How to succeed vigorously â II

So letâs get to the most important postflop stats and how you can use them to your advantage, generating as much havoc as possible:
You probably already know that set-mining, if youâre playing Full Ring, works pretty decent but itâs not like it used to be. Players arenât stacking off flops with top pair no kicker anymore, and sometimes weak players can find folds with overpairs. In 6-max itâs worse, because people arenât as tight as before, and having a wider range, when you hit that set youâre a lot less likely to get paid off. But letâs see how we can solve this problem.
Fold Flop C-bet to raise is influenced by board texture, villainâs opening range, and how he reacts to raises in general. Letâs say that weâre raising a standard amount on the flop which is 2.5x the C-bet, and the C-bet is the usual 2/3 pot. So weâre laying down 5/3 to win the other 2/3+3/3(the pot)=5/3. We need the opponent to fold exactly 50% of the times at minimum to be able to profit indefinitely to this move.
Probably not. So most of your range is pure air! What has worked for me is raising flops when Iâm in late positions, OOP versus a BTN or CO opener, on boards that I call semi-dry(or semi-wet). When a dry board is A73 rainbow, a wet board is 678ss, then a semi-dry board must beâŚyou got it! Something of these two combined. The perfect examples have to be A58ss or Q45ss, and the reason why this is, is that now opponents can think OH heâs has a flush draw or a straight draw or an actual hand that is protecting itself from my draws and is raising now. But the good thing is that these flops are a lot harder to hit by our opponent, so heâll believe us more often AND he hits less than on wet boards. Heâs almost never floating you there!
So if his Fold Flop C-bet to Raise is higher than 50% you can raise a lot of missed hands on these boards, because heâs going to fold usually if he doesnât hit anything. But DONâT under ANY circumstances overdo it. Players at the lower limits tend to over-adjust and youâll get 3-bet on the flop with A high in no time.
Also, I absolutely have to specify that you need a whole lot of hands on the villain, and if his C-bet is lower than 55% donât even bother raising any flops because youâre going to run usually into strong hands when he bets right out. With these opponents just bet when they check and only continue with strong hands when they C-bet.
2) Raise Flop C-bet
First of all you have to understand that these players raise WAY too much, even a 35% flop raise c-bet is way off the charts, and you should call them down with top pair, but you have to also be careful of their turn and river tendencies, some opponents just give up after youâve called their flop raises, while others barrel away relentlessly on good turns and rivers that contain scare-cards. What you can do against these guys is to wait for some decent hands and just call them down, see their missed J7s at showdown and THEN you know.
Weâll be talking more about how to deal with maniacs like this and how to differentiate them from well-balanced players in the next article, and Iâll also show you some more stats that can prove useful when looking at them in the right situations.
Up until then, Iâm leaving you with the greatest quote of all times about mastering opponent control:
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. Bruce Lee