Red Line Mastery: Outplay Your Opponents Without Showdown

hey guys Jericho 2 here for run. com and today I'm proud to present to you the first mini course in run one's history Redline Mastery outplaying opponents without Showdown by Yours Truly the Jericho 2 the first episode of this mini course will be our Redline players always bluffing before we get into it uh let me introduce the the goal of this of this mini course the purpose of this mini course I want to make RS once users better Redline players better at winning at non Showdown making them harder to play against and I believe that you we will achieve this by uh improving everybody's red light making them Bluff more making them call more it's an underrated part of the game and I kind of want to shed light on it so yeah let's get into it shall we uh what does it mean being a red line player well first of all like procor graphs are made up of four different lines you have the green line which are going to be your straight up winnings or losses you have the yellow line sometimes referred as the orange line which is going to be your Allin uh expected value adjusted winnings uh so what does it mean all in expected value adjusted winnings uh if I were to get in Aces versus Kings Prix and I would win I would be running above EV above expected value because I'm supposed to win that pot on average 80% of the time if I were to get in Queens versus Jacks and I were to lose I would be running under EV under expected value because I I lost the pot that I'm supposed to win 80% of the time so it the yellow line or orange line will kind of try to uh tell you how much you should have one given all the allins that occurred the blue line which is the third line is The Showdown winnings so how often do you win whenever you table your hand when you show down your hand so you're on the river you bet they call show the hands or under Riv they bet to call and show the hand or check check show them the hand how often are you winning in that spot uh usually people kind of win a lot that's how they make most of their money they bet their River they get called by worse they show their hand so usually it's that's the way people win most often on average and the fourth line uh the one we will be focusing on in this course is the red line AKA non-sh Showdown wedings uh what does that mean whenever you Tre bit pre theold you forbit pre fold whenever you bet flop and they fold whenever you raise turd and they fold whenever you bet River raise is River the fall whenever you win a hand without showing down your hand this will go into non-sh Showdown winnings it's also true for whenever you fold flop fold pre fold turn this will go into your non- Showdown winnings NE negatively because you will be uh losing money without showing down your hand most people usually uh lose a decent amount in non Showdown winnings uh from what I've seen and just to summarize a bit the green line will be the sum of both Showdown and non-sh Showdown winnings so in other words uh Blue Line plus Red Line will equal your net winnings AKA Green Line uh and just to show you an example let's have a look at my uh overall Poker Stars 2kl graph and I will Ex show you the different lines so I have played a bit more than 100 CN on that stake uh so this is the green line uh which basically is your net winnings uh so yeah most people know that line on the graph now if I were to go to show all in expected value you can see that I was running more or less on par with EV expected value them uh uh in most parts of the graph and if I were to look at DN I am probably running like 4 to 5K under EV there so I was supposed to Win 4 or 5K more than I did uh given all the allins that occurred over those 100kn now for The Showdown lines uh so we can see the red line being up quite a lot most of the time carrying the graph did run pretty did run pretty bad at the end the Blue Line wasn't winning until until what like 10 65 6 till 65k heads so so yeah I ran a bit bad there too but yeah overall you can see that most of the graph was being carried by the red line uh making most of the winnings of this graph and you can see that the Blue Line plus the red line winnings will equal the green line winnings so I hope this uh is clear for everybody now that we know what the line mean the lines mean uh let's get into the depth of things a couple of misconceptions that I often hear about being a Redline player is that people assume that you are always bluffing and don't get me wrong bluffing or being aggressive is an important part about getting your red line up however the other important aspect about being a Redline player that is often forgotten is calling and I would say that calling is as important as bluffing whenever I'm teaching students about improving their Red Line most of them will only focus on the bluffing aspect of the game so finding the right combos the right frequencies like being a pain in yes to play you know like just bluffing a lot raising a lot this is good however they they they tend to brush away the calling aspect they kind of feel as if it's not being as important or as valuable as the bluffing aspect of the game personally and from my experience I would say that improving your calling skills will move your red line upwards way more than improving your bluffing skills and it's a very underrated uh aspect of the game because usually calling is like ah whatever you call what's you call good you call strong hands you fold the rest but there's more to it and so just to summarize a little bit to improve one's Red Line we must work on both the bluffing aspect and the calling aspect on average like the most natural thing to do is just to focus on the bluffing aspect so like don't they'll feel bad if that's what your your go-to sentiment is I I was like this too at the beginning and the calling aspect is as important and usually will impact red red line way more yeah that's what I've experienced like whenever I started to work on my calling my red line went up way more so let's have a look at at a few different graphs we have here the blue line graph which I would say 90 to 95% of players have a graph that is more or less similar to that a gra it's a graph that doesn't Focus much on bluffing nor calling usually the Blue Line will be through the roof and the red line will be tanking so usually the red line will be like a 45 degree angle like going straight down and it's the typical blue light winning player type of graph so usually it's players that focus a lot on value betting on getting called by worst they don't really care too much about the bluffing aspect of the game about the calling aspect of the game they just try to make hands get paid move on and I I had a graph like this for a long time I'm not going to lie uh I was I was a bit of a nit and and I not bluffing much and I was folding a lot so so yeah just I I know good players that have graph like this but I I think the best players usually will have other type of graphs that we'll get too uh the next type of graph will be the break event red line graph so usually that will be a graph that focuses on bluffing but disregards calling so so whenever I get students that want to improve their red line they usually go from a blue line graph to a break event red line graph they start bluffing a lot usually they their their calling stays more or less the same but they start bluffing a lot and then their Red Line kind of breaks even and it's the typical like bluffing right frequencies type of graph it's definitely an improvement I believe over the the blue line graph you're harder to play against and it shows that you are winning willing to put the money in with with air with your Bluffs and uh yeah I think a lot of good regulars have this type of graph a lot of the best players at Mid Stakes they have a graph more or less similar to this and the last type of graph the one that I aspire to bring my students to is the red line graph so it's a graph that will focus on bluffing and calling uh Blue Line usually will win or be Breaky in the red line uh is the one carrying the graph the one that will be winning heaps and it's the typical bluffing and calling right frequencies type of graph this is the hardest graph uh type of graph to achieve in No Limit Olden it's really hard to do in my opinion because you need to study a lot of the bluffing aspect a lot of the calling aspect and your blue line if it's winning like it means that you're doing a lot a lot right as well I believe this is like Peak no limit hold and poker performance here if you're able to get a graph like this like you you are on top of things if a solver would play it would more or less have a graph like this winning a lot with red line and blue line winning uh winning as well but yeah just being carried by the red line and I think the toughest players usually usually will have graphs like this the ones that are aggressive the ones that are willing to put the money in with air the ones that are willing to make uh tough calls uh they usually will have graphs like this and yeah this is uh you can also call this a purple line graph when both uh red line and blue line are winning uh blue blue plus red usually equals purple so so yeah that's a that's a cool thing to have in my opinion yeah and uh just to end on the great on a on a cool note this is my poker stars 1kl overall graph uh you can see most of the winnings are with the red line uh ran really bad at the end here Blue Line got got hit really hard but you can see the red line most of the time like going upwards carrying the graph and just overall being aggressive calling a lot bluffing a lot trying to be a Pon DS to play again uh cuz those games are going to be tough right at 1K at 2K you're going to be playing a lot of three- ended uh playing against tough players so you need to be aggressive you need to call a lot you need to Bluff a lot and I think if you can apply this to mid-stakes game to small Stakes game then you're going to be ready for the the higher Stakes as well so and it's good it's good things to put into motion so yeah this is what I aspire to bring you guys to and this is what I Aspire my students to get to as well welcome to episode number two of my mini course hold forbidding Galore so it's pretty obvious today we'll be working on forbiding I'll try to explain to you why it's important with regards to the red line and just to improve your overall uh cold forbidding game so let's get into it shall we uh for first of all what is called forbiding so I'll just give you a quick example uh for those who are not familiar with this uh cut off opens to 2. 5 big blinds button Tre bits to nine big blind then the big blind four bits cold for bits basically 23 big blind it's called cold for bitting because big blind was not not involved in the hand prior and not put any uh voluntary money in the pot uh basically it's when you're ra raing after tree bit but you're not the one who got treeit tree bitted right so you were outside of the Razer and the three better and cold for bitting uh no liid all them like especially as a bluff I I feel like it's still quite uh not used as much as it should be especially in 2024 it's a huge show of a strength that puts immense amount of pressure on both the opener on two people both the opener and a three bidder and I believe that it's just a great move overall what will cold four bidding do it will increase your Redline winnings naturally given how many folds uh one will get pre so pre flop or post flop as well so sometimes like yeah you called forbit then they they call but then there's always like pulse flop where you can make them fold and flop and turn you know depending on the Flop and the the positions and all of that so there's 's a lot going on there for you it's not just about pre flop like it translates to post flop as well uh it helps to balance the times that you do have premiums as well so you're going to be pretty face up if you're only like cold forbiding Ace king and queen queen plus uh so adding uh Bluffs to your range uh will help you be not as face up as you uh as one might be uh and it does not require a ton of studying it's really rare those spots No Limit all them that don't require a lot of study uh but this is one of them so because pre pre flop and post flop are are quite quite straightforward uh in this note so so pre flop you just kind of need to know learn the ranges you know what you should be called forbiding as a Blu and as value and then like post flop the the the ranges are so small and the spr the stack topt ratio is so so small as well like there's not a lot of Stack La uh given how big the pot is that there's not a much there's not a lot to do to study you know it's going to be a lot of betting small or even some jamming on the Flop and and yeah so so I I really like this spot for for this reason uh for for those reasons yeah let's talk about cold forbidding frequencies uh many new players are players that are getting new to a new Stakes they usually will shy away from cold forbidding uh I've seen it many times so when cold forbiding has a bluff at a new stake when when you're cold forbidding as a bluff at a new stake it's kind of nerve-wracking and it's quite uncomfortable you know it's more money it's like I'm doing this as a bluff nobody knows me however it's a move that all great poker players use like every good rag will have uh cold uh cold forbit Bluffs uh so that's why it's so important to master so uh many students that I have sometimes they're struggling to have a win rate and usually I'll have a look at their cold forbiding percentage and I'll see it's around like 2 2.

5% which is super low and whenever I look at the top players in my database their cold forbiding percentage is always between four to 5% and this is a huge difference cuz one player just cold for bits the double or 2. 5x of what the other players called forbing so the the player that is not called forbing enough is missing out on so much EV so many spots that he should be taking down pre or post flop and he's also like I've mentioned hindering what himself when he has premiums because people are going to be folding more if they see that he has a cold for bit of 2% instead of if he has a cold forbit that is normal of like 4. 5 5% uh yeah so this is what I want to try to shed light on today in order to do so let's have a look at my overall uh cold forbidding uh percentage over in my 500 NL database that has over uh 750k ends in there so yeah let's go have a look here as you can see I have a in this database I have way more hands than this at 500 andl but in this database I have around 78 6K ends there and uh this would be the cold forb betting stat 4.

78% of cold forbidding which I think is a really good number uh got premiums got Bluffs every position is cover just really strong overall in my opinion and so yeah I would strive to get H at least to 4. 5 if I was a a regular in some kind of small to Mid Stakes game uh just to be tougher to play against at high stakes I think this is a between 4.