have lost a lot of my edge I used to have when I'd just run people over, and I haven't adjusted. Seriously, 4betting is last years 3betting. I couldn't believe how many times I saw co raise, button snap reraise, and a blind shove. In the days when I was good at donkaments you could count on the blinds mucking TT or JJ late in a donkament in that spot. So how do you play profitably from the blinds or OOP in general?

All too often in HSMTT 2p2 posts. I see a hand start off with a loose, aggressive, MTTer (how many of those are there these days, 10billion?) opening from late position with stacks anywhere from 25-50bbs. Hero is in one of the blinds with KJs. How does hero proceed? Standard line would be, stacks suck for 3betting, so I call. Can't fold, villians range is way too wide. Also, you can rest assure that if villian thinks he has fold equity your getting crammed on and nobody likes stacking off there tourney life with the king and the jack.

I think that there is just nonstop spewing going on from the blinds, and everyone is guilty of doing it. You don't want to feel weak/tight by giving up your blinds, but calling and planning on just c/ring everytime you flop a draw or a pair is so ridiculously -EV it boggles my mind that everyone does it. You just are going to reverse imply yourself to death, if villian has air, he's going to be folding, and if he has you outkicked/overpaired/has a big draw himself, you are either going to be racing or dominated. I guess in rare occasions you will have the person in position outkicked or have him stack off with a mid pair on like a J52 flop, but those times are far outweighed by the times you c/f the flop or he just has you beat. Yes, playing OOP sucks when you can't reraise and c-bet without being committed for your stack. It just becomes a lagtard mess of hero calls and hero plays and the only players that are truly beating the 109r are the very tricky ones and the ones that just have that knack for knowing when to 4bet pre and just can feel an opponents weakness via various betsizing/tells/history/etc.

I really think that a weak lead frequency is something that can help balance out your range/overcome your positional disadvantage/give you the oppurtunity to semibluff closing the action. However, its the general consensus among all HSMTTers that whenever someone weakleads its always garbage and/or setting up a semibluff and will pretty much always be essentially minraised for you to be put to the test. Can this logic be exploited?

How often should you be cold calling your big pairs from the blinds with intents of c/ring or perhaps even weak-leading? I remember when ActionJeff would absolutely crush tourneys (still does just talking about a year or two ago) and WHENEVER he called a raise from the small blind you could be like 100% sure he had KK+. However, people were so much dumber back then. I think MTTers these days get warning signals and practice pot control/just c/f when they see an awkward call oop and give credit for a huge hand. So what is the optimal frequency?

c/r air frequency. I play a lot of hu sngs and am a pretty big winner and I know one thing I work on a lot is my c/r air frequency with marginal hands. It doesn't have to be complete air, usually a gutshot/an overcard no a dry flop will help, but it is just a fact that you are going to have to be c/ring when u brick the flop some % of the time if you are goin to makeup for the fact that your opponent is going to cbet >80% of the time and you are going to miss the flop completely >60% of the time. Its getting this frequency down pat, the board textures, (paired flops, monotone flops) that make the best players the best. Also, if you get in your opponents head enough, they will just spaz donate stacks. I think (I could be wrong) that this is what makes Sorel Mizzi one of the best tourney players out there today. He spews so much so terribly sometimes, doesn't even have a clue about potodds or opening ranges really, he just has a knack for getting the fish to give him all their chips drawing dead. How do you get that image?

Finally, the last part of my rant where I'm trying to understand donkaments again as I'm on a 100k downswing from lovely PLO, is "the no value bet"

I'm playing with a guy who I know is repopping me ridiculously light. Just know he's gunning for me (I get that sometimes with my internet persona, lolz) Anyways, say I raise co at 200-400 50 with 20k effective stacks to 1100 and i have 99, he makes it 3800 on the button and action is back to me. I KNOW a 4bet is without a doubt +EV here. However, I also don't see him "making a mistake" if I 4bet (minus me getting slight edge vs AK/AQ n maybe him felting 77 or 88), so the 4bet has essentially no value. Am I right? So I guess I have to take a flop out of position? The flop comes down J67r and I check and he fires a predictable 6k. What do I do? Calling seems awkward because wwhat do I do on a high card turn. Folding seems stupid/weak given my read of the situation. I elected to shove and he snap called with J9o and my friend ridiculed me for turning my hand into a bluff and said I should c/ call down. I read him right preflop but can I really fold? Is this a cooler? At what point in a tourney does lowering your variance/just getting THAT pot makeup for the fact of not following the FTOP, make your opponent make mistakes! Other times where there is "no value bets" Lets say you have a super user account and can see your opponent has JJ. You call a raise from the small blind with AQs and flop comes A high. You check he cbets and the action is on you. Assuming an extremely nitty opponent, who 2barrel/3barrel/calls 0%. I can argue that a raise here is correct as your opponent never puts another chip in the pot if he doesn't hit his 2outer. Obv this scenario isn't that practical, but it clearly illustrates a time where "protecting your hand" does have value! Even though, when someone says that he is usually referred to as a donk. More elaborate situations can be created with some slighter 2barrel/3barrel/calldown frequencies and more marginal suckouts that can create an interesting scenario.

I think there are several aspects to tourney theory that 2p2 might be missing. As much as it is fun to ridicule the p5 idiots when they make ridiculously stupid, spewy plays. They obviously are doing something right, some metagame, some logic, for them to be crushing. And yes, some of them do [censored] crush. Yes, I know it is variance and a really swongy game MTTs, but these players must intuitively have figured out something about MTTs.


That was a long, probably incoherent rant. I just am glad WCOOP is over and am wondering if anyone has anything to add to maybe clear my mind.

[Ship Ship McGipp]

lol donkaments

[DJ Pattiecake]

the way they are doing it works playing oop is hard so fold or get it in

[DJ Pattiecake]

[ QUOTE ]
to the point where some of the best players even profit money from the blinds. (or come real close)

[/ QUOTE ]

nuh uh

[luckychewy]

you obviously have a lot of good points. the first thing i'll address is the 99 co vs btn hand. i think it matters HUGELY what type of range you think he has when he 3-bets you light. if he has like top 60% or something ridiculous then i would play the same as you and when he outflops you, chalk it up to a cooler of sorts. i think if he cbets an extremely high %, which seems reasonable, getting him to put in however many chips when he cbets is so huge for you when he has such an insanely wide range and my hunch would be that you are giving up a lot by just jamming pf.

[ QUOTE ]
I KNOW a 4bet is without a doubt +EV here. However, I also don't see him "making a mistake" if I 4bet (minus me getting slight edge vs AK/AQ n maybe him felting 77 or 88), so the 4bet has essentially no value. Am I right?

[/ QUOTE ]

well, i'd say you sort of are. one thing to consider is what he's doing with his double overcard broadway hands that aren't going to feel super comfortable calling a shove. is he more likely to flat these? is he playing like a maniac and 3-betting and calling a shove? if he is 3-betting and folding QTo, you are possibly more justified putting the $ in pf to get him to make a mistake via ftop. i think it's all so dependent on how often he has these hands in his range, and also how the EV of getting him to fold these compares to the EV of cr ai a ton of flops when we almost assuredly get cbet chips from almost all of his completely whiffed holdings. i think there is a lot more to this particularly stemming from how good the villain plays and how correctly he reacts to your actions. it also matters of course how often you get outflopped and how strong you pair already is. obviously there is SOME threshold/breaking point where in a vacuum you should be flatting OR reshoving without question. ie - if 22 is a +cEV reshove it's almost certainly better to reshove it than call and cr while aa is almost surely better to flat and cr with, both for obvious reasons imo.

as far as the p5 guys killing it, yeah some of them do obviously and results are somewhat irrefutable. i don't really know what to say about this, it seems like some of them make so many mistakes day in and day out and just get paid to no end because of their internet images. like, we see them spew and misinterpret someones range horrifically, and then we see other people spew to them more and more. also what you said about people donating stacks to sorel, i'm sure this happens non stop. semi-fishy non-regulars just think they are always getting a move put on them and keep stacking off with the A3 when they open the button then think the great imperium is putting a move on them and 4-bet all in for 50 blinds or something. then once they get these stacks donated to them they are constantly able to kill the table/field because they still have the image and they have so much real time experience with big stacks and how to put them to good use.

[LearnedfromTV]

I think stack sizes are the key determinant of optimal opening/3betting/4betting/coldcalling ranges, and that there are significant differences in optimal ranges/raise sizes for 20bb v 25bb v 30bb, etc (note that raising smaller essentially increases stack size).

There are two aspects of this:

1. The preflop game of raise/fold chicken and whether it ends with someone shoving.

2. The stack/pot ratio if someone calls (an open raise or a 3bet)

With respect to #1, what matters is the risk/reward of a 3bet or 4bet (or possibly 5bet) shove given standard raise sizes. How close the effective stacks are to the ideal point for a 3bet or 4bet shove affects all of the non-shove preflop decisions. This is the why there's the tricky line around 15bb where you are forced to open tighter, reduce your raise size, or both; open shoving isn't +EV with many hands, and raising is asking to get shoved on because if you have a wide range it is very difficult for your opponent to make a large mistake by shoving. This mostly has to do with the odds being laid by the shove. There is an analogous line for 3betting, a point at which shoving is risking too much for too little but any smaller threebet is committing; the initial adjustment is obvious - raise more into opponents with those stacks. Their readjustment to you opening wider is to defend/call wider, but to some extent position makes it impossible to fully defend; you have to fold the best hand preflop sometimes, and even the best SB flop defense strategy will win less/lose more than the same strategy played from the button.

As already implied, #2 is tied to #1 in two ways - a) most of the time reraising a certain raise is awkward, flatcalling it is awkward for your opponent. b) optimal 2bet/3bet/4bet ranges for given stack sizes as determined only by the raise/fold game (no flops allowed) have some holes that can be exploited by flat calling. How to do this (which which hands and how to play them on the flop) depends a lot on how your opponent will deal with being put in a flop situation where the stack/pot ratio is awkward for his range on a lot of flops. There is a little bit of inconsistency in your argument when you talk about people flatting OOP ringing alarm bells and the reverse implied odds problem of doing it with KJs. If stacks are sufficiently large for reverse implied odds hands to fare badly against a certain opponent, your monsters will clearly be more profitable, but so will your bluffs, because if calling preflop planning to get it in on a "range of flops" of {K-high, J-high, QTx, plus a few ideal bluff flops where you have overcards/backdoors and are putting in the final bet, either on the flop or turn} means you're crushed by your opponents range, then either he's not opening was wide as you think or he's folding lots of the mid-upper part of his range on those flops (QJ, KT, 99, etc.), which means you can profitably bluff.

All of that said, you are always giving up something when you play a hand OOP, because the flops/pot sizes/stack sizes that are awkward for him are less awkward because he has position, and the ones that are awkward for you are more awkward because you don't. So built into all of this is the fact that sometimes you have to fold KJs from the SB, even if you're ahead of his range, and sometimes you can call with trash on the button. For this reason, I think taking the +EV shove in some of the situations where it will allow your opponent to play perfectly (the 99 hand for example) is fine, both because it reduces the chance you make a postflop mistake and because it widens your 4betting range, which both reduces his 3betting frequency and makes it more likely he calls you wider the next time.

[eBo]

Pretty interesting post. I like the point about the c/r air frequency. That is something that I will have to incorporate into my game.

Your whole post reminds me of a famous motto- "When things get really complex, go back to basics."

If players are capable of 4betting light, then 3bet them w/only the goods. If players are 3betting light, then 2bet w/only the goods. Poker is easy.

[LearnedfromTV]

Re the 99 hand and luckychewy's post:

Against opponents who reraise way too wide and cbet way too much, I agree that flatcalling 99 is significantly more profitable than shoving, and getting outflopped is something like a cooler.

But against a non-spewy opponent who is bluff 3betting optimally, reading your range well, and bluffing postflop judiciously; i.e. if we're talking about converging to optimal frequencies: I think the exact kind of concession you need to make as a result of being OOP is shoving 99 there even if he's only calling with a couple worse hands.

[dmk]

honestly, i've just resorted back to the pre-2005 days of party and just nit it up most of the time and always find a way to get chips.

like you said, everyone is so spew happy w/ their light 3-bets and crap - 90% of them don't adjust to the person they're 3-betting. they just go, oooh, a raise, i'll 3-bet!!!

so ya, i'm turning back into a nit i think

[LearnedfromTV]

One more thing to add. A year or so ago I read a post in MSNL that was eye opening and I think applies here. Unfortunately I don't remember the poster or the thread.

Anyway, the point he made was that the blind amounts are the cost of playing an orbit, not the cost of that particular hand. So (no antes for simplicity), you aren't paying 1bb to play one hand and 0.5 to play another, and nothing to play the other 7; rather you're paying ~0.2bb per hand to play an orbit.

Now, as the person who put in the blind you are getting better odds to call a raise and slightly better odds to reraise (but as the amount of money in play increases, the relative value of that initial 0.5 or 1 bb discount is reduced), but this is mitigated by the fact that playing hands is more difficult out of position.

The implication is that blind defense, while important, may not be as important as button defense, because even though you don't put in a blind from the button, as a function of your positional advantage you essentially "own" a greater portion of the blinds than anyone at the table outside of the blinds.

Tournaments are interesting because there are stack sizes where the blinds can almost completely neutralize their positional disdvantage by 3bet shoving optimally, but with certain stack sizes position is extremely important, and I think it may be optimal for the blinds to play very tight, essentially let the button steal from them, and then get their money back by defending their button vigorously when that button is now the CO/HJ.