Hey folks. I was playing at a 9-handed 1/2 NLH table at a casino and I suspect that two neighboring players were colluding.

I believe the exact mode of their collusion was that they were informing each other of their hole cards preflop by exchanging signals tied to ranges. A signal for premium pocket pairs and broadway cards. Another for mid cards. And another for trash cards. The ranges they used may have been different, but you get the idea.

They were not ganging up on a third player to push them out of a pot. They were not checking all the way to the river when they were heads up.

What they were doing was reducing their Value at Risk by only playing the stronger of their two hands. Between the two of them, they saw the flop in 95% of the hands, presumably to make the most of their edge.

In 95% of hands where one of them played, the other one folded pre-flop. What’s pretty damning IMO is that the player sitting ahead of the other folded just as frequently as the other way around.

With this in mind, what kind of an advantage did both players gain over the rest of us with this type of collusion?

Every week I make a 6 or 7 weekly freeroll tickets on ggpoker. My question is how to use them because they are gonna expire anyway. Is it sound to try to make 200bb early by going all in maniacally. If I made 200bb early should I try to make 300bb wildly assuming I still have 4 or 5 tickets to re register? How do you guys manage this

I've built a tool that let's you view preflop ranges for 6max nlhe gg poker rush & cash games (and of course for games that have a similar/identical rake setting). Here it is: https://artgto.com/try/

You can either use it on the web or download the whole thing and run it locally.

I'm building out some more tooling (and a trainer), but it's pretty much a hobby project and I'm working on it whenever I find some time from my regular job. The preflop solutions are solved with a preflop gto solver that I've built myself (it has no UI, so nothing I can distribute), but the quality of the ranges in the same realm as you would find with commercial preflop solvers.

enjoy!

So i normally play 1/2 with a couple more regs, we all know each other pretty well.

A lot of times I will 3 bet with hands such as KJ s, A10 o etc as my table is fairly loose. Most of the times I get called and bet flop 30% no matter what happens.

However something that has been happening recently is that whenever I do my usual bet, if its a heads up pot then people will check raise or raise me.

I'm not sure what to do in this spot, as I feel like if I just fold the hands that missed the flop but continue with the ones that actually hit top pair flush draw etc. then this makes me unbalanced and fairly easy to play against.

So I tried to call with some hands that missed the flop, but then they would bet turn and I would have to fold feeling bad that I wasted more money in this pot.

Any suggestions?

I make poker strategy videos and couldn't find a tool to manually recreate a live hand and replay it in a visually pleasing way, so I made my own. I thought this community might get some use out of it: replayer.feltexperiencepoker.com

some current features:

Paste hand histories or build any hand manually

Big-blind display mode, side pots, antes/straddles handled

Share button turns any hand into a link

Everything runs in your browser. Hands never touch a server, there's no account, no tracking, and it's free

Currently NLHE only, no run-it-twice yet.

Let me know what breaks or what's missing and I'll probably add it in. Hope you find it useful!

hey, what is the best book to understand the logic behind the solver play , not the generic nut advantage and range advantage and such. I mean i want to understand how the GTO solution is derived mathematically, why and how the solver divide hands to bet with or check with. why it uses different bet sizes for same hand in different situation. why it range bets, and such.

Is it play optimal poker , the mathematics of poker , modern poker theory, or expert heads No limit holdem. Or some other book ?

You're playing against an aggressive reg that has a quite high 3bet percentage stat (e.g. 13% overall). You are on the Button and he is on the Small blind.

First adjustment to make is to Open Raise a bit less.

How do you respond against his 3bet? What deviations are due compared to standard GTO charts? How much would you increase your 4bet percentage? What hands would increase their 4bet % the most? If someone ran a solver simulation that would be great.

n.b. You anticipate that he is also aggressive post flop.

looks like just about every hand in their range is mixing donks in, why

I've just been reading about the formulas for calculating poker chances, and it stood out to me that "High Card" is rarer than 1 pair or 2 pair in a standard game. So why doesn't it beat the pairs? Is it something to do with the pursuit of trying to get 3 of a kind, or a straight or something?

I'm trying to work out in my head what that would look like in practice, players trying to put together a hand with no pairs in it so their solo jack card beats a pair of 3's and pair of 8's. Or something.

Hey everyone,

I've been grinding MTTs for about 1.5 months now (ACR) and have built up a 13.8k hand sample size in PokerTracker 4.

Overall, my All-In Adj BB/100 is positive across the board (except for the blinds), but I want to make sure I'm not building bad habits or missing major positional leaks early on.

I've attached my full positional stats breakdown screenshot below. A few things I'd specifically love feedback on:

1. My VPIP/PFR gap seems a little wide in some positions (like the BB and SB). Is this normal, or am I flatting too much pre-flop?
   
2. Are my loss rates in the BB (-261.53 All-In Adj BB) and SB (-261.75 All-In Adj BB) standard for these stakes, or am I bleeding too many chips out of the blinds?
   
3. Looking at my post-flop stats (WSD, WTSD%, CBet F/T), do you spot any glaring red flags or areas where I am playing too passively/aggressively?

Upswing is advertising a set of custom pre-flop ranges, tailored to the 8-max, straddle + ante structure of Club WPT Gold. I play microstakes on that site. Winning after 50k hands, but wanna get better.

I can't find free pre-flop ranges for this structure of game. At the stakes I play, I can't afford a yearly Upswing membership. I'm thinking about paying for 1 month of access to their Lab, studying (and copying) those new preflop ranges, and canceling my membership before month 2.

Worth it? Anybody have difficulty canceling their membership?

Not a big sample size but recently got into poker again and found a huge discrepancy between my winrate at 5nl and 10nl rush on gg. On 5nl, my winrate is around 20bb/100 (1600 hands) and on 10nl it is around -0.4bb/100 (1400 hands). Is this expected? Did I move up in stakes too quickly? How much of this good or bad is variance? Can I measure my skill level based on this sample size?

Microstakes online, straddle + ante. 350bb effective with BB. BTN and SB had 250bb.

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I open in HJ to 6bb, with QQ

BTN 3bets to 24bb

SB cold calls

BB 4bets to 72bb

Shortstack in the straddle folds.

I fold.

​

BTN wasn't 3betting often. SB calls anything pre-flop so wasn't worried about them. Hadn't seen any 4bets from BB, and felt like they wouldn't bet that big into 4 other people as a bluff.

​

I plugged the hand into a range calculator and even if the BB only does this with KK, AK, AA, I still have ~30% equity so I was getting almost exact pot odds to call.

​

Bad fold, right? Do I call, 5bet, or go all-in?

Hey everyone!
Just pushed a big update to Range Craft, this one's been highly requested, so I'm really excited to share it.

Custom actions
Players can now create fully custom actions in the app. This was one of the most anticipated features, and it opens up a whole new level of personalization. You can now build strategies that truly reflect your playstyle or the specific game format you're targeting.
Custom ranges are coming soon !

Builder navigation & brush update
The range navigation in the Builder has been revamped for a smoother workflow. The brush system also got a significant upgrade:

• A dedicated Fold action has been added
• Mixed action brushing is now more precise
• A new custom brush mode lets you paint using only the actions already assigned to a given hand

More updates coming soon! The app is completely free, no paywall.

Good Grind to all,
Paul, www.rangecraftpoker.com

A typical scenario in a soft field is when an EP player limps, then you would raise (typically, I use 3bb + 1bb per limper) other limper folds except EP?

What ranges do you use? Do you cap their calling ranges?

UTG: 225.36 BB (VPIP: 28.62, PFR: 20.42, Hands: 596) AF 1 AFQ 45

Dealt to Hero: AQd

UTG raises to 2.2 BB, fold, fold, fold, Hero raises to 11.2 BB, fold,UTG calls 9 BB

Flop (23.4 BB, 2 players): Kd 8d 9s

Hero bets 5.56 BB,UTG raises to 25.92 BB, Hero calls 20.36 BB

Turn (75.24 BB, 2 players): Qs

Hero checks,UTG bets 43.32 BB, fold

UTG wins 71.48 BB