today i want to talk about one of the major philosophical and mental adjustments that players make when they move from the small stakes to the mid stakes namely the idea that as you move up in stakes you have to play very differently that the metagame has somehow evolved so far away from what the small stakes play looks like that it is completely unrecognizable to the average you know recreational analyst so today i wanted to look at the results of one of my students who has been playing one two zone on ignition poker before i go
hard on my students results i do want to first say that these games compared to the competitive poker population are actually quite difficult zone games are notoriously much harder than their regular counterparts and 200 no limit is essentially the threshold at which players can make seventy five to a hundred thousand dollars a year uh if they are very serious grinders and because that is the professional threshold that's where you begin to see the play get much tougher because you just generally face students who are not only more studied but they're studying the right material because
they've made it as high as 200 no limit if they are serious grinders and so today we're looking at dawn's results now as you can see the actual results are kind of all over the place and generally when you see someone's blue and red lines kind of go up and down and up and down it's because their strategy is not very consistent and so very often what happens is that they'll get into this groove where they stumble into what is the optimal exploitative framework for the games that they are playing and then their results just
skyrocket but then when they begin to have a few hiccups when a few bluffs don't work when they start having a little bit of a downswing they lose faith in that system and they begin to try to add new ideas i remember one time i was reading the harvard business review and it was talking about what kind of executives or what kind of students are not ready for personalized coaching and one of the factors for people who are not ready are people who are looking for quick tips and easy patches to the leaks in their
game rather than people who are invested in sitting down and learning all of the fundamentals of poker from a very holistic and ground up basis so players who are constantly looking for quick and easy advice rather than players who are willing to grind and pile solver in my opinion are the players who are going to have the most erratic results because their strategy is always shifting and changing with the tide so there's one major leak that is subtle but devastating that involves being too aggressive and i wanted to talk about today how being too aggressive
with some of your hands actually makes your non-showdown winnings plummet so let's go into the sessions and hand to note and let's take a look at some of the hands i've marked so first let's replay this king jack hand so our opponent raises to a standard size from middle position it seems that this is a regular game rather than a zone game because we have stats so the game is not completely anonymous however from the small blind we should be playing a three bet or fold strategy and generally we want to be making this about
four times the initial raise maybe slightly more so i would say going to 10 or 11 is probably going to be a good sizing c11 so good job and we get a fold get a call this is a very standard defense our opponent should be defending most of his strong suited broadway type hands here now obviously this is a bad situation because we have now flopped top pair and our opponent has the nut flush draw but obviously we don't know that from the hero's perspective this is a pretty good flop for us as we should
have the majority of the strong ace king type hands pocket kings our opponent can have sixes and nines it's possible that we can have some combinations of sixes although if you fold that from the small blind facing the middle position raise that's probably going to be on the tighter side and fine i don't think that this is a flop where we can depolarize with our entire range and play a simplification strategy so we just can't bet our entire range on this flop because our opponent is also going to be defending so many suited hands that
he's going to have quite a few flushes here we can however but this hand and if we are going to bet on this flop this is definitely a great candidate hand because it gets value gets a little bit of protection there's a little bit of denial here definitely a hand that is going to be in our betting range along with a lot of other kind of mixtures of hands for board coverage so queens is going to be a hand that is going to be much closer but you can probably bet that with some frequency of
the time obviously going to be betting a large percentage of the time when you have the ace of clubs but also you should have a checking range here that is somewhat protected against someone who just barrels off at you now when they have the nut flush and they barrel off with you obviously you're gonna lose but you should also i imagine have some hands like the ace of clubs king of spades here because you quote unquote block the world and because you prevent your opponent from really having having any hands that is going to call
multiple streets you can start with a check call and just play your hand in a very cagey manner and because you have the ace of clubs you don't really mind giving off free cards because it'll often improve your opponent to a second best hand while your nuts flush draw or your nut flush is going to be a little bit more disguised after saying all that i like this small bet our opponent really has no incentive to raise us here and it's actually pretty important that he doesn't raise us here because imagine if you raise all
of your flushes here then what hands do you call from this position when your opponent triple barrels into you you might have naked king queen here with no club maybe you can call with king queen with one club but very often you're going to get to the river with a not very strong king pocket jacks with the jack of clubs or an ace of clubs x-type hand and so that entire range facing river bets is not very protected and you're going to kind of get run over and so in order to defend that range you
should also be calling with a lot of your flushes the turn is the ace which is not a good card for our hand but it's a really good card for our three betting range now the flop is ace king high so as the three better this should just be really crushing for us and i think that if we pull the rise a little bit on the flop this is a turn that we can afford to actually simplify uh with a small bet so it's actually kind of funny because you can't simplify here on the flop
but on this turn you actually probably can simplify and so we see a small bet from dalton which i like might be a little bit on the large side i think like 1250 is going to be ideal but it's a very small difference opponent just calls this is a position where he kind of crushes everything so there's no real reason for him to raise now the river is the offsuit king and dalton shoves now obviously our opponent snaps but if we go back to the beginning of the video i wanted to talk about instances where
being too aggressive actually makes your non-showdown winnings decrease and so if you look at this you might think wait if you shove here all the time obviously all the spots where your opponent doesn't have anything he's just gonna fold doesn't that mean that our red line will only go up well the problem is one when you shove this hand it's actually extremely thin think about what hands do you actually expect your opponent to call here an ace of clubs x-type hand that is just going to call extraordinarily thinly on a board that is really really
advantageous to the pre-flop three better who is probably three betting quite tightly in the small blind versus middle position formation i'm not too sure about that what worst kings can our opponent have king 10 of hearts king 10 of diamonds that's a very very small percentage of our opponent's range and generally when you are trying to play a fairly solid strategy and you are also assuming that your opponent is playing a fairly solid strategy i don't like value shoving when i only can get my opponent to hero call me especially when i can't name too
many combinations of hands that are actually going to be hero calls so king 10 is probably a hero call at this point it's probably a pure bluff catcher and you know ace of clubs queen x might not be a hand that is in our opponent's range because from a gto perspective if you're in middle position and the small blind three bets you when you have ace queen off suit you should be mucking or forbidding that hand more often than you are calling it's possible that if your opponent is just looking at a ggo chart he
has zero combinations of a spleen off suit here which is probably fine and so if our opponent doesn't even have that many ace x's that is not the nut flush draw then what are we actually trying to get to call so despite us having trips despite us having rivered trips which is even better than having flopped strips our hand is quite near the bottom of our value range and it's not clear that if we shove it for value we are going to get paid by worse hands very often so because we cannot shove for value
what we need to be doing is checking here on the river to protect our check calling range and so this is what i mean by defending our red line i don't know why i put redline in quotes that's just a that's a factual thing but if you always show very thinly here then there's other parts of the game tree where you're going to be getting run over namely if i check here and my opponent jams what hands am i going to call with do i really want to hero him with an asex type hand it's
possible that if i'm only trying to call here with i don't know the ace of clubs queen x which is you know kind of a gross spot to be in facing a raise but then that means i have so many other hands that are just check folding the river if i think ace queen is close and i'm gonna make a face then what other hands do i have that can check call here and so something that is very important is that in all parts of your game tree you need to have a range where you
can begin checking and just call down because if i check here on the river and my opponent jams yeah i'm still going to lose all the times that he has some value hands i might save a little money if he doesn't jam a value hand and instead he goes for a smaller bet sizing but i also widen my opponent's range very slightly and allow him a few more floats in order to have jams by the river especially when i go one third on the flop one third of the turn it allows my opponent to have
hands like hopefully seven eight of hearts seven eight of diamonds and seven eight of spades that he can jam on me by the river which is one of the instrumental things about using the one-third sizing on the flop and one-third sizing on the turn is that it widens your opponent's range as much as possible so that they can have bluffs to shove into you when you check here if you use the one-third sizing on the flop one third sizing on the turn and then just check here with all your air your opponent can accidentally exploit
you just by mindlessly betting and in general if you have a strategy that loses to your opponent closing his eyes and betting against you your strategy is probably not very good that's something i learned very early on in my limit poker career is that if you just go bet bet on every street very often weaker players will find way too many river folds against you so this is a spot where you should be defending your check calling range because you cannot get enough thin value and you should be check calling instead of shoving as you
can see in the background we have this already beautifully laid out in pile solver shout out to using rta when i'm doing my youtube analysis makes it a lot easier doesn't it here on the flop going to be betting the majority of our range generally going to be betting when we have a club in our hand and you can see that king jack of spades is going to be about the overwhelming majority of the time what's kind of more interesting to look at is what is actually in our checking range queens is usually going to
be the hand that is the best to check and then defending that check with queens and a little bit of your jacks indeed is going to be defended with ace king almost never defended with the ace queen which is the ace of clubs queen of spades type combos which are probably going to bet on the flop because they just have such amazing blocker properties against your opponent's calling range so we bet our opponent doesn't really raise here calls and then it is the ace of diamonds as we can see here we can basically just bet
our entire range and despite this being an 11 check if you simplify to this to just be a range bet with the smaller sizing and not even using this slightly larger sizing at all you would see that the ev is very very comparable to playing the mixer strategy so i really like that dalton correctly realized that he should be betting small on the flop and on the turn and we get called and then we have an off suit king wow so much respect is given here on the river now one of the reasons we have
to give so much respect is because we bet the majority of our range on the flop and then we bet almost everything on the turn if not everything on the turn and so think about how wide our range is compared to our opponents our range is probably 70 percent of hands that three bet pre maybe 80 of hands our opponent has faced bets twice and so now he has had the ability to narrow his range quite significantly compared to ours and when you're ever your opponent's range is much narrower narrower than yours you should begin
to play a little bit more defensively obviously that's very hard to recognize two streets in in a three bet pot over the board but nonetheless we should be starting with a check here and when our opponent jams we have very very easy decisions with all of our king x type hands and indeed pile silver likes to call with ace queen with the ace of clubs and considers folding ace queen with the queen of clubs although that is probably going to be a pretty difficult fold also if we see by the river in our opponents shoving
range they do have eight seven of hearts so this is something that is kind of important to consider if our opponent is so nitty that he cannot have eight seven of hearts in his pre-flop range or he's so nitty that even on the turn facing the one-third bet he's not gonna float us with eight seven of hearts then you can probably consider folding a hand like king ten or even king jack on the river because your hand is a pure bluff catcher and your opponent may simply never have any bluffs but if you're playing against
opponents who are slightly splashier who are going to be trying to peel thinly on this turn recognizing that you're betting twice with very very large percentages of your range giving them an opportunity to steal it from the river well then you just have to close your eyes and make a face and call there but to be honest i'm probably never following trips in a three-bed pot and after i've taken this line but as you can see if you were just too aggressive here facing a raise if you don't ever have hands like king 10 king
jack king queen pocket kings or aces like if you just shove all of these hands what are you actually calling with by the river some traps with pocket nines that probably just go into the shoving range you can see that if you just shove all of these hands super thinly right you can only call you can only like hero call him a little bit with jax which seems to be very very narrow on this board or you can just hero him with whatever traps you have with the nut flush and a little bit of your
ace queen but again facing any kind of aggression you're going to be folding the overwhelming majority of your range our opponent opens to 4x from the cutoff which is too big and we go ahead and three bet him too small so first off when an opponent opens from 4x in any position especially in these lower stakes games although the rake is not too horrible at 200 online you should generally never have a flatting range you should only be three bet or folding and because you're out of position i do prefer this to be a 4x
raise to make the pot odds worse for your opponent to call so this should be 16. neither here nor there our opponent calls and this is a good call i think that he should be four betting maybe 25 percent of the time but flatting with jax the majority of the time obviously never folding again this is a board that is very very good for the pre-flop razor generally two broadway cards are very very good for you because you can always have top and medium set and your opponent might not always have those hands so if
this was queen jack three we can always have pocket queens and pocket jacks but our opponent can possibly only have pocket jacks and he'll have naturally reduced combos of them because he four bets some of them pre-flop and we go ahead and bet small this is a spot where we can bet small with our entire range because this flop is so good for us and with the nuts again our opponent is just going to call us now i'll give you a hint here and just let you know that dalton goes ahead and just barrels off
and most of the time you're gonna just look at these two hands in a three bed pot and say up this is a cooler especially if we three bet larger pre-flop and there's more money to fight over post flop then yes the money is always going in and to be honest in this setup the money is always going in anyway however like with the last hand i'm more interested in thinking about how does our line affect the other parts of our range so here on the turn this now is a very optimistic bet in order
to put the money in on the flop we have the second defective nuts which is great now we have the fourth or fifth effective nuts but we really can't give our opponent any credit for having pocket kings but the problem is now what hands are we getting to call us down for value if we go bet the turn and then shove the river king jack might find a fold by the river i think i would probably find a fold with king jack king 10 i would find fooled with by the river ace king which i
should have in some frequency here might be a fold by the river and from dawn's perspective what hands am i trying to defend against here ace 10 came in backdoor diamonds which are you know kind of tentative uh on the flop oh i'm sorry i thought i think i said i had we have the fourth effect of nuts we really have the fifth or sixth because also the low straight came in so this is just a spot where i think it's too optimistic to try to put the money in and as we begin to reduce
our opponents or range with various bet sizings we'll see that as this range narrows it's just going to be a little bit stronger than ours on average so when we shove here this is a spot where our opponent is not going to fold other queens but again what queens are we getting value from queen 10 exactly and that might be a hand where if we have taken a passive line on the tournament river he's going to shove on his own so we're not really losing any value because he thinks that we have ace king so
this is a spot where on the turn rather than betting i like checking here and protecting this range from now getting shoved on because i think that going for value is going to be too thin after three more additional effective nuts have come in by the turn also it's effective nuts that our opponent should have quite often he should have all of the ace ten suiteds he should have all the king queens and he should have all of the ten nines here in pyrosolver we can see that it prefers a small bet with nearly entire
range on the flop our opponent calls and the turn is the backdoor king of diamonds and again pile sulfur likes to check and now play extremely defensively we can see the ace the king the jack the ten nine eight all of the cards that bring in the gut shots and opening the straight jaws essentially the hands that change the effect of nuts very dramatically are going to be the ones where we're going to have to slow down but all of the low blanks are ones where then we can continue with a mixed range because we
simplified on the flop notice that we're very rarely going to simplify on the turn because we are now arriving on the turn with our entire pre-flop range but our opponent has had a chance to fold some of his hands on the flop and so he generally is going to have stronger hands in general here we can see the outer position ev is 19 while the in position ev is 22 when the king comes on the turn so when the card is better for our opponent we should have a smaller checking range so we check here
and you know let's pretend our opponent jams when we have a hand like ace queen or any of the queen x's namely now these are very very easy calls and so when you play too aggressively when you play too thinly and are really trying to only get two or three or four case combos to call you on the river you probably going for two thin value and then accidentally exposing yourself to too much aggression after you check so when you go for thin value here right if you always try to barrel off when you have
a hand like queen 10 you're gonna find that after you check here you're just gonna get owned a lot and you should be checking here a lot because the king of diamonds is gonna be so good for your opponent because it improves the board coordination so much so if the turn comes bad for you and then you do not have a check calling down range you're going to get wrecked a lot and so you should definitely let the texture of the board be a signal for you to slow down so a subtle but extremely extremely
important leak to recognize in your own game if you are going for tooth in value consistently you'll probably being you're probably over exposing yourself to aggression on future streets because you have arrived with too wide of a range on on the river compared to your opponent's narrower stronger range also i didn't realize how difficult it is to say narrower narrower narrower narrower thank you for watching if you enjoyed this please like and subscribe if you are a student over at my school at overnightmonster.com please send me hand histories if you want them reviewed over youtube
if you have not signed up for overnightmonster.com maybe you should check it out because hundreds of players are using it to move up from the small stakes to the mid stakes and to be honest there's a couple guys who have started at 25 no limit and now are 5 10 online regulars which is pretty crazy so this has been alvin teaches poker hopefully i'll be doing videos more frequently than once a month because i kind of enjoy doing them i had a lot of fun doing this analysis good job dalton thank you for letting me
review your hands as always this is alan teaches poker good luck everyone
