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Post by krcmdc on Jun 15, 2019 21:57:26 GMT
Ignition blunder 2... Not sure about this one being a blunder. Snowie has a propensity to be very nitty when pots are multiway. I'd almost certainly make this call if I were playing Snowie as well. But this would never happen playing Snowie, as Snowie would never be giving away chips like SB is trying to do here. But, knowing that Snowie plays ultra nitty, and trying to play like Snowie, probably means that I should just fold in such spots. I can't imagine that they're anything more than marginally profitable at best anyway.
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 15, 2019 22:15:00 GMT
Ignition blunder 3... Ok this is certainly a spot where I didn't play Ignition the same as I'd play against Snowie. I'd certainly check this 100% against Snowie. Not sure why I didn't check in the actual hand. It is a 3b pot, so there is some extra incentive to cbet, but it's such a terrible board, and it's multiway. Pretty much a no brainer check. Interestingly enough, everyone called my cbet. Turn came 2h, it checked to CO and he shoves $3 into $7.50, and he takes it down with K high flush draw. It would be interesting to see how it plays out if I check that flop. I wouldn't be check/folding, unless something crazy happened. There's a good chance that it simply checks through on the flop. I can pretty easily delay cbet a board pairing card on the turn. Although I'm not sure if that would be Snowie's advice, but even playing Snowie, I don't know Snowie's advice until after I make my own decision. Ok, setting it up in Snowie tells me that Snowie does not delay cbet the turn. And Snowie does bet BB range on the turn, so it never really gets to CO if things go according to Snowie's plan. However, if I force the actions as they happened, then of course Snowie just folds to CO on the turn, whether there was a flop cbet or not. Pretty good reason to just save that flop cbet.
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 15, 2019 22:19:40 GMT
Blunder 4... This one is somewhat close, having the open ender with the flush draw. Not sure if I'd have folded this against Snowie either. Although Snowie would never bet this sizing, so perhaps that matters in these spots.
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 15, 2019 22:28:19 GMT
Blunder 5... Same hand as blunder 4. Snowie likes to lead out with 25% pot donk bet on this river. This is one that I get wrong in Snowie all the time, but it's usually not a blunder. I tend to simply choose the wrong sizing, I tend to pick much bigger sizes when I bet these kinds of spots. Although occasionally when I think it's a spot where I can get away with a small stab, that's usually when Snowie tells me that I should have bet bigger. Not realy sure what the solution is with these kinds of spots, they're not blunders so long as I bet something. But I didn't bet anything in actual play. Turns out that he wasn't going to fold unless I was willing to bet extremely large, and even then he might not fold. And DriveHUD tells me that Villain was 22/19 after 88 hands. So I have no reason in the world to play against this villain any differently than I'd play against Snowie. I just auto pilot too many situations when I'm playing actual hands.
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 15, 2019 22:34:51 GMT
Blunder 6... Preflop consisted of UTG folding, HJ limping, CO folding, BU limping, my 5x iso, HJ calling, BU folding. Snowie approved of my preflop actions. On the flop, I cbet half pot, Snowie approves. On the turn, I check, and Villain checks. Snowie wants me to lead the river, considers it a small blunder not to do so. Against Snowie I probably just automatically throw out that 1/4 pot river bet, because I have a 1/4 pot button. I don't have that at Ignition, so my auto pilot misses it almost always. More proof that I need to auto pilot much less.
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 15, 2019 22:40:20 GMT
And the 1 blunder that I had playing against Snowie... Whatever, lol. I have many things to work on before I begin to try balancing this range. Preflop went BU open, my SB 3b, BU calls. I cbet flop, BU min raises, I call. Turn comes mostly a brick, but it does complete the straight for the 65s hands. So after calling the raise on the flop, I check to the raiser on the turn, ...and Snowie considers that turn check to be a blunder. Perhaps it is, but I have many things that need improvement before I worry about this issue.
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 16, 2019 18:31:16 GMT
Ok, I need to make a little adjustment to the schedule and the way I'm doing things. I notice that when I'm playing Snowie, I don't really put forth the same level of effort that I put in earlier this year. I'm pretty sure that it's caused by not playing a certain number of hands. If I just have to "play Snowie for 30 minutes", then the minutes keep clicking by even if I go get a glass of tea, or even if I stop to answer a message or dm. I have many interruptions, I pay far less attention, and I'm not getting anywhere near as much out of it as I did before. So, I'm going to solve this by going back to playing a minimum number of hands, rather than just designating an amount of time. I have been playing, but not really, four 30 minute sessions per day with Snowie, netting me around 400 hands per day. When actually I should be getting more than 250 hands per session. So now, I'm going to schedule the playing of 300 hands for 3 of those 4 sessions, and 150 hands for the 4th. The 300 hands will probably take a bit more than 30 minutes, but the 150 hands will take significantly less than 30 minutes and all in all it will hopefully average out to about 30m per session. Each Snowie session is immediately followed by an Ignition session, so I might be getting a few less hands at Ignition each day. But I haven't really been putting in that effort either. I started off well, but after about 7k hands running $100 below EV, everything started to wain. But tomorrow is Monday again, and I'll get started right back where I'm suppose to be, hoping that these tweaks improve things. Still have a couple weeks before the month ends, and so long as everything is working fine and producing results before next month starts, I'm okay with it.
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 23, 2019 1:50:44 GMT
Not sure how long it will last, but for the first time since my most recent beginning, I've got a positive actual win rate at both games...
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 25, 2019 2:54:45 GMT
Ok, this "schedule" isn't really working out very well at all. I need more study time, and a bit less playing time. I also need to use GTO+ effectively, as well as more effectively using Snowie.
My basic problem with GTO+ is always figuring out exactly how to use the information it provides me. I keep coming up with all sorts of ideas that seem useful, but they're never practical, and in the end they never seem to help anything at all. So it's time to return to the most basic of basics, and simply grind shit out in tiny amounts, over a decent period of time, until I actually get somewhere. With this in mind, my plan is to start working on BU v BB scenarios where BB flats my BU rfi. The plan is to go street by street, finding what is optimal, and then tweaking it in a manner that makes it useful. I'll first solve a variety of different flop textures, I haven't decided exactly how many yet, and I don't remember exactly which are prebuilt into GTO+, but I'll eventually pick one of those prebuilt subsets of flop textures and solve each one of them for a variety of flop cbet sizing options, noting the total EV of each board texture.
Then I'll begin tweaking, first by running more sims across the same board textures except this time with only a couple small sizing options, to see overall EV and frequencies. Then run even more sims across the same board textures with only a couple large sizing options, to see overall EV and frequencies. The idea being to hopefully get it down to the best possible simple strategy that can be remembered and played accurately by my feeble human brain. Judging from what I see from higher stakes players, virtually all possibilities can be simplified down with minimal loss of EV to either using a small cbet 100% of the time, or a larger cbet a lower % of the time. So if I have only those 2 things to consider on the flop, then maybe my feeble human brain will be able to figure out which texture is which. Well, I should be able to figure out which is which by the time I get done running all these fkn sims.
That takes care of flop play. Move on to the turn and repeat basically the same process, finding a "near" optimal sizing and frequency that can remembered and played accurately across all sorts of different turn cards, for each flop texture. And then rinse and repeat the same essential process for the river.
And now I'll be done, except no, I'm still not done. I need to repeat everything, going all the way back to the flop, this time using "strategies" that my opponents tend to use, rather than allowing them to use the GTO strategy that GTO+ will have them using in all of the above sims. This will include all sorts of different preflop starting ranges based on villain type, as well as different postflop ranges based on villain type. My opponents don't play anywhere near optimally, so I'd like to see a few things, 1) how much EV does their suboptimal strategy give me, and 2) where, what and how often does GTO+ make significant strategy changes based on these new postflop ranges.
I also need to become much more proficient with using spreadsheets, so that I can keep track of all of this information and thereby never have cause to do the exact same thing twice. I have literally zero idea how long this will take to get through just this one BU RFI vs BB call scenario. I'll be amazed if I can get it done in less than 1 month. But once it's done, and I mean completely done, unlike pretty much everything I've done with GTO+ so far, which never really got completely done because I never had any idea what to do with the information I was getting, at least this time it might take forever, but when it's done, it's done, it's right, and I'll be able to play at least one scenario as near perfect as I could ever want to play it. I'll know and understand how to adjust to different types of villains. I should know virtually everything that I'd ever need to know about the scenario. And if I do it right, I'll have everything saved so that I can return to it later and hone it in even more should I ever run out of scenarios to study.
I'll set up and run sims all night when I sleep, as well run them during any part of the day when I'm not actually playing. I'm hoping that even though I know this will take a good amount of time, I'm hoping that slow, steady and consistent progress keeps me interested. This combined with continued effort to learn to play like Snowie suggests will hopefully lead to significant improvement in my skill set. Which is needed these days given that WPN has become a ghost town and all the decent regs, as well as many of the better bots are now grinding away at Ignition/Bovada/Bodog every day and night. The games at Ignition are infinitely more reg/bot infested than they've ever been. I sure hope that WPN gets their software shit straightened out before these fkn people start to like Ignition/Bovada/Bodog more than WPN.
Anyway, that's the latest and greatest plan of attack. I'll figure out exact hours and such for everything at some point tonight. I'm hoping that something like 1000 hands per day with Snowie, plus another 1250-2400 hands, depending on how much is regular and how much is zone, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 to 6 hours per day of actual play, plus something like 1 hour per day dealing with putting GTO+ info into spreadsheets, and maybe 1 more hour of watching videos and such will all combine for an optimal and reasonably pleasant way of rapidly improving my poker skill set.
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 25, 2019 9:36:57 GMT
Ok, I just spent the past 6 hours figuring everything out, and beginning to use GTO+ again. I set up a sim to run through 33 flop textures. I ran through the first texture, and then stopped, saved, etc, so that I could have an idea of how long it will take for each different texture, and that answer is a bit more than an hour. Which means in total, about 40 hours will be needed for me to complete this initial run through.
I also took the time to figure out if and how I could narrow things down, once I've been given a solution. I tried and I tried, but I couldn't find anything that was even close to same level of EV as using 5 completely different sizings, all balanced perfectly. I tried using small sizes, I tried using 100% frequencies, etc, but nothing could come close, until I finally decided, fk it, let's see what happens when we overbet. And lo and behold, if I cbet with a 31.4% frequency, and I do so with 1.5x pot sizing, I can get equal EV as I had using 5 different sizes perfectly. It sounds a bit complex cbetting exactly 31.4%, but that's just how it worked out by cbetting everything as good or better than top pair 3rd kicker (AJ+ on AK5r board), and mixing in some bluffs with underpairs and gutshots. It's really not that difficult at all. I've run about 10 sims trying to find a simple solution, and I was getting pretty depressed and ready to give up if that last idea had failed. But it didn't, it worked, it's easy, and it completely maximizes EV to nearly the exact same level as a perfect GTO strategy. Now I'm not depressed anymore, now I'm overly optimistic, lol. When I ran the initial sim, with all the different sizing options, I did notice that it liked betting large, as pot and 1.5x pot were the 2 most frequently used options. But I tried cbetting only 100% and it did terribly, worse than cbetting small, so I didn't bother trying 1.5x pot, until I'd exhausted all the other options, essentially wasting about 4 hours of my time, ...lesson learned.
GTO+ is once again running through those 33 different flop textures, well, 32 now, and I'm going to bed. Still need to figure out how to keep all this information in a spreadsheet, ..but I'll figure that out tomorrow. I really want to make sure that I have this schedule optimized and working well before July 1, so that I can begin July in full stride and see what happens when I manage to do this for an entire month.
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 27, 2019 0:43:34 GMT
Ok, I've been slacking a bit with playing hands, playing snowie, and doing the study work required to get my actual play to equal my snowie play. Here are the most recent results at each... Most recent snowie hands... Most recent Ignition hands... Clearly not making much progress in this endeavor. Definitely need to start being more diligent in this area. But that's true for most every area at the moment. I haven't looked at the 36 Ignition blunders, but I'll do that immediately after this post. Probably won't post anything about it, unless I find something worth posting.
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 27, 2019 3:07:33 GMT
Ugh, this shit just takes so long. I've made it about half way through these 36 blunders. I'm not even sure what I'm going to do with them, or how I'm going to learn from them. So far, I've just been taking notes of blunders and errors as I note how the relevant parts of the hands played out. I figure at some point I'll "label" them in terms of position, type of blunder, street, stack sizes, cost of blunder according to Snowie. And perhaps I can find some patterns to the mistakes, giving me something useful to use for improvement.
So far, I've gone through 18 of 36. And I've called 8 of them "passivity" blunders, 5 of them "station" errors, and 4 times I was "over aggro". And there was 1 situation where I simply called a huge preflop 3b overbet against a total monkey that Snowie hates, but it's completely fine imo, so I ignore it. But 8 passivity blunder, 4 over aggro blunders and 5 station blunders doesn't really seem to point to a single issue, oh joy. 7 of them have occurred on the river, 5 on the turn, 4 on the flop, and 1 preflop. At least this tells me that I get worse on the later streets, which is sort of a pattern, but it's not something that I didn't already know. It's just easier to figure out what Snowie likes preflop because it occurs so much more frequently than all the other possibilities. The deeper we go into the hand, the more the tree of possibilities has grown, and the more difficult it is to figure out what Snowie wants and why Snowie wants it. I do know that this improves over time, it was always my worst problem playing against Snowie, but it did steadily improve as I played Snowie consistently and regularly, I just haven't done this lately.
Anyway, I'm taking a break from these blunders for the moment. I can't even promise that I'll ever return to them, but I will keep doing these types of things regularly, hoping that eventually it starts to help.
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 28, 2019 11:35:07 GMT
Well, I made it through 24 of the 36 blunders so far. And I've managed to run GTO+ on 2 of the 3 nights while I slept. Simply forgot all about it last night. Which sucks because it takes so long to get through these sims. My computer is simply not designed for running these sims, and having 5 different bet size options creates such a large tree, every individual flop takes more than an hour. And having started with 33 different flops, it's going to take a while. But, when I said earlier that I'd expect it to take a month to finish everything, I think that's a bit over estimated. The first set of sims takes a long time. But the rest only have 1 or 2 sizing options, and several of them won't have a checking option, so I'd expect to get through those in just one night each. So, to make this long story, not really much shorter, I'd be surprised if I'm not done within about 2 weeks.
I've also come to be concerned by the fact that I'm running these sims, and the result will essentially be a set of ranges, and how to play them, against different opponents across different turns and rivers. My issue is that I still really haven't even gotten all the preflop ranges memorized. I really have no idea what any of my ranges look like on the outer rims beyond the 3b ranges. I have them all written down, and I refer to them often, but you just don't face enough 4bets in most positions to be able to memorize them by brute force. So, I need to dedicate some time, somewhere, somehow, to simply memorizing these ranges. I honestly don't need to know them 100% perfectly, but I do need to be able to get an "A", if I were to be tested on them. I'd probably get a "C" at the moment, assuming the person giving the test knew which ranges were the least likely to be known and would therefore lean the test toward those ranges more than other, more commonly used ranges. I need to fix this. Many months ago, I spent a decent amount of time memorizing exactly such ranges, though I don't remember them now, and I haven't really used them since last Autumn when I purchased Snowie and decided to use Snowie's ranges instead. But I've done this exact same thing before, and it isn't nearly as difficult as it might seem. I just make templates with notepad, and fill them in from memory several times each day, remember a little more and a little more with each attempt. Snowie's ranges are tighter, and more intuitive to me (at this point in time anyway), so I don't think it will take all that long to accomplish this objective. It's just a matter of doing the work.
But that is true with most everything, and it has always been my biggest obstacle. Someday I'll stop being lazy, or perhaps I'll die, not sure which will come first, not even sure that I care which comes first, lol. That's not a suicide warning or anything, it's just an admission that my laziness doesn't concern me as much as it should. And that's not a brag, it's actually quite shameful, but it's also quite true.
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Post by krcmdc on Jun 28, 2019 16:52:26 GMT
It's really difficult to stay motivated when the only thing going upward is your EV...
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Post by krcmdc on Jul 1, 2019 8:44:01 GMT
Ok, finally managed to get the first run of sims finished. 33 different flops, 5 different flop sizings options as well as the option to check. Next run will only allow a 33% sizing as well as the check option. I'm hoping that this takes much less time, like I'd hope that I can run this entire sim in just one night's sleep. Currently running through the first flop right now, just to get a gauge on the time required, so I'll probably edit this a bit later.
Edit: It seems that about 25m was required for the first run. But, it ran a bit slower because I was posting here as well as messing with the spreadsheet that I keep all the info on. Plus the fact that the longer I leave it alone, the faster it seems to go, increasing speed gradually. I'd expect that it will probably take an average of something more like 22 or 23m for each flop texture. Same 33 flops, so we're talking about something like 12.5 hours to finish the entire sim. I guess it won't happen in just one nights sleep. But it will happen easily in two nights.
I'm going to run several sims in this first instance, many of which probably aren't needed. But I don't really know for sure how to determine what is and what is not needed, so I'm hoping that running several extra will help me learn which are not needed faster than if I try to just guess and end up making mistakes. It's really important that I get this first one done correctly, I can always optimize how I do the sims in later sims, but I don't want to be forced to do any of them again because of stupid mistakes.
It also occurred to me that I shouldn't do what I did in this first sim, in terms of making slight adjustments to the preflop ranges according to what I "know" about the population. I should rather just use the ranges Snowie provides, and then adjust later. I didn't make any extreme changes, just simple little things, but in all sims after this, there will be no changes at all. I think that this is a far superior methodology because it allows me to reverse the sim later. If I use perfect ranges for both position in the initial sim, then I don't have to run another complete sim, when I switch myself from one position to the other, as both positions will have been run with "my" ranges. So like in this first sim, it's my BU RFI v BB flat call preflop. Now when I want to do my BB flat call preflop v villains RFI from the BU, I'll have to run completely new sims because the BB range I used in this isn't exactly the same as my actual range would be. Given that this first sim by far takes the most time, I'd like to not have to repeat it when I switch positions. I can always adjust ranges in the subsequent sims that are much faster. I intend to do this anyway, to a much greater extent than the slight changes that I made before I ran this sim. Which basically means that the changes I made already, didn't really mean anything, all they did was make it impossible for me to reuse this same sim when I switch positions. Yes, they're more accurate according to population tendencies, but the first sim should simply be as close to GTO as is possible, and this first one isn't because I made these slight changes without figuring this part out beforehand. Oh well, I knew I'd have to learn a lot with the first sim, I just hope I'm not still learning after I've done several of them.
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