Hey Adam, just a quick one hopefully!

I'm struggling to develop a sound prelfop game. Its by no means wild and I have a pretty good understanding of factors like position, player type and raise size. Ive worked a lot on out of blinds as I used to play insanely tight and its working nicely.

The thing I'm struggling with is developing ranges pre vs a UTG 3x in 6 max or 9 handed, and then being able to associate a certain hand with a certain strength.

Could you give me tips or put me in the general direction on how to start forming ranges pre so I can stick to them. It helps to see my range visually so on flop textures I can see which hands ill be checking or betting.

All the best, cheers

Hi Adam, I've always had a question about how the pros cash out, so do you have a cash out method that allows you to cash out in a month independently of your real earnings in that month? Or how dou you decide how much to cash out?

Here is an example range BB vs UTG 3x to get you started. Light red is value, dark red is bluffs, dark blue is cold-call. This is for 6-handed games

It's good to have ranges vs every position and versus every sizing. So if you were to instead face a min-raise in this spot the range would change to something like follows




Hopefully this will get you started. I have complete ranges for every position like this, but I don't give them for free. Send me PM if interested to purchase. You will also find a selection of my ranges scattered throughout the articles here at pokervip.com. So you could probably build a lot of the ranges from these.

I don't really cash out that much. As I mentioned earlier in the thread I am using coaching profits to pay bills etc. So I only really cash out if I decide to make a big purchase.

However, for those of us where sole income is from poker, it's good to have some kind of system in place. The goal is obviously to withdraw enough to cover bills, but not so much that it increases risk of ruin drastically. This will partly depend on if we have bills that we need to pay with poker funds of course. The ideal setup is to just never cash out until bankroll gets really big. We maximise our poker progress this way.

Assuming we have set bills, we need to calculate the minimum cashout we need per month. We should at the very least cash out the minimum since this is what we need to live on, but should not really cash out more than this unless our bankroll is doing well. Assuming we don't have important bills to cover we can be a little bit more lapse, and it's probably a good idea to cash out proportional to profits. So for a winning month we could take 10% of our earnings or something similar. In a losing month we don't take anything, but this is fine since we don't have bills anyway. There would obviously be a minimum threshold where bankroll is not permitted to drop below, and assuming we dropped below this we would not cash out anything until roll had recovered.

Cbetting Principles

A common leak is not cbetting aggressively enough. The following is a very brief guide where we will analyse the most common missed cbet spots.


Basic Cbet Stats

First step is to fire up your tracking software and check your Cbet Flop frequency. It should be around 65% in the vast majority of lower limit games online. If it is below 60% you are likely missing out on a decent chunk of winrate. If it is in the 80% region you are overdoing it. Note that this will still be a profitable strategy (even 100% cbet is profitable), but it won’t necessarily generate the highest winrate.

The next step is to break it down by position. Check cbet IP and cbet OOP. It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that cbet IP should be significantly higher than cbet OOP. There should be at least a 15% gap between the two stats. (I.e if OOP cbet is 55% then IP cbet should at least 70% for example). If the two stats seem somewhat similar then there is a good indication that we are not as positionally aware as we should be. A cbet OOP as low as 50% is completely fine and even recommended. Cbet IP should likely be over 70% therefore in order to produce that 65% average.


Spot 1 – Vulnerable Pairs

Construct a filter for a missed cbet, specifically in position. Filter for all second and bottom pair hands. The majority of these will be cbets. Checking back these hands is overly risky given their vulnerable nature. Only non-vulnerable pairs can be checked back. The vast majority of flopped pairs should be cbets. So if you are flopping stuff like bottom pair on the T73 rainbow and proceeding to check back because you have “showdown value” you are making a big mistake.


Spot 2 – Slowplays

There is hardly a good reason to slowplay in position ever. It just doesn’t make sense. The vast majority of top-pair and better should be cbet. If it’s a weak top pair, take a bet/bet/check line. We would only ever slowplay a value hand if we had a good incentive to do so. I.e villain will start double barrel bluffing OOP or overbetting turns and rivers. This will hardly ever happen in lower limit games, so the only thing we achieve (in most case) by checking back the flop with a made hand is giving our opponent a free card and potentially missing value. Don’t’ do it. Construct a filter for missed cbets IP which shows all hands top pair and better. Most should be cbets.


Spot 3 – Backdoor draws and Direct Draws

In the majority of cases if we have any of the following

- backdoor nut or second nut flush
- backdoor flush with backdoor straight combo
- nut gutshot (2card)
- oesd


then we should be cbetting. Run a filter to see if any of these have been missed.


Alright, that was the quick version, but running a filter for each of these scenarios will be surprisingly effective and allow you to do some self-analysis. Btw, if you are one of these guys who cbets way too much, your first job will likely be to find spots where you can check OOP instead of cbet. Work on improving your check/call and check/raise game as the preflop aggressor. Also work on not cbetting in scenarios where we don’t have any backdoor potential.

What about turn and river cbet? I cbet on the low side OTF, which I have been working on recently, but I then cbet more OTT/OTR.

Think I'm playing 50/55/65

Should be the other way round. 65/52/44.

It's unlikely that you are currently employing the most profitable strategy.

Understanding Automatic Profit




Hey guys,

So there will probably be a couple of parts to this at least. One of the things that can greatly accelerate your progress is understanding what auto-profit is and where you can generate it. This should be a somewhat straightforward and simple post to get started with, so if you are a high level NLHE pro, you might not find it too exciting.

Sometimes I talk about this concept without really going over the basic maths, but without that subconscious awareness of the mathematics involved, players often have a tendency to disregard the concept or give it incorrect weighting in their minds.

So, What is Automatic Profit?
Automatic profit means that we can generate profit by betting any 2 cards.

Let’s take a simple example in the SB. Folded round to hero.

Hero (SB) raises to 2.5bb.

We can calculate the break-even threshold on this preflop steal or bluff by considering which percentage of the total pot was invested. Hero is actually investing 2bb here, since the original 0.5bb was a mandatory post. The total pot is hero’s 2.5bb + the 1bb posted by the BB, so 3.5bb total pot. To calculate the percentage of the total pot invested we can divide 2 by 3.5 to get 0.571 or so. We move the decimal point two places to the right to get our percentage of around 57%.

The break-even threshold on our preflop steal is 57% though, so what does this mean exactly? It means that if our opponent folds above this threshold we generate profit in the long run, even if we check/fold every flop when called. Yes, sometimes our opponent will call and we will lose money. But he is folding enough to completely make up for that and more. We should open-raises any two cards preflop, including the 23o.

Now, the one proviso here is, don’t spew money postflop. We are assuming that our postflop EV is zero with our worst hands. We can achieve a postflop EV of zero by simply check/folding the flop, so if we are unsure on the best play, then we should generally take the safe option and check fold. Ideally our postflop EV won’t be quite zero, because even hands as weak as 23o are occasionally going to flop straights or quads. The only time our postflop EV will be less than 0 is if we flop dominated hands and make big mistakes. It’s ok to play very tight postflop when making exploitative steals preflop. We are guaranteed to make money even if we do nothing postflop. But if we spew postflop, then it can end up being better that we didn’t steal preflop.

Ok, so we’ll talk about a couple of things in the next post.

1. Using HUD stats to generate auto-profit
2. Understanding where we can generate auto-profit vs the population

Hi, thanks very much for doing this.

Some of us play no HUD, no tracking anonymous games, will we be able to use this properly without all the stats stuff at our disposal? Is that the Auto-Profit vs Population part perhaps?

Yeah exactly. The HUD info won't be overly useful, but the vs-population stuff we will get into applies even if we don't have a HUD up and running.

Nice simple introductory post to the concept! Looking forward to the next

Thanks coach!

Hi, Adam!!! First of all, thank you for helping the community, this is very useful for us!!

I would like to ask you if is possible you can write down a quick guide (you are expert in showing the info so easy and concise) on how do you approach an optimal PF hand range construction off the table.
I am more the type of player that like to get "the hands dirty" instead of getting a complete chart of hand ranges in every situation and memorize it. I`d like to know why we add or not these specifics X combos, how we identify and calculate our thresholds, do you work with equities? or mix it with playability postflop?, what are the main factors do you use? how I balance properly my value combos with bluffs, etc.
I use Power-equilab which I think it's a very powerful tool, currently to identify thresholds (value 3bet/4bet, CC, bluffs) I am using a mix between equity and playability, but I am struggling and get lost and do not know how to finish it.

I know this is a very complex part of poker, and lot of factors come into the study, but if I want to improve my poker I will need a decent understanding of the theory behind this...

Well thank you very much,
looking forward to your answer....

Exploitative Auto-Profit

So far we have seen what auto-profit is, and how to calculate the break-even point of a bluff. Simply understanding the maths behind this should enable us to use our HUD with a much greater efficiency assuming that we have some stats on our opponent. We’ll be able to use the auto-profit concept even without stats which we will discuss in the next part. But for now, let’s assume that we have a good sample on our opponents.


High and Low Thresholds for Stats

Let’s start with a simple stat. The fold to 3bet stat. We have the number on our HUD, but as a new player we won’t have a great instinct for what constitutes a high or low fold to 3bet. However, we can use our knowledge of auto-profit to generate some default thresholds.

For example,

SB posts 0.5bb
BB posts 1bb.

SB open-raises to 3bb
BB 3bets to 9bb.

Let’s first calculate the break-even point of a bluff on BB’s 3bet. Remember that it is simply the total amount of the pot invested.

Total pot size = 12bb
BB’s investment = 8bb

Notice that BB’s investment is not 9bb. He is only raising an additional 8bb on top of the 1bb that was the mandatory BB post.

8/12 = 0.6666 or around 67%.

In other words if SB is folding more than 67% of the time to a BB 3bet, it means that the BB is generating automatic-profit with any 2 cards. We should look for players who have a fold-to-3bet stat above this frequency and 3bet extremely aggressively.

So using our knowledge of auto-profit we were able to see that anything above a 67% fold-to-3bet is exploitably high. Now, most of us were probably aware of this fact. It’s common knowledge. But we may not have realised exactly how it was calculated.

Transferring the Knowledge to Other Stats

If we take a less commonly used stat, for example, fold to turn check-raise. Do we automatically know what are high and low values for this stat? Possibly not, it’s no longer something that we would consider common knowledge. However, with some basic maths, we can easily calculate the thresholds whereby our opponent is folding too much to turn check-raises.

In other words, we no longer need someone to come along and tell us what the default values should be for every stat on our opponents HUD. With a little bit of simple maths, we can deduce whether any HUD stat, commonly used or not, is within an acceptable threshold or whether it is exploitable.

We should spend some time going through all of the stats on our HUD, thinking about commonly used bet-sizes in various scenarios, and establishing the acceptable values for those stats. Upon doing this, both PT4 and HM2 have colour code features that allow stats to be automatically colour-coded based on whether they are high, acceptable, or low.

BB – the Special Case

If we are in another situation at the table: let’s say that UTG opens and we are in MP. We know that UTG folds to 3bets 70% of the time. Does this mean we should 3bet 32o? Not necessarily, in fact this would nearly always be a mistake, because we have at least 4 other guys to act behind us preflop.

However, if we are in the BB we can literally 3bet any 2 cards if our opponent is folding above the threshold where we generate automatic profit.


+EV vs Max-EV

If we make a 2/3rds pot cbet on the flop and our opponent folds more than 40%, we are generating automatic profit. Does this mean we should always cbet any 2 cards if our opponent is folding 41% of the time to a cbet? No, not necessarily, this is a common mistake. If our opponent is folding 41%, all this means is that our bet has a positive expectation. We must still keep in mind that checking may have a higher expectation with certain holdings.

The further this number gets above the acceptable threshold, for example our opponent is folding 70% of the time to cbets; this stat is now so far above the acceptable threshold that it’s now likely that cbetting anything will always have a higher EV than checking, since the EV of cbetting is so high. It does of course depend on other factors, for example how our opponent plays on the turn and river if we check, but it would be a reasonable default assumption that we should be cbetting very close to 100% of the time.

Nice post. Just a question for understanding. When you say at the end if a persons fold to cbet is 70% you should bet nearly 100% of the time, you mean with cbet 100% with the air part of our range as opposed to 100% of our range. In a spot with a person overfolding to cbet on the river I will check some of my mid strength SDV holdings as if he calls it will be with stuff that beats me so the check is higher EV? I cbet polarised vs this guy and more depolarised vs the station.

That make sense. Or am I overcomplicating and if they fold too much just bet the lot, and fold to a raise if it comes.

I'm literally talking about entire range. You should probably cbet most of your value hands also if a guy folds 70% to cbets.

Checking might sometimes be the maxEV play, if we have an /incentive/. For example perhaps the guy shoves every turn if we slowplay the flop. But a lot of guys at lower limits are passive. What this means is that there is often no real benefit to slowplaying even if the guy folds a ton. It's usually highest EV to cbet and hope he has something.

There are of course exceptions, but the important thing to understand is, just because the guy folds a ton doesn't mean it is not maxEV to value-bet.

It is indeed, not straightforward. After I have finished the posts on auto-profit I'll try and summarise it in a quick guide as one of the strategy posts.

But while preflop is often seen as the simplest part of poker, ironically it's actually the most complex if you want to solve for it correctly.

Hy every body today is my first atempt too win big ticket 550euro live entry for belguim poker challange on unibet do you have some tips a m trying just to forget the price just play my game play the spots stay calm any other advice for me it starts in 10 beginning to feel the trill

Hi Guys,

Am looking for some advice. I have noticed that i am losing way too much money from the blinds (according to PT4) and i think the problem lies with my defending/3betting ranges. I am aware depending on opening size from BTN or SB would depend on defending range and what 3bet bluff/value hands, however i seem to have this all wrong. i have read some articles on the site and watched some videos but they are not really what i am after. I recently downloaded Power-Equilab however I am not sure how to work the software. Also it only seems to have starting hands and no defending ranges like i hoped.

Does anyone know of an import for this or where I can find some ranges so I can manually input these? Any help on this would be great and will drastically improve my game.

Thanks

thanks for the info about Auto-Profit, just needed that refreshed