Battling Maniacs in MTT Poker

have you ever had a player at your table who was so aggressive you knew that they couldn&#39;t possibly always have a strong hand but you weren&#39;t sure how to actually fight back we&#39;ve all been in that situation at some point so if you want to know how to react next time it happens this video is for [Music] you hi Wizards I&#39;m Matt hunt and this video is all about battling The Maniacs those players at your table who give you nightmares with their continued insistence on always playing aggressively no matter what and seemingly never backing down when you do fight back we&#39;re going to focus primarily on mtts but the principles we&#39;re discussing will also be relevant for cash games especially when we look at some deeper stacked adjustments let&#39;s start by defining what we mean by a maniac at least in strategic terms what we&#39;re really focusing on is Players whose overall aggression levels are far too high across all parts of the game tree and who will generally be putting in far too much betting volume as a whole this means not only betting too often but also betting too big in certain spots where small bets are much more effective in addition we&#39;re also going to assume that our Maniac is prone to underfolding to our aggression on the earlier streets in other words we&#39;re going to assume that they&#39;re not just automatically backing down as soon as we show any aggression ourselves after all if they were betting at a high frequency but then overfolded to raises they wouldn&#39;t be anywhere near as difficult to play against finally we&#39;re also going to assume that their bething ranges are somewhat too merged in many situations this essentially means they&#39;ll be taking a lot of middle strength hands and beting them in situations where they&#39;re not functioning clearly as value bets or Bluffs now one caveat here is that while GTO wizard AI will give us a great level of insight into how we should approach these players we&#39;re not easily going to be able to account for predicting our opponent&#39;s aggression levels on future streets for the most part we&#39;re going to stick to exploring our options in ways which we can do quickly and efficiently using the AI as opposed to to running Sims which might take hours or even days to complete so let&#39;s meet our subject for this video our archetypal Maniac player profile Wizards this is Steve Steve is 25 years old although this photo maybe looks a little older than that from the USA and Steve is what we would call a trust fun kid Steve&#39;s parents are billionaires and he loves gambling with his parents&#39; Money Steve doesn&#39;t care about winning and losing he knows he&#39;s probably not a winning poker player but that doesn&#39;t bother him Steve loves the game and he particularly loves winning big pots showing down big Bluffs and putting his opponents in Nightmare spots for this reason he will always bet if you check to him no matter what and he never bets less than half pot Steve&#39;s least favorite thing to do at the poker table is folding it takes a lot of effort to make Steve fold any kind of draw and if he has a pair he&#39;s not going to fold it unless you&#39;re betting at least two times the pot so what&#39;s our Pathway to maximizing our against thieve well it all starts pre flop and we can explore it using GTO wizard AI heads up pre- flop solver even though we&#39;re not necessarily going to be playing heads up against Steve simplifying the game can help us get a pretty good idea of the general principles we&#39;ll need to obey if we&#39;re going to maximize our EV against him the general approach we&#39;re going to take when heads up against Steve is designed to help us figure out our overall exploitative framework for playing against him and establish where our additional EV is coming from when playing against him in a full ring or six Max environment we&#39;re obviously not going to be able to use the same ranges as we would when heads up but we will be able to use the same overall approach to extracting more EV from Steve so our strategies will translate fairly well we&#39;ll Begin by assuming we&#39;re deep stacked at around 200 big blinds we&#39;re not incorporating an anti but that doesn&#39;t matter since we&#39;re just looking at the principles here we&#39;ll imagine Steve is the in position player pre flop and he&#39;s going to open to three big blinds on the button let&#39;s see how our three bet strategy from Outer position is going to change depending on exactly how wide Steve&#39;s opening range is this will give us a sense of how the width of an opening range is going to alter our defense strategy even when villain is opening larger and wider than what would be optimal I&#39;ve allowed us a set of six potential three bet sizes here everywhere from three times the open size all the way up to eight times our goal here is to look at how the width of the opening range affects our three bet strategy against this large open size so that we can get a baseline idea of what we should do at Deep Stacks when our opponent is both opening wider and larger than what would be optimal this graphic shows us how our use of each of the sizes Alters as the width of the opening range changes with the opening frequency on the left from 25 up to 100% and our total 3 Bet frequency in the last column on the right with the distribution in each of the other columns it&#39;s obvious that our three bet frequency is going to go up as the opening range gets wider but the most interesting part of this graphic is that there&#39;s a heavy shift toward the smaller sizings as well now here&#39;s the same information in chart form you can see the changes in the distribution of our sizes a little better here against the tighter opening range the no clear Trend in three bet sizing but as the range gets wider there&#39;s a clear preference for the smaller sizes of nine big blinds and 12 big blinds since villain has a lot more very weak hands which can&#39;t continue even versus a smaller three bet so it would seem that against players who open two wide we should three bet slightly smaller right well actually it&#39;s not that simple because the player profile we&#39;re talking about here isn&#39;t just opening too wide they&#39;re also underfolding versus our three bets and probably four betting too much as well so let&#39;s step by step and figure out what the best course of action is versus that specific type of player first let&#39;s look at an extreme example what if our opponent Steve never folds to a three bet at all we can simulate this by simply removing the folding option from his side of the game tree and doing the same calculations we did before that gives us this grid which looks very different to the earlier one you&#39;ll notice that there&#39;s no point in showing this Grid in chart form because if we know our opponent isn&#39;t folding there&#39;s no reason to three bet to any size other than the biggest one available every frequency between nine big blinds and 21 big blinds is zero here at 200 big blinds we&#39;re probably too deep to just simply Jam all in but later on we&#39;ll look at the 50 big blind stack size and things will be very different there I did the same thing for an inos spot with the game tree tweak to have us limp 100% of hands and villain raise 100% and got more or less the same results here are the two strategies side by side as you can see if villain opens any two cards and never folds to three bat not only are we choosing the biggest three betat size available but our three bet range also becomes entirely linear there are no Bluffs in this range at all or at least there&#39;s no element of polarization to it we&#39;re essentially three betting so wide for Value that even some of the hands which would usually be classed as Bluffs are now value raises like pocket 3s jack8 suited or ace7 off why does this strategy look the way it does to answer that question we have to look at Steve&#39;s response here which is going to lead us down another rabbit hole as you can see here when we force Steve to open any two cards and never fold to a three bet his response is extremely passive What&#39;s Happening Here is that most of the hands which Steve should be folding are weak enough that they can&#39;t ever justify for betting so he has to just call with them but if he calls all those hands the eveve of his entire calling range will be much lower so the solver is trying to compensate by adding more strong hands to his calling range essentially forcing him to trap at a much higher rate this is a phenomenon I like to refer to as the please don&#39;t make me play Bad effect we&#39;re forcing the solver to do something which is clearly a bad idea opening any two cards and never folding to a three bet so it&#39;s going to try to compensate in any way it can in order to minimize losses in this case the best way for it to do that is to rarely forit and trap with most of the strong hands to strengthen the flatting range the only hands that do have the incentive to for bet here are now the middling to strong ones which want to get more money in the pot pre- flop but aren&#39;t very good at realizing Equity post flop mostly the middle and lower pocket Pairs and the strongest offit Aces those hands simply want to jam all in to put as many of our hands in a tough spot as possible since a lot of our range is flipping against those hands here so in the end Steve&#39;s best response if he&#39;s not allowed to fold is to almost always call but sometimes just shove all in for 200 big blinds the fact that he&#39;s never for betting to a smaller size here is directly allowing us to three bet a completely linear range this is why our strategy of three betting larger and more linear looks the way it does we get maximum value from his extremely weak calling range and we don&#39;t get four bet much at all but what if Steve plays a completely different strategy what if Steve plays a strategy where he never shoves all in but for bets to something like three times our three bet size would we still prefer our strategy of three betting to a large size with a linear range well the short answer is yes as this graphic shows the main reason for this is because even when Steve is not allowed to shove all in his strategy of never folding still requires him to trap a lot and rarely for bet so his calling frequency versus the 3 Bet is still around 95% and we don&#39;t have to worry about being put in an awkward position versus a foret our next step therefore is to think about what our strategy will look like if Steve is going to forb bet more frequently which since he&#39;s a maniac we should probably expect to happen in practice GTO wizard ai&#39;s node loocking feature allows us to do this very needly since we can simply use the sliders to increase Steve&#39;s for bet frequency and the solver will automatically pick the best hands for him to do it with based on the EV of those hands as forb bets this next graphic shows how our 3 Bet frequency changes as we alter Steve&#39;s 4 bet frequency with our 3 Bet frequency on the Y AIS and His Four bets on the x-axis interestingly there&#39;s not a massive change one way or the other only a few per either way with some slight increases and decreases based on how wide Steve&#39;s for bet for Value range becomes even if Steve is for betting 40% of the time which is almost 10 times as often as he&#39;s supposed to we&#39;re still only decreasing our 3 Bet frequency by about 3% why is this well it has to do with the construction of Steve&#39;s forb bet range as you&#39;ll see in a moment but first let&#39;s take a glance at our strategy versus the forb BET itself evidently we&#39;re doing a lot of shoving all in versus this for bet which makes a lot of sense given that he&#39;s for betting to a large size of three times our three bet and we&#39;re getting a good price to be all in and realize our Equity but the other interesting thing here is that as soon as Steve is for beding more often than the optimal frequency of around 5% here we no longer have any folds against that forbet this could be a very important part of our strategy against Maniacs it&#39;s telling us that if we already know a player is likely to forb bet too aggressively it might be a big mistake to have any three bet folds at all however the big factor here is the construction of Steve&#39;s forb bet range as I mentioned a moment ago this next image shows us an example of how Steve&#39;s forb bet range was constructed when I used the slider to give him a 40% forb bet frequency it obviously looks pretty weird but in a general sense you can see that it&#39;s a polarized range it has a lot of pocket Pairs and strong offsuit ASX hands for Value while the bluffing region is anchored around a lot of the very weakest offsuit hands with the queen de off to eight de off region for betting in pure the fact that our three bet frequency didn&#39;t change very much overall is largely down to this Factor when Steve is forb betting a polar range he still mostly has fairly clear decisions against our for bet Jam calling with his value and folding his Bluffs and we still have some fairly awkward spots with the in value portion of our three betting range which doesn&#39;t really want to get it in but also doesn&#39;t want to fold to a four bet in general four betting a polar range from in position especially for the big size that Steve has chosen would be a fairly good decision for Steve here even though the fact that he&#39;s never folding is obviously already costing him a lot of EV but the difficult thing for us here is that a lot of these Maniacs don&#39;t for bet with polar ranges they tend to take an approach primarily based on the strength of their hand and don&#39;t often consider the possibility of a difficult spot against future aggression or what happens if their opponent shoves all in they simply tend to put more money in the pot when they think there&#39;s a good chance they have the best hand so with that in mind let&#39;s examine what happens if we make Steve&#39;s forbat range a much more linear one instead this is what it looks like when we have Steve for betting more linearly this is the most extreme version where he&#39;s forb betting the top 40% of the deck and calling everything else I had to select these hands manually since the slider in the node lock menu makes decisions according to EV as opposed to basic hand strength and here&#39;s what it does to our frequencies there&#39;s a much more obvious change in our three bet strategy here to begin with the less often Steve is for betting the more often we can three bet with a slight reversal once his four bet frequency becomes extremely high there&#39;s about a 14% gap between our aggression when he forb bets 5% of the time and when he forb bets 40% of the time which is far more significant than what we saw before to figure out why this is happening we also have to look at our responses to the for bet once it does occur now looking at the distribution of our frequencies here this is where things get really interesting when Steve is for betting a very tight and strong top five% range we respond with no calls and purely an Allin or fold strategy our hand is either strong enough to get it all in against this full bet range or it doesn&#39;t benefit from putting any more chips in the pot at all remember also that we were three betting more often in this scenario to begin with as well on the other end of the scale when he&#39;s for beding extremely aggressively in a linear fashion we already know our initial 3B frequency has decreased by about 14% from the previous graph and now we&#39;re seeing that we never fold to the 4 bet at all in fact we mostly shove all in with only certain specific hands benefiting from calling given the awkward price that we&#39;re getting and the low post flop SP so before we go any further let&#39;s just take a beat to recap where we&#39;re at and summarize what we&#39;ve figured out so far we&#39;ve established that Steve never folds to our three bet which means we have a significant incentive to three bet larger and more linear in our Construction in order to compensate for never folding to our three bet Steve should be four betting very rarely and protecting his extremely wide flatting range by trapping with his strong hands but it&#39;s probably reasonable to assume he&#39;s not doing that depending on our exact read on what Steve is doing we might have more than one plausible option in how we adjust to exploit him if he&#39;s for betting too much which we&#39;ve already established is likely since he&#39;s a maniac but he&#39;s doing it with a polarized 4 bet range then our initial three bet strategy doesn&#39;t really change we still have a big incentive to three larger and more linear to take advantage of his lack of folding depending on our exact read on what Steve is doing we might have more than one plausible option in how we adjust to exploit him if he&#39;s for beding too much which we&#39;ve already established is likely since he&#39;s a maniac but he&#39;s doing it with a polarized 4 bet range then our initial three bet strategy doesn&#39;t really change very much we still have a big incentive to three bet larger and more linear to take advantage of his lack of folding but the main difference now is that we simply stop folding in to his for bet since it contains a lot of extremely weak Bluffs which are doing very poorly against our linear three bet range however if Steve is for betting too aggressively and doing it with a linear range we would have to start three betting a tighter range but five bet jamming more often when we do three bet the goal of this being to put Steve in as many difficult spots as possible when he forb Bets with a thin value type hand which would usually just call our three bet eventually our strategy will reach a point where we have no incentive to ever fold to his forb bet will e be five bet jamming or simply peeling the four bet given the price we&#39;re getting the reason for this is that as his linear 4 bet range expands wider and wider it becomes so wide that it becomes a little easier for us to sometimes call the forbat and play post flop against a tight linear range though we would have very little reason to call the four bet and try to navigate on future streets but all this is making the assumption that Steve never folds to the three bet at all and that might be a little unrealistic what if he does fold sometimes there are a few questions which we need to answer here the first one is do our linear three bets gain anything from him folding after all a linear three bet range is three betting for thin value and if we&#39;re getting folds we&#39;re losing a little bit of that value although we&#39;re also denying him the ability to realize Equity at the same rate so the trade-off could be worth it the next question is how does his folding frequency affect our three bet range do we start altering our construction as he begins folding more or does our range simply expand and contract well in order to answer any of these these questions we have to start normalizing his forb frequency because if we don&#39;t the solver will want him to compensate for folding more by altering his forb range and frequency and that will throw off all of our results this graphic shows us the results of tweaking Steve&#39;s folding frequency with a consistent linear 10% for bet frequency and a shifting calling frequency it&#39;s worth noting in this instance that we had Steve for betting to a sizing much larger than what GTO would prefer which is why you can see in the right hand column that our GTO frequency for calling the forb bet in this case would be only around 1% these numbers are much more easily interpreted in graph form though so let&#39;s view them that way this is what our graph looks like for this spot on the far left we have our strategy for if Steve is only folding 10% of the time and on the far right we have the GTO strategy where Steve is folding at the optimal frequency for a three big blind any two cards open which would be around 77% given the large sizing of our 3 Bet as you can tell from the graph our strategy on the left is more evenly distributed with more three betting and more folding while as we get closer and closer to Steve playing a GTO strategy we start three betting less calling more and folding slightly less as well this might all be difficult to interpret so what&#39;s actually happening here well it&#39;s a few things first we know Steve is underfolding to three bets so we know he&#39;s folding less than the 77% of the time he should be in GTO given that he opened with any two cards for three big blinds the more Steve starts to fold to our three bet the less we have to gain by three betting for thin value with certain hands which are on on the edge of our value range this causes these hands to shift towards calling instead this in turn actually strengthens our calling range because we&#39;re adding in some hands at the top of the range consequently this actually allows us to start calling slightly wider at the bottom of the range because those weaker hands are now slightly more protected as we start three Bing more for thin value we also have to now fold the bottom of our calling range because the fact that our calling range is weaker overall means that the weakest hands in this range can no no longer call profitably when it comes to our response against a forbat nothing is changing there Steve&#39;s forbat strategy stayed consistent throughout these examples so the exact hands which call or five bet against a four bet have not changed either if he&#39;s playing a fixed strategy then we should also play a fixed strategy so let&#39;s develop a full picture of Steve&#39;s overall pre- flop game and allow us to arrive at a final conclusion we think Steve is Raising to three big blinds with any two cards pre- flop we also believe he&#39;s forting a linear 10% range consisting of the top 10% of hands we also think that he&#39;s probably only folding to three bets around 20% of the time and we don&#39;t think he&#39;s ever going to fold to a shove after he for bets obviously we don&#39;t have any proof of any of this but these are our reads based on what we&#39;ve seen of Steve at our table what do we think our final strategy is going to look like feel free to pause the video and take a guess or write down some aspects of our strategy if you like well this is our first snapshot of our 200 big blind strategy against Steve from out of position with three Bing to that very large 8X size with the range you can see on the left and calling quite wide as well although not quite every suited hand in the deck against Steve&#39;s four bet range you can see our strategy on the right with five bet jamming with nines plus an ace Queen and calling with a few other hands but because he&#39;s forbidding to a large sizing with a fairly linear and strong range we&#39;re not peeling very often here if we switch the positions and create a game tree which allows us to be in position things look much the same except now our thin value range has become much wider and we&#39;re now never folding a suited hand to a raise obviously this is because we&#39;re playing in position heads up we shouldn&#39;t do this in a full ring context from in position versus the forb bet we&#39;re calling more or less the same range with some very slight tweaks to our approach based on the slightly different price we&#39;re getting which is a product of me needing to manufacture a heads up in position spot for us you can see that our 5 bet Jam range is basically the same though which is highlighting the fact that when it comes to heads up Allin ranges position isn&#39;t really relevant because we&#39;re not going to make any post flop decisions after we&#39;re already all in to look at things by the Numbers we can see on the left here the two strategies versus the initial open we&#39;re going much wider from in position as you can see 48.6% compared to 28.7 with our three bet frequency and we&#39;re folding a lot less often from in position which of course is very natural on the right we have our strategies versus the forb itself since we&#39;re three betting a lot wider to begin with we&#39;re going to be folding a lot more often in relative terms and you can see that that we&#39;re 3 Bet folding around 550 combos instead of only 280 combos note however that our 5 bet Jam range is almost exactly the same in each case 66.0 combos compared to 66.8 one once again this is because Steve&#39;s strategy is fixed he&#39;s calling off with the same hands and four betting with the same hands so we&#39;re five bet jamming the same hands our calling range does shift slightly but it&#39;s not easy to establish exactly why we would be calling less often from in position most likely caused by the slightly different prices on offer in the game tree that I had to construct to mimic an inos spot our next area of Investigation is to think about what we might do if the effective Stacks in play are much shallower for example at 50 big blinds instead of 200 big blinds at this depth it&#39;s a lot more difficult for us to use a larger three bet size since we&#39;re much closer to Simply being forced all in and it might not be feasible to three bet a big chunk of our stack we&#39;re also now at a depth where Steve&#39;s four bets will always be all in we&#39;re not going to have to think about a five bet jamming range here this might affect our strategy in some interesting ways Steve&#39;s approach is also going to change slightly we think he would now be willing to forb bet jam with 20% of hands instead of 10 giving that he&#39;s risking fewer chips and we think his range for calling an Allin would be more or less the same set of hands he&#39;s figured out what range he&#39;s willing to play for Stacks with and he&#39;s determined to play for Stacks with those hands this is what our GTO strategy looks like against his any two cards three big blinds open at 50 big blinds again in a heads up context and this this time with a 12 big blind three bet size so four times the open we&#39;re doing a surprising amount of jamming with low pairs offsuit Aces and even some middling suited hands in fact this range looks a lot like a range for jamming 25 to 30 big blinds over a button open in an MTT which is not a coincidence this spot is actually very similar to that one if you look at the amount that we&#39;re risking relative to the pop our non Allin 3 Bet range is very polar with a fairly wide value region and a mostly offsuit high card low card Bluff region against this four bet Jam we&#39;re calling off as wide as Jack n suited 65 suited King jack off suit and we&#39;re obviously folding all of our three bet Bluffs if we engineer the same spot from in position everything looks very similar except for the fact that our value three bet region is narrower and we&#39;re no longer jamming anything since calling has so much more value when we&#39;re in position post flop our three bet call off region is not quite as wide since we&#39;re now preferring to call and realize equity in position with many hands which were previously preferred to just get it in Pre flop these are the numbers we&#39;re obviously folding much less often if we&#39;re in position although that&#39;s partially a product of the game tree parameters we had to use as I mentioned our call-off range versus the jam is staying relatively consistent although it is reducing by about 30 combos again for the reasons we&#39;ve already stated if we apply what we already know about Steve&#39;s overall pre flop game to the shallowest stack size these are the strategies we end up with a very aggressive outer position approach which contains a lot of jams and a very wide three bet call off range to counter the fact that Steve is four bet jamming 20% of hands we actually have very few three bet folds here as you can see on the right and only a few of those are taking that line at full frequency from in position the fact that Steve&#39;s pre- flop range is any two cards gives us a relatively straightforward response we&#39;re almost never jamming anything except for pocket threes about half the time and we&#39;re calling most of the deck with very rarely three bet folding and our three bet for Value range is very wide since we&#39;re extracting so much thin value from all the time Steve Rays calls the three bet in terms of the numbers it&#39;s much the same as what you&#39;d expect much more calling from in position with no jamming and less three betting while the only reason our three bet call off range goes from around 280 combos from out of position to roughly 230 from in position is because certain hands are no longer three betting they prefer to call and play in position as we saw before hands like pocket fors Queen n suited and King 10 off a three betting pre flop with the intent to call off when they&#39;re out of position but when in position they have a big incentive to just call and keep all of Steve&#39;s worst hands in his range so to summarize our overall pre flop approach against Steve in a way which would be applicable even in a full ring environment we know for sure that we have a significant incentive to three bet much larger and much more linearly for thin value if he&#39;s not going to be folding much that&#39;s our primary adjustment when we&#39;re very deep stacked there are many hands which like to three bet pre- flop from in position as part of our wider linear range but then simply fold if we get for bet if Steve&#39;s four bet remains relatively static and he&#39;s playing a fixed strategy where he doesn&#39;t adapt to our frequencies then we can do the same and simply three bet for thin value against his calls while folding a bit more against his forb bets however if he forb bets a very high frequency we may start to Simply five bet Jam a lot more as we saw before once we get a little shallower we&#39;re going to be more inclined to start jamming pre flop from out of position since we aren&#39;t going to be able to realize Equity very easily from out of position even when his opening range is extremely wide the hands which are at the top of our potential flatting range against this open will actually start to prefer to three bet call off instead of just calling and having to play out of position against a very wide range which can check back a lot of flops and realize some Equity from in position we&#39;re going to be a lot more content to call at shallower Stacks while still continuing to three bet fairly wide and linearly being very willing to call it off if we get jammed on since Steve&#39;s four bet jamming range will be wider finally if we were playing short stacked against Steve for example in an MTT scenario we would be shoving a lot more often both from out of position and in position however it&#39;s a little more difficult to estimate exactly how wide our ranges would get since ICM would most likely be a factor at various stages of the tournament and we would have to balance our desire to exploit Steve specifically against our priorities in the overall event that we&#39;re playing so now that we&#39;ve taken a thorough look at how we might adjust the Steve pre flop let&#39;s see what kinds of post flop adjustments we might consider making first let&#39;s consider a somewhat deep stacked three bet pot scenario where we three bet a linear range from the blinds against a middle position open from Steve and he calls so here is our setup on GTO wizard AI if we want to look at the setup briefly I&#39;ve got a situation with about 100 big blind effective Stacks Steve opens we threw that quite large about 5x the open size here and we get a flop of Queen Jack 4 I&#39;ve given us a completely linear three bet range here as you can see just a lot of Broadway hands good Pairs and some good Aces and I&#39;ve given Steve a very very wide range if we look at all these hands over here here it&#39;s a range that is basically just completely capped pre flop low pairs offit Aces every single suited hand and then maybe you know he&#39;s for betting a lot of these strong hands at very high frequencies so clearly when we get this queen Jack for flop we have a massive nut Advantage best hands 50.3% good hands 44.3 2.1 10.4 our overall Equity is 72% roughly so it&#39;s a great spot for us here this is extremely favorable considering how wide Steve&#39;s range is and of course as a byproduct of that it&#39;s going to become a range bet spot for us solver wants to bet 100% of the time here however range betting would be fine here but it might not necessarily be the highest EV option for us if we look at what happens after we check Steve&#39;s range is so weak that he is actually only supposed to bet about 5% of the time but that&#39;s not happening we&#39;ve already established that Steve is likely going to bet every single hand when we check to him so what we can do is we can actually delete the checking option from his side of the tree which I think is always kind of an interesting thing to do and say okay well what happens if we force him to bet we&#39;re not necessarily going to decide on his size for him we&#39;re just going to give him let&#39;s say four different bet sizing options plus an Allin and to give him the option to just jam and we&#39;re not going to say what size he has to bet we&#39;re just going to tell him you cannot check he does not have the option to check anymore and as you can see there&#39;s kind of a split between all in with certain hands mostly I think flush draws and straight draws and then basically betting 50% half PO with the rest of the range and as a result our frequency for betting on the Flop here has gone all the way down to zero so we&#39;ve gone from range bet to range check and that&#39;s simply a byproduct of a baseline understanding of the fact that Steve is making so many errors when we check the Flop the EV of us checking the Flop has gone astronomically up and we are massively benefiting now from just allowing him to make that significant mistake on top of that not only are we now checking our entire range but if he bets this half pot size of 18 we are now literally check jamming our entire range here if we look at what the EVS are of some of these hands even check jamming a hand like Ace eight of spades here which has such little Equity doesn&#39;t really have any way to improve very easily here we&#39;re going to have so much fold Equity here that we&#39;re actually making about 35 to 40% of the pot here maybe even more than that depending on which exact combo we have uh by check jamming ace8 here so it&#39;s just a byproduct of him putting in so much money with so many trashy hands here it&#39;s actually very easy and plausible for us to just check Jam every single hand now we haven&#39;t locked what he&#39;s calling off with and maybe we should because this solver is going to want him to fold a lot of hands here because he&#39;s not going to be getting a good price but let&#39;s say he Bets with any pair and let&#39;s say he&#39;s never going to fold any pair or Draw so we&#39;ve tweaked the game tree here just to make it easy for us to check and then him to range bet and against the check Jam we&#39;re going to have him call with any pair and any basically any let&#39;s say eight out straight draw or better so we&#39;re just going to put all of that on zero and then I&#39;m going to go through the categor sets two pairs top pairs second pairs third pairs low pairs combo draws flush draws and open Enders and that&#39;s going to be the range of hands that he&#39;s going to call off with so we&#39;re going to hit lock all force him to play this way with everything and let&#39;s see if our strategy changes at all here we are now nope we&#39;re still check jamming everything and we&#39;re not going back to the Flop and deciding to bet everything again either we&#39;re not going to shift our strategy around really there EV wise we&#39;re losing a tiny bit well actually we we&#39;re losing a fair amount compared to before when he never folds any of these draws and never folds a pair uh with you know hands like Ace 8 we&#39;re now only making about 20% of the pot 22% of the pot but we&#39;re now absolutely just printing to a ridiculous degree even with hands like King Jack King Jack of Spades here just wins almost 90% of the pot or 80 86% of the pot so absolutely massive massive profit margins with these hands so just getting it in on the earlier streats with a higher Equity range than he has is really helping us here massive spot for us very interesting spot but a good guideline to even if a spot is a range bet in theory the mistakes he&#39;s making from in position make it such that we probably don&#39;t want to do that to summarize the spot we just looked at it was a spot where we could easily range bet if we wanted given how much Equity we had however that doesn&#39;t fully capture all the EV available to us after all we know that Steve never checks back to flop if we check to him and he always bets at least half pot so it benefits us a lot to let him do that this adjustment causes us to want to range check the Flop and based on Steve&#39;s overall Tendencies facing a potential check Jam from our range here at this low spr our best approach is actually to check Jam our entire range it seems like a bit of a crazy adjustment here but if your opponent really does bet the Flop with every single hand in their range here and their range is that wide then this is the best adjustment to make especially when their range is as wide wider Steves our next spot is going to be an in-position single Ray pot where we open pre flop and Steve defends the big blind we&#39;ll be a little shallower here at around 50 big blinds so this might be very applicable to a lot of MTT spots so this is the spot we&#39;re looking at 50 big blinds MTT spot I have given Steve a very very wide range where he is three betting that top 20 25 perish and then just never folding any other hand so he&#39;s he&#39;s literally ever folding to our raay pre flop clearly on this 109 for two Spades board we have a massive n Advantage now which of course is really favorable for us and it&#39;s resulted in a strategy where if I give us three bet size options here just to see if there&#39;s any kind of mixed strategy going on we basically are favoring a catchall size of 75% and there is a tiny bit of 200% here but we&#39;re not really going to need to use that very much now of course we haven&#39;t made any assumptions yet about Steve&#39;s strategy so let&#39;s now take the node locking function and double his check raising frequency in every spot we&#39;re just going to instead of 14 we&#39;re going to put 28 versus the small bet here so we&#39;re going to lock everything there and then we&#39;re going to look at the frequency Against The Catch All Size the 75% size and we&#39;re going to take that frequency and lock it at 18% instead of 9% so once again he is check raising twice as much as he should and then we&#39;re going to take this 200% size which of course is a huge overb bet and instead of having him get it in with 13% frequency we&#39;re going to have him get it in 26% of the time let&#39;s see what that does to our overall strategy and bear in mind we haven&#39;t tweaked his ranges very specifically here we haven&#39;t tweaked his continuance through a call all we&#39;ve done is just accounted for the fact that he&#39;s raising a lot more let&#39;s take a look now things have changed quite dramatically we&#39;re getting to a point where with our value region we are betting big we are shoveling money in our value region of this portion of hands our strongest combo drawers the the Broadway Spades over pairs any strong 10 nines fours all of that stuff wants to shovel money into this pot by contrast a lot of other hands want to get a bit of money in there because they have pretty decent equity and maybe they want to call a raise maybe they want to three bet versus arays but they&#39;re not necessarily looking to just immediately shovel that money in also noteworthy that 109 is in there which is kind of interesting it could be a blocker Factor that&#39;s creating that possibly but the other interesting thing is the 75% size has disappeared now because it&#39;s not necessarily favoring the top of our range it&#39;s not necessarily favoring the bottom of our range top of our range just wants to bet really big everything else wants to either bet small or as you can see now check there&#39;s about 38% check frequency here which is quite high and it is putting us in a spot where a lot of of these 9x hands are going to want to check back the Flop a lot of Ace highs a lot of pocket pairs so quite obviously there are quite a lot of hands now which are benefiting from the fact that we now have the option to check behind in position instead of facing a check raise twice as often as we&#39;re supposed to so against a player like Steve who is a complete Maniac check raising way too often in position we really benefit from Simply checking back and realizing Equity here as opposed to Growing the pot and having to decide what to do against the check race of course the flip side of that is when we actually have value we want to get money in when we have high Equity draws we want to get big money in and of course Steve is playing a fixed strategy he&#39;s not going to exploit us he&#39;s not going to adapt to us so we&#39;re just looking to get him to shov all in and create the biggest pot that we possibly can so we saw here that the Flop is a range bet at equilibrium considering the very wide range that Steve is defending here but Steve&#39;s overall tendency to check raise too often increases the value of checking back for us now while we can&#39;t account for Steve potentially over bluffing the turn after we check we can make some broad assumptions that most of our middle strength hands are going to realize Equity more effectively after checking back than after betting and calling arrays from Steve however it&#39;s not easy to establish exactly where our threshold should be here since depending on the exact flop bet and raise sizings we use for our game tree the ideal response from Steve is going to shift around and the extent to which certain hands increase or decrease in EV as a bet will also change in order to make this spot a little simpler and make sure we capture the most EV possible we can start by focusing on the top of our range since that&#39;s where the majority of our EV comes from in any given spot in this case our strongest hands wanted to shovel as much money in as possible and take advantage of Steve&#39;s overall level of aggression the hands which do prioritize checking back or betting smaller will be the ones which really don&#39;t want to get raised or create bigger parts and that&#39;s going to be a lot of middling and weaker hands and again if Steve is playing a fixed strategy he&#39;s not adapting to us we&#39;re not going to get exploited for that lastly now let&#39;s look at a spot when we&#39;re defending against Steve&#39;s open and this time we&#39;re going to be the one out of position at the same 50 big blind stack size so this is our last spot in this case we&#39;ve got a 654 rainbow flop and as you can see I&#39;ve given very wide range or very wide range to Steve I&#39;ve given him any two cards and our range is a little bit wider than what you might expect against the 3x open here but I&#39;ve kind of tried to hedge a little bit between a tighter range because of the larger open versus also a range that looks a little bit more like a traditional defending range except we are three betting a very linear range against Steve here so I&#39;ve taken out a lot of the strongest hands now this would be a spot that would create some leading at equilibrium and when I ran this completely unlocked we did see about 40% donk Bing here from the big blind but I&#39;ve forced big blind to check and I&#39;ve also forced button to C bet any two cards with 50% size so we can tell that you know Steve is still range betting he&#39;s still doing exactly what he did before in response I&#39;ve given us two check raise sizes and what&#39;s really interesting is that we do use both of them quite a lot we actually have a very very split response here but in particular there&#39;s something noteworthy about the difference between the two sizes if we hone in on the Allin size we can see that it&#39;s a lot of top pair it&#39;s a lot of pair plus gutshot it&#39;s a lot of pair Plus open Ender and if we hone in on the smaller Ray size the non Allin Ray size you can see that sets 87 and maybe some some gut shots some weaker Bluffs some Straits like the dece 3 those hands are populating this range a little bit more if we look at the breakdown to see the Manhattan graph you can kind of see this a little bit better you can see to some degree up here that the very very top of the range is populated a little bit more if I just highlight it here with populated a little bit more with the very very strongest stuff and the bulk of the stuff just below that is vulnerable enough that it doesn&#39;t really want to play more streets but it also does have enough equity to check Jam then you&#39;ve got chunks like this over here you&#39;ve got this chunk over here and you&#39;ve got little bits and pieces of some pretty weak hands actually down here but in general you can kind of see that there&#39;s two very distinct raay sizes emerging here as part of our strategy and if we lock in what we think Steve is going to do against each of these sizes hopefully we will see it become an even more pronounced difference between the two approaches so if we lock in by saying well Steve is never folding let&#39;s say top pair plus maybe we don&#39;t really know what he&#39;ll do with second pair so we&#39;ll keep that open we&#39;ll also say we know he&#39;s never folding an open Ender but beyond that uh we&#39;re just going to kind of let him make his own decisions at this point we&#39;re not going to lock every single hand but we are going to lock a lot of them and then when it comes to the more moderate check rise size we&#39;re going to Lo his response there by saying we think that he&#39;s going to raise all in with let&#39;s say all of his top pair plus and all of his open Enders same sort of a thing and then from that point onwards we&#39;re going to once again keep things unlocked and we&#39;re not going to necessarily force him to play a certain way we&#39;re just going to say we have a pretty decent idea that he&#39;s going to be willing to get it in very wide and let&#39;s see what strategy looks like as a byproduct so we&#39;re now going to lock Steve&#39;s response against the more moderate raise size and in this case what we&#39;re going to do is assume that he gets it in with a lot of hands of course gets it in with his top pair plus and all of that stuff and then we&#39;re also going to assume that he has a certain region where he responds very passively third pair second pair low pair he&#39;s just going to call Gut shots he&#39;s going to call and so on so that I think is going to alter our response a little bit just put the ray back in there in the overpair and top pair categories so now we&#39;ve got this response where he&#39;s actually being quite passive uh in a lot of ways and if I just put all of this stuff over here on fold because the Sim does want him to actually call at least a little bit with some of these back door hands we now have all of his range locked in and if we have two different responses against these two different sizes for him here let&#39;s see how our range is distributed we actually prefer the small size so this is what&#39;s really interesting here that in theory originally we now came to a point of we really wanted to just check Jam but because he&#39;s making a lot of passive mistakes against the non Allin size here we actually benefit from that and when he does Jam against this size we now just basically call it off with every single hand so we&#39;re never folding to the jam if he does Jam but because the smaller size generates additional calls from him that shouldn&#39;t call so he&#39;s calling with any Deuce any gutshot he&#39;s calling with any four he&#39;s never folding a pair here because we&#39;re now getting additional value out of that it&#39;s going to incentivize us to use this size we don&#39;t want to necessarily stop him from making those mistakes by being passive here we could still Jam the jam is still going to have value attached to it and you we haven&#39;t locked his range in full here so maybe if we had him never folding a pair he uh he we might be able to gain more value from the Allin but this is greater than a 2X pot all in and we did say before he never folds a pair to less than 2x pot but above 2x pot we don&#39;t really know so in general here even if we kind of attribute some frequency to calling off with bottom pair here the Allin is not as valuable as the small raise the 67% raise here so we&#39;re definitely prioritizing that as one of our main tools to exploit Steve and his overall passiveness against that raise size so in this spot we saw that there were some flop donk bets existing at equilibrium against Steve&#39;s wide opening range however if Steve is always SE betting this board we should check and let him make this mistake our check raise frequency if Steve range bets half pot is extremely high mostly because our calls are going to under realize their equity on a highly Dynamic board texture and a lot of our potential check raising hands are simply going to shov all in if they get three bet or call off against the three bet shove if we&#39;re a little bit shallower a little bit deeper there&#39;s going to be some slight variations there one downside of check raising a lot here and taking advantage of Steve&#39;s continues is that since the board is highly Dynamic it&#39;s definitely going to be pretty tricky to play the turn here after we check raise and we could consider using that larger check raise or the check Jam as a counter to this but of course there is going to be a little bit of an EV sacrifice that comes along with forcing ourselves to check Jam some hands which might do better as a smaller raise to get value from that passiveness of Steve&#39;s so this may not be an optimal approach it might just be a practical simplification and of course if you are looking at getting better at these spots I would recommend practicing them run them through GTO wizard AI run some node locks put some trainer drills together and give yourself a chance to get better at playing these spots so this brings us back around to establishing an overall strategic framework for how we&#39;re going to crush Steve even in a full ring environment against a maniac like Steve the bulk of R comes from the earlier streets and from the fact that he&#39;s putting in far too much money with far too many hands our goal is to build pots with higher Equity hands even if those are some fairly thin value hands and extract the maximum value at the top of our range this is going to mean we use larger sizes and more linear ranges overall to maximize the amount of money we can get into the pot on the earlier streets while our Equity is still high our goal here is to realize our own Equity as much as possible being all in pre- flop or on the Flop if necessary while denying Steve the chance to realize his Equity since a big part of the reason why his Maniac style is a losing strategy is because most of the hands he plays aren&#39;t strong enough to realize enough equity against our range if we play too passively against Steve and don&#39;t get enough money into the pot on the earlier streets then we allow him to realize his Equity more easily we end up with more spots where he unexpectedly sucks out on the turno river or more spots where we simply can&#39;t get any value from a very good hand because he lands on the river with nothing which can pay us off the exception here is when our hands Equity is highly robust for example if we flop a full house or another hand which is virtually Invincible in those instances we might benefit from allowing Steve&#39;s extremely weak range to realize some more equity and pick up a hand which can pay us off to some extent finally when it comes to post flop play if Steve is always going to bet when we check to him we should not bet from out of position check raising should be a huge part of our strategy against him when we&#39;re in position we may want to have more check in order to neutralize his ability to check Rays at a higher frequency but from out of position our main source of EV is to allow him to put far too much money into the pot with too many hands that about does it for this video thanks for sticking with me all the way through if you have any questions I&#39;ll be around in our Discord server to answer them otherwise I&#39;ll be back soon with another video here on YouTube thanks for watching everyone and good luck at the tables [Music]

have you ever had a player at your table 
who was so aggressive you knew that they   couldn&amp;#39;t possibly always have a 
strong hand but you weren&amp;#39;t sure   how to actually fight back we&amp;#39;ve all 
been in that situation at some point   so if you want to know how to react next 
time it happens this video is for [Music] you hi Wizards I&amp;#39;m Matt hunt and this video is 
all about battling The Maniacs those players   at your table who give you nightmares with 
their continued insistence on always playing   aggressively no matter what and seemingly never 
backing down when you do fight back we&amp;#39;re going   to focus primarily on mtts but the principles 
we&amp;#39;re discussing will also be relevant for cash   games especially when we look at some deeper 
stacked adjustments let&amp;#39;s start by defining   what we mean by a maniac at least in strategic 
terms what we&amp;#39;re really focusing on is Players   whose overall aggression levels are far too high 
across all parts of the game tree and who will   generally be putting in far too much betting 
volume as a whole this means not only betting   too often but also betting too big in certain 
spots where small bets are much more effective   in addition we&amp;#39;re also going to assume that our 
Maniac is prone to underfolding to our aggression   on the earlier streets in other words we&amp;#39;re going 
to assume that they&amp;#39;re not just automatically   backing down as soon as we show any aggression 
ourselves after all if they were betting at a   high frequency but then overfolded to raises they 
wouldn&amp;#39;t be anywhere near as difficult to play   against finally we&amp;#39;re also going to assume that 
their bething ranges are somewhat too merged in   many situations this essentially means they&amp;#39;ll be 
taking a lot of middle strength hands and beting   them in situations where they&amp;#39;re not functioning 
clearly as value bets or Bluffs now one caveat   here is that while GTO wizard AI will give us 
a great level of insight into how we should   approach these players we&amp;#39;re not easily going to 
be able to account for predicting our opponent&amp;#39;s   aggression levels on future streets for the most 
part we&amp;#39;re going to stick to exploring our options   in ways which we can do quickly and efficiently 
using the AI as opposed to to running Sims which   might take hours or even days to complete so let&amp;#39;s 
meet our subject for this video our archetypal   Maniac player profile Wizards this is Steve Steve 
is 25 years old although this photo maybe looks a   little older than that from the USA and Steve is 
what we would call a trust fun kid Steve&amp;#39;s parents   are billionaires and he loves gambling with his 
parents&amp;#39; Money Steve doesn&amp;#39;t care about winning   and losing he knows he&amp;#39;s probably not a winning 
poker player but that doesn&amp;#39;t bother him Steve   loves the game and he particularly loves winning 
big pots showing down big Bluffs and putting his   opponents in Nightmare spots for this reason he 
will always bet if you check to him no matter what   and he never bets less than half pot Steve&amp;#39;s least 
favorite thing to do at the poker table is folding   it takes a lot of effort to make Steve fold any 
kind of draw and if he has a pair he&amp;#39;s not going   to fold it unless you&amp;#39;re betting at least two 
times the pot so what&amp;#39;s our Pathway to maximizing   our against thieve well it all starts pre flop 
and we can explore it using GTO wizard AI heads up   pre- flop solver even though we&amp;#39;re not necessarily 
going to be playing heads up against Steve   simplifying the game can help us get a pretty good 
idea of the general principles we&amp;#39;ll need to obey   if we&amp;#39;re going to maximize our EV against him the 
general approach we&amp;#39;re going to take when heads up   against Steve is designed to help us figure out 
our overall exploitative framework for playing   against him and establish where our additional 
EV is coming from when playing against him in a   full ring or six Max environment we&amp;#39;re obviously 
not going to be able to use the same ranges as we   would when heads up but we will be able to use 
the same overall approach to extracting more EV   from Steve so our strategies will translate fairly 
well we&amp;#39;ll Begin by assuming we&amp;#39;re deep stacked at   around 200 big blinds we&amp;#39;re not incorporating 
an anti but that doesn&amp;#39;t matter since we&amp;#39;re   just looking at the principles here we&amp;#39;ll imagine 
Steve is the in position player pre flop and he&amp;#39;s   going to open to three big blinds on the button 
let&amp;#39;s see how our three bet strategy from Outer   position is going to change depending on exactly 
how wide Steve&amp;#39;s opening range is this will give   us a sense of how the width of an opening range 
is going to alter our defense strategy even when   villain is opening larger and wider than what 
would be optimal I&amp;#39;ve allowed us a set of six   potential three bet sizes here everywhere from 
three times the open size all the way up to   eight times our goal here is to look at how the 
width of the opening range affects our three bet   strategy against this large open size so that 
we can get a baseline idea of what we should do   at Deep Stacks when our opponent is both opening 
wider and larger than what would be optimal this   graphic shows us how our use of each of the sizes 
Alters as the width of the opening range changes   with the opening frequency on the left from 25 up 
to 100% and our total 3 Bet frequency in the last   column on the right with the distribution in each 
of the other columns it&amp;#39;s obvious that our three   bet frequency is going to go up as the opening 
range gets wider but the most interesting part   of this graphic is that there&amp;#39;s a heavy shift 
toward the smaller sizings as well now here&amp;#39;s   the same information in chart form you can see the 
changes in the distribution of our sizes a little   better here against the tighter opening range 
the no clear Trend in three bet sizing but as   the range gets wider there&amp;#39;s a clear preference 
for the smaller sizes of nine big blinds and 12   big blinds since villain has a lot more very weak 
hands which can&amp;#39;t continue even versus a smaller   three bet so it would seem that against players 
who open two wide we should three bet slightly   smaller right well actually it&amp;#39;s not that simple 
because the player profile we&amp;#39;re talking about   here isn&amp;#39;t just opening too wide they&amp;#39;re also 
underfolding versus our three bets and probably   four betting too much as well so let&amp;#39;s step by 
step and figure out what the best course of action   is versus that specific type of player first let&amp;#39;s 
look at an extreme example what if our opponent   Steve never folds to a three bet at all we can 
simulate this by simply removing the folding   option from his side of the game tree and doing 
the same calculations we did before that gives   us this grid which looks very different to the 
earlier one you&amp;#39;ll notice that there&amp;#39;s no point   in showing this Grid in chart form because if we 
know our opponent isn&amp;#39;t folding there&amp;#39;s no reason   to three bet to any size other than the biggest 
one available every frequency between nine big   blinds and 21 big blinds is zero here at 200 big 
blinds we&amp;#39;re probably too deep to just simply Jam   all in but later on we&amp;#39;ll look at the 50 big blind 
stack size and things will be very different there   I did the same thing for an inos spot with the 
game tree tweak to have us limp 100% of hands and   villain raise 100% and got more or less the same 
results here are the two strategies side by side   as you can see if villain opens any two cards and 
never folds to three bat not only are we choosing   the biggest three betat size available but our 
three bet range also becomes entirely linear   there are no Bluffs in this range at all or at 
least there&amp;#39;s no element of polarization to it   we&amp;#39;re essentially three betting so wide for Value 
that even some of the hands which would usually be   classed as Bluffs are now value raises like pocket 
3s jack8 suited or ace7 off why does this strategy   look the way it does to answer that question we 
have to look at Steve&amp;#39;s response here which is   going to lead us down another rabbit hole as you 
can see here when we force Steve to open any two   cards and never fold to a three bet his response 
is extremely passive What&amp;#39;s Happening Here is that   most of the hands which Steve should be folding 
are weak enough that they can&amp;#39;t ever justify for   betting so he has to just call with them but if 
he calls all those hands the eveve of his entire   calling range will be much lower so the solver is 
trying to compensate by adding more strong hands   to his calling range essentially forcing him to 
trap at a much higher rate this is a phenomenon   I like to refer to as the please don&amp;#39;t make me 
play Bad effect we&amp;#39;re forcing the solver to do   something which is clearly a bad idea opening 
any two cards and never folding to a three bet   so it&amp;#39;s going to try to compensate in any way it 
can in order to minimize losses in this case the   best way for it to do that is to rarely forit and 
trap with most of the strong hands to strengthen   the flatting range the only hands that do have the 
incentive to for bet here are now the middling to   strong ones which want to get more money in the 
pot pre- flop but aren&amp;#39;t very good at realizing   Equity post flop mostly the middle and lower 
pocket Pairs and the strongest offit Aces those   hands simply want to jam all in to put as many 
of our hands in a tough spot as possible since   a lot of our range is flipping against those 
hands here so in the end Steve&amp;#39;s best response   if he&amp;#39;s not allowed to fold is to almost always 
call but sometimes just shove all in for 200 big   blinds the fact that he&amp;#39;s never for betting to 
a smaller size here is directly allowing us to   three bet a completely linear range this is why 
our strategy of three betting larger and more   linear looks the way it does we get maximum value 
from his extremely weak calling range and we don&amp;#39;t   get four bet much at all but what if Steve plays a 
completely different strategy what if Steve plays   a strategy where he never shoves all in but for 
bets to something like three times our three bet   size would we still prefer our strategy of three 
betting to a large size with a linear range well   the short answer is yes as this graphic shows 
the main reason for this is because even when   Steve is not allowed to shove all in his strategy 
of never folding still requires him to trap a lot   and rarely for bet so his calling frequency versus 
the 3 Bet is still around 95% and we don&amp;#39;t have to   worry about being put in an awkward position 
versus a foret our next step therefore is to   think about what our strategy will look like if 
Steve is going to forb bet more frequently which   since he&amp;#39;s a maniac we should probably expect to 
happen in practice GTO wizard ai&amp;#39;s node loocking   feature allows us to do this very needly since we 
can simply use the sliders to increase Steve&amp;#39;s for   bet frequency and the solver will automatically 
pick the best hands for him to do it with based   on the EV of those hands as forb bets this next 
graphic shows how our 3 Bet frequency changes as   we alter Steve&amp;#39;s 4 bet frequency with our 3 Bet 
frequency on the Y AIS and His Four bets on the   x-axis interestingly there&amp;#39;s not a massive change 
one way or the other only a few per either way   with some slight increases and decreases based on 
how wide Steve&amp;#39;s for bet for Value range becomes   even if Steve is for betting 40% of the time which 
is almost 10 times as often as he&amp;#39;s supposed to   we&amp;#39;re still only decreasing our 3 Bet frequency 
by about 3% why is this well it has to do with the   construction of Steve&amp;#39;s forb bet range as you&amp;#39;ll 
see in a moment but first let&amp;#39;s take a glance at   our strategy versus the forb BET itself evidently 
we&amp;#39;re doing a lot of shoving all in versus this   for bet which makes a lot of sense given that 
he&amp;#39;s for betting to a large size of three times   our three bet and we&amp;#39;re getting a good price to 
be all in and realize our Equity but the other   interesting thing here is that as soon as Steve is 
for beding more often than the optimal frequency   of around 5% here we no longer have any folds 
against that forbet this could be a very important   part of our strategy against Maniacs it&amp;#39;s telling 
us that if we already know a player is likely   to forb bet too aggressively it might be a big 
mistake to have any three bet folds at all however   the big factor here is the construction of Steve&amp;#39;s 
forb bet range as I mentioned a moment ago this   next image shows us an example of how Steve&amp;#39;s forb 
bet range was constructed when I used the slider   to give him a 40% forb bet frequency it obviously 
looks pretty weird but in a general sense you can   see that it&amp;#39;s a polarized range it has a lot of 
pocket Pairs and strong offsuit ASX hands for   Value while the bluffing region is anchored around 
a lot of the very weakest offsuit hands with the   queen de off to eight de off region for betting 
in pure the fact that our three bet frequency   didn&amp;#39;t change very much overall is largely down 
to this Factor when Steve is forb betting a polar   range he still mostly has fairly clear decisions 
against our for bet Jam calling with his value and   folding his Bluffs and we still have some fairly 
awkward spots with the in value portion of our   three betting range which doesn&amp;#39;t really want to 
get it in but also doesn&amp;#39;t want to fold to a four   bet in general four betting a polar range from in 
position especially for the big size that Steve   has chosen would be a fairly good decision for 
Steve here even though the fact that he&amp;#39;s never   folding is obviously already costing him a lot of 
EV but the difficult thing for us here is that a   lot of these Maniacs don&amp;#39;t for bet with polar 
ranges they tend to take an approach primarily   based on the strength of their hand and don&amp;#39;t 
often consider the possibility of a difficult   spot against future aggression or what happens if 
their opponent shoves all in they simply tend to   put more money in the pot when they think there&amp;#39;s 
a good chance they have the best hand so with that   in mind let&amp;#39;s examine what happens if we make 
Steve&amp;#39;s forbat range a much more linear one   instead this is what it looks like when we have 
Steve for betting more linearly this is the most   extreme version where he&amp;#39;s forb betting the top 
40% of the deck and calling everything else I had   to select these hands manually since the slider in 
the node lock menu makes decisions according to EV   as opposed to basic hand strength and here&amp;#39;s what 
it does to our frequencies there&amp;#39;s a much more   obvious change in our three bet strategy here to 
begin with the less often Steve is for betting the   more often we can three bet with a slight reversal 
once his four bet frequency becomes extremely high   there&amp;#39;s about a 14% gap between our aggression 
when he forb bets 5% of the time and when he forb   bets 40% of the time which is far more significant 
than what we saw before to figure out why this is   happening we also have to look at our responses to 
the for bet once it does occur now looking at the   distribution of our frequencies here this is where 
things get really interesting when Steve is for   betting a very tight and strong top five% range 
we respond with no calls and purely an Allin or   fold strategy our hand is either strong enough 
to get it all in against this full bet range   or it doesn&amp;#39;t benefit from putting any more 
chips in the pot at all remember also that we   were three betting more often in this scenario 
to begin with as well on the other end of the   scale when he&amp;#39;s for beding extremely aggressively 
in a linear fashion we already know our initial   3B frequency has decreased by about 14% from the 
previous graph and now we&amp;#39;re seeing that we never   fold to the 4 bet at all in fact we mostly shove 
all in with only certain specific hands benefiting   from calling given the awkward price that we&amp;#39;re 
getting and the low post flop SP so before we go   any further let&amp;#39;s just take a beat to recap where 
we&amp;#39;re at and summarize what we&amp;#39;ve figured out so   far we&amp;#39;ve established that Steve never folds to 
our three bet which means we have a significant   incentive to three bet larger and more linear in 
our Construction in order to compensate for never   folding to our three bet Steve should be four 
betting very rarely and protecting his extremely   wide flatting range by trapping with his strong 
hands but it&amp;#39;s probably reasonable to assume he&amp;#39;s   not doing that depending on our exact read on 
what Steve is doing we might have more than one   plausible option in how we adjust to exploit him 
if he&amp;#39;s for betting too much which we&amp;#39;ve already   established is likely since he&amp;#39;s a maniac but he&amp;#39;s 
doing it with a polarized 4 bet range then our   initial three bet strategy doesn&amp;#39;t really change 
we still have a big incentive to three larger   and more linear to take advantage of his lack of 
folding depending on our exact read on what Steve   is doing we might have more than one plausible 
option in how we adjust to exploit him if he&amp;#39;s for   beding too much which we&amp;#39;ve already established is 
likely since he&amp;#39;s a maniac but he&amp;#39;s doing it with   a polarized 4 bet range then our initial three 
bet strategy doesn&amp;#39;t really change very much we   still have a big incentive to three bet larger 
and more linear to take advantage of his lack   of folding but the main difference now is that 
we simply stop folding in to his for bet since   it contains a lot of extremely weak Bluffs which 
are doing very poorly against our linear three   bet range however if Steve is for betting too 
aggressively and doing it with a linear range we   would have to start three betting a tighter range 
but five bet jamming more often when we do three   bet the goal of this being to put Steve in as many 
difficult spots as possible when he forb Bets with   a thin value type hand which would usually just 
call our three bet eventually our strategy will   reach a point where we have no incentive to ever 
fold to his forb bet will e be five bet jamming   or simply peeling the four bet given the price 
we&amp;#39;re getting the reason for this is that as his   linear 4 bet range expands wider and wider it 
becomes so wide that it becomes a little easier   for us to sometimes call the forbat and play post 
flop against a tight linear range though we would   have very little reason to call the four bet and 
try to navigate on future streets but all this is   making the assumption that Steve never folds to 
the three bet at all and that might be a little   unrealistic what if he does fold sometimes there 
are a few questions which we need to answer here   the first one is do our linear three bets gain 
anything from him folding after all a linear   three bet range is three betting for thin value 
and if we&amp;#39;re getting folds we&amp;#39;re losing a little   bit of that value although we&amp;#39;re also denying 
him the ability to realize Equity at the same   rate so the trade-off could be worth it the next 
question is how does his folding frequency affect   our three bet range do we start altering our 
construction as he begins folding more or does   our range simply expand and contract well in 
order to answer any of these these questions   we have to start normalizing his forb frequency 
because if we don&amp;#39;t the solver will want him to   compensate for folding more by altering his 
forb range and frequency and that will throw   off all of our results this graphic shows us the 
results of tweaking Steve&amp;#39;s folding frequency with   a consistent linear 10% for bet frequency and a 
shifting calling frequency it&amp;#39;s worth noting in   this instance that we had Steve for betting to 
a sizing much larger than what GTO would prefer   which is why you can see in the right hand column 
that our GTO frequency for calling the forb bet   in this case would be only around 1% these numbers 
are much more easily interpreted in graph form   though so let&amp;#39;s view them that way this is what 
our graph looks like for this spot on the far left   we have our strategy for if Steve is only folding 
10% of the time and on the far right we have the   GTO strategy where Steve is folding at the optimal 
frequency for a three big blind any two cards open   which would be around 77% given the large sizing 
of our 3 Bet as you can tell from the graph our   strategy on the left is more evenly distributed 
with more three betting and more folding   while as we get closer and closer to Steve playing 
a GTO strategy we start three betting less calling   more and folding slightly less as well this might 
all be difficult to interpret so what&amp;#39;s actually   happening here well it&amp;#39;s a few things first we 
know Steve is underfolding to three bets so we   know he&amp;#39;s folding less than the 77% of the time he 
should be in GTO given that he opened with any two   cards for three big blinds the more Steve starts 
to fold to our three bet the less we have to gain   by three betting for thin value with certain hands 
which are on on the edge of our value range this   causes these hands to shift towards calling 
instead this in turn actually strengthens our   calling range because we&amp;#39;re adding in some hands 
at the top of the range consequently this actually   allows us to start calling slightly wider at the 
bottom of the range because those weaker hands are   now slightly more protected as we start three Bing 
more for thin value we also have to now fold the   bottom of our calling range because the fact that 
our calling range is weaker overall means that the   weakest hands in this range can no no longer 
call profitably when it comes to our response   against a forbat nothing is changing there Steve&amp;#39;s 
forbat strategy stayed consistent throughout these   examples so the exact hands which call or five bet 
against a four bet have not changed either if he&amp;#39;s   playing a fixed strategy then we should also play 
a fixed strategy so let&amp;#39;s develop a full picture   of Steve&amp;#39;s overall pre- flop game and allow us 
to arrive at a final conclusion we think Steve   is Raising to three big blinds with any two cards 
pre- flop we also believe he&amp;#39;s forting a linear   10% range consisting of the top 10% of hands we 
also think that he&amp;#39;s probably only folding to   three bets around 20% of the time and we don&amp;#39;t 
think he&amp;#39;s ever going to fold to a shove after   he for bets obviously we don&amp;#39;t have any proof of 
any of this but these are our reads based on what   we&amp;#39;ve seen of Steve at our table what do we think 
our final strategy is going to look like feel free   to pause the video and take a guess or write 
down some aspects of our strategy if you like   well this is our first snapshot of our 200 big 
blind strategy against Steve from out of position   with three Bing to that very large 8X size with 
the range you can see on the left and calling   quite wide as well although not quite every suited 
hand in the deck against Steve&amp;#39;s four bet range   you can see our strategy on the right with five 
bet jamming with nines plus an ace Queen and   calling with a few other hands but because he&amp;#39;s 
forbidding to a large sizing with a fairly linear   and strong range we&amp;#39;re not peeling very often here 
if we switch the positions and create a game tree   which allows us to be in position things look 
much the same except now our thin value range   has become much wider and we&amp;#39;re now never folding 
a suited hand to a raise obviously this is because   we&amp;#39;re playing in position heads up we shouldn&amp;#39;t 
do this in a full ring context from in position   versus the forb bet we&amp;#39;re calling more or less 
the same range with some very slight tweaks to   our approach based on the slightly different price 
we&amp;#39;re getting which is a product of me needing to   manufacture a heads up in position spot for us you 
can see that our 5 bet Jam range is basically the   same though which is highlighting the fact that 
when it comes to heads up Allin ranges position   isn&amp;#39;t really relevant because we&amp;#39;re not going to 
make any post flop decisions after we&amp;#39;re already   all in to look at things by the Numbers we can 
see on the left here the two strategies versus   the initial open we&amp;#39;re going much wider from in 
position as you can see 48.6% compared to 28.7   with our three bet frequency and we&amp;#39;re folding a 
lot less often from in position which of course is   very natural on the right we have our strategies 
versus the forb itself since we&amp;#39;re three betting a   lot wider to begin with we&amp;#39;re going to be folding 
a lot more often in relative terms and you can see   that that we&amp;#39;re 3 Bet folding around 550 combos 
instead of only 280 combos note however that our   5 bet Jam range is almost exactly the same in 
each case 66.0 combos compared to 66.8 one once   again this is because Steve&amp;#39;s strategy is fixed 
he&amp;#39;s calling off with the same hands and four   betting with the same hands so we&amp;#39;re five bet 
jamming the same hands our calling range does   shift slightly but it&amp;#39;s not easy to establish 
exactly why we would be calling less often from   in position most likely caused by the slightly 
different prices on offer in the game tree that   I had to construct to mimic an inos spot our next 
area of Investigation is to think about what we   might do if the effective Stacks in play are much 
shallower for example at 50 big blinds instead   of 200 big blinds at this depth it&amp;#39;s a lot more 
difficult for us to use a larger three bet size   since we&amp;#39;re much closer to Simply being forced all 
in and it might not be feasible to three bet a big   chunk of our stack we&amp;#39;re also now at a depth where 
Steve&amp;#39;s four bets will always be all in we&amp;#39;re not   going to have to think about a five bet jamming 
range here this might affect our strategy in some   interesting ways Steve&amp;#39;s approach is also going to 
change slightly we think he would now be willing   to forb bet jam with 20% of hands instead of 10 
giving that he&amp;#39;s risking fewer chips and we think   his range for calling an Allin would be more or 
less the same set of hands he&amp;#39;s figured out what   range he&amp;#39;s willing to play for Stacks with and 
he&amp;#39;s determined to play for Stacks with those   hands this is what our GTO strategy looks like 
against his any two cards three big blinds open   at 50 big blinds again in a heads up context and 
this this time with a 12 big blind three bet size   so four times the open we&amp;#39;re doing a surprising 
amount of jamming with low pairs offsuit Aces   and even some middling suited hands in fact this 
range looks a lot like a range for jamming 25 to   30 big blinds over a button open in an MTT which 
is not a coincidence this spot is actually very   similar to that one if you look at the amount that 
we&amp;#39;re risking relative to the pop our non Allin 3   Bet range is very polar with a fairly wide value 
region and a mostly offsuit high card low card   Bluff region against this four bet Jam we&amp;#39;re 
calling off as wide as Jack n suited 65 suited   King jack off suit and we&amp;#39;re obviously folding 
all of our three bet Bluffs if we engineer the   same spot from in position everything looks very 
similar except for the fact that our value three   bet region is narrower and we&amp;#39;re no longer jamming 
anything since calling has so much more value when   we&amp;#39;re in position post flop our three bet call 
off region is not quite as wide since we&amp;#39;re now   preferring to call and realize equity in position 
with many hands which were previously preferred   to just get it in Pre flop these are the numbers 
we&amp;#39;re obviously folding much less often if we&amp;#39;re   in position although that&amp;#39;s partially a product 
of the game tree parameters we had to use as I   mentioned our call-off range versus the jam 
is staying relatively consistent although   it is reducing by about 30 combos again for the 
reasons we&amp;#39;ve already stated if we apply what we   already know about Steve&amp;#39;s overall pre flop 
game to the shallowest stack size these are   the strategies we end up with a very aggressive 
outer position approach which contains a lot of   jams and a very wide three bet call off range to 
counter the fact that Steve is four bet jamming   20% of hands we actually have very few three 
bet folds here as you can see on the right and   only a few of those are taking that line at 
full frequency from in position the fact that   Steve&amp;#39;s pre- flop range is any two cards gives 
us a relatively straightforward response we&amp;#39;re   almost never jamming anything except for pocket 
threes about half the time and we&amp;#39;re calling most   of the deck with very rarely three bet folding 
and our three bet for Value range is very wide   since we&amp;#39;re extracting so much thin value from 
all the time Steve Rays calls the three bet in   terms of the numbers it&amp;#39;s much the same as what 
you&amp;#39;d expect much more calling from in position   with no jamming and less three betting while the 
only reason our three bet call off range goes from   around 280 combos from out of position to roughly 
230 from in position is because certain hands are   no longer three betting they prefer to call and 
play in position as we saw before hands like   pocket fors Queen n suited and King 10 off a three 
betting pre flop with the intent to call off when   they&amp;#39;re out of position but when in position they 
have a big incentive to just call and keep all of   Steve&amp;#39;s worst hands in his range so to summarize 
our overall pre flop approach against Steve in   a way which would be applicable even in a full 
ring environment we know for sure that we have a   significant incentive to three bet much larger 
and much more linearly for thin value if he&amp;#39;s   not going to be folding much that&amp;#39;s our primary 
adjustment when we&amp;#39;re very deep stacked there are   many hands which like to three bet pre- flop from 
in position as part of our wider linear range but   then simply fold if we get for bet if Steve&amp;#39;s four 
bet remains relatively static and he&amp;#39;s playing a   fixed strategy where he doesn&amp;#39;t adapt to our 
frequencies then we can do the same and simply   three bet for thin value against his calls while 
folding a bit more against his forb bets however   if he forb bets a very high frequency we may start 
to Simply five bet Jam a lot more as we saw before   once we get a little shallower we&amp;#39;re going to be 
more inclined to start jamming pre flop from out   of position since we aren&amp;#39;t going to be able to 
realize Equity very easily from out of position   even when his opening range is extremely 
wide the hands which are at the top of our   potential flatting range against this open will 
actually start to prefer to three bet call off   instead of just calling and having to play out of 
position against a very wide range which can check   back a lot of flops and realize some Equity from 
in position we&amp;#39;re going to be a lot more content   to call at shallower Stacks while still continuing 
to three bet fairly wide and linearly being very   willing to call it off if we get jammed on 
since Steve&amp;#39;s four bet jamming range will be   wider finally if we were playing short stacked 
against Steve for example in an MTT scenario we   would be shoving a lot more often both from out 
of position and in position however it&amp;#39;s a little   more difficult to estimate exactly how wide our 
ranges would get since ICM would most likely be   a factor at various stages of the tournament and 
we would have to balance our desire to exploit   Steve specifically against our priorities in the 
overall event that we&amp;#39;re playing so now that we&amp;#39;ve   taken a thorough look at how we might adjust 
the Steve pre flop let&amp;#39;s see what kinds of post   flop adjustments we might consider making first 
let&amp;#39;s consider a somewhat deep stacked three bet   pot scenario where we three bet a linear range 
from the blinds against a middle position open   from Steve and he calls so here is our setup on 
GTO wizard AI if we want to look at the setup   briefly I&amp;#39;ve got a situation with about 100 big 
blind effective Stacks Steve opens we threw that   quite large about 5x the open size here and we get 
a flop of Queen Jack 4 I&amp;#39;ve given us a completely   linear three bet range here as you can see just 
a lot of Broadway hands good Pairs and some good   Aces and I&amp;#39;ve given Steve a very very wide range 
if we look at all these hands over here here it&amp;#39;s   a range that is basically just completely capped 
pre flop low pairs offit Aces every single suited   hand and then maybe you know he&amp;#39;s for betting a 
lot of these strong hands at very high frequencies   so clearly when we get this queen Jack for flop 
we have a massive nut Advantage best hands 50.3%   good hands 44.3 2.1 10.4 our overall Equity is 
72% roughly so it&amp;#39;s a great spot for us here   this is extremely favorable considering how wide 
Steve&amp;#39;s range is and of course as a byproduct of   that it&amp;#39;s going to become a range bet spot for us 
solver wants to bet 100% of the time here however   range betting would be fine here but it might not 
necessarily be the highest EV option for us if we   look at what happens after we check Steve&amp;#39;s range 
is so weak that he is actually only supposed to   bet about 5% of the time but that&amp;#39;s not happening 
we&amp;#39;ve already established that Steve is likely   going to bet every single hand when we check to 
him so what we can do is we can actually delete   the checking option from his side of the tree 
which I think is always kind of an interesting   thing to do and say okay well what happens if 
we force him to bet we&amp;#39;re not necessarily going   to decide on his size for him we&amp;#39;re just going 
to give him let&amp;#39;s say four different bet sizing   options plus an Allin and to give him the option 
to just jam and we&amp;#39;re not going to say what size   he has to bet we&amp;#39;re just going to tell him you 
cannot check he does not have the option to check   anymore and as you can see there&amp;#39;s kind of a split 
between all in with certain hands mostly I think   flush draws and straight draws and then basically 
betting 50% half PO with the rest of the range and   as a result our frequency for betting on the Flop 
here has gone all the way down to zero so we&amp;#39;ve   gone from range bet to range check and that&amp;#39;s 
simply a byproduct of a baseline understanding   of the fact that Steve is making so many errors 
when we check the Flop the EV of us checking   the Flop has gone astronomically up and we are 
massively benefiting now from just allowing him   to make that significant mistake on top of that 
not only are we now checking our entire range but   if he bets this half pot size of 18 we are now 
literally check jamming our entire range here   if we look at what the EVS are of some of these 
hands even check jamming a hand like Ace eight of   spades here which has such little Equity doesn&amp;#39;t 
really have any way to improve very easily here   we&amp;#39;re going to have so much fold Equity here that 
we&amp;#39;re actually making about 35 to 40% of the pot   here maybe even more than that depending on which 
exact combo we have uh by check jamming ace8 here   so it&amp;#39;s just a byproduct of him putting in so much 
money with so many trashy hands here it&amp;#39;s actually   very easy and plausible for us to just check Jam 
every single hand now we haven&amp;#39;t locked what he&amp;#39;s   calling off with and maybe we should because 
this solver is going to want him to fold a lot   of hands here because he&amp;#39;s not going to be getting 
a good price but let&amp;#39;s say he Bets with any pair   and let&amp;#39;s say he&amp;#39;s never going to fold any pair 
or Draw so we&amp;#39;ve tweaked the game tree here just   to make it easy for us to check and then him to 
range bet and against the check Jam we&amp;#39;re going   to have him call with any pair and any basically 
any let&amp;#39;s say eight out straight draw or better   so we&amp;#39;re just going to put all of that on zero and 
then I&amp;#39;m going to go through the categor sets two   pairs top pairs second pairs third pairs low pairs 
combo draws flush draws and open Enders and that&amp;#39;s   going to be the range of hands that he&amp;#39;s going to 
call off with so we&amp;#39;re going to hit lock all force   him to play this way with everything and let&amp;#39;s 
see if our strategy changes at all here we are   now nope we&amp;#39;re still check jamming everything and 
we&amp;#39;re not going back to the Flop and deciding to   bet everything again either we&amp;#39;re not going to 
shift our strategy around really there EV wise   we&amp;#39;re losing a tiny bit well actually we we&amp;#39;re 
losing a fair amount compared to before when he   never folds any of these draws and never folds 
a pair uh with you know hands like Ace 8 we&amp;#39;re   now only making about 20% of the pot 22% of the 
pot but we&amp;#39;re now absolutely just printing to a   ridiculous degree even with hands like King Jack 
King Jack of Spades here just wins almost 90% of   the pot or 80 86% of the pot so absolutely massive 
massive profit margins with these hands so just   getting it in on the earlier streats with a higher 
Equity range than he has is really helping us here   massive spot for us very interesting spot but a 
good guideline to even if a spot is a range bet in   theory the mistakes he&amp;#39;s making from in position 
make it such that we probably don&amp;#39;t want to do   that to summarize the spot we just looked at it 
was a spot where we could easily range bet if we   wanted given how much Equity we had however that 
doesn&amp;#39;t fully capture all the EV available to us   after all we know that Steve never checks back 
to flop if we check to him and he always bets   at least half pot so it benefits us a lot to let 
him do that this adjustment causes us to want to   range check the Flop and based on Steve&amp;#39;s overall 
Tendencies facing a potential check Jam from our   range here at this low spr our best approach 
is actually to check Jam our entire range it   seems like a bit of a crazy adjustment here but if 
your opponent really does bet the Flop with every   single hand in their range here and their range 
is that wide then this is the best adjustment to   make especially when their range is as wide wider 
Steves our next spot is going to be an in-position   single Ray pot where we open pre flop and Steve 
defends the big blind we&amp;#39;ll be a little shallower   here at around 50 big blinds so this might be 
very applicable to a lot of MTT spots so this   is the spot we&amp;#39;re looking at 50 big blinds MTT 
spot I have given Steve a very very wide range   where he is three betting that top 20 25 perish 
and then just never folding any other hand so   he&amp;#39;s he&amp;#39;s literally ever folding to our raay pre 
flop clearly on this 109 for two Spades board we   have a massive n Advantage now which of course 
is really favorable for us and it&amp;#39;s resulted   in a strategy where if I give us three bet size 
options here just to see if there&amp;#39;s any kind of   mixed strategy going on we basically are favoring 
a catchall size of 75% and there is a tiny bit of   200% here but we&amp;#39;re not really going to need 
to use that very much now of course we haven&amp;#39;t   made any assumptions yet about Steve&amp;#39;s strategy 
so let&amp;#39;s now take the node locking function and   double his check raising frequency in every spot 
we&amp;#39;re just going to instead of 14 we&amp;#39;re going to   put 28 versus the small bet here so we&amp;#39;re going to 
lock everything there and then we&amp;#39;re going to look   at the frequency Against The Catch All Size the 
75% size and we&amp;#39;re going to take that frequency   and lock it at 18% instead of 9% so once again he 
is check raising twice as much as he should and   then we&amp;#39;re going to take this 200% size which of 
course is a huge overb bet and instead of having   him get it in with 13% frequency we&amp;#39;re going to 
have him get it in 26% of the time let&amp;#39;s see what   that does to our overall strategy and bear in mind 
we haven&amp;#39;t tweaked his ranges very specifically   here we haven&amp;#39;t tweaked his continuance through 
a call all we&amp;#39;ve done is just accounted for the   fact that he&amp;#39;s raising a lot more let&amp;#39;s take a 
look now things have changed quite dramatically   we&amp;#39;re getting to a point where with our value 
region we are betting big we are shoveling money   in our value region of this portion of hands 
our strongest combo drawers the the Broadway   Spades over pairs any strong 10 nines fours all 
of that stuff wants to shovel money into this pot   by contrast a lot of other hands want to get a bit 
of money in there because they have pretty decent   equity and maybe they want to call a raise maybe 
they want to three bet versus arays but they&amp;#39;re   not necessarily looking to just immediately shovel 
that money in also noteworthy that 109 is in there   which is kind of interesting it could be a blocker 
Factor that&amp;#39;s creating that possibly but the other   interesting thing is the 75% size has disappeared 
now because it&amp;#39;s not necessarily favoring the top   of our range it&amp;#39;s not necessarily favoring the 
bottom of our range top of our range just wants   to bet really big everything else wants to either 
bet small or as you can see now check there&amp;#39;s   about 38% check frequency here which is quite 
high and it is putting us in a spot where a lot   of of these 9x hands are going to want to check 
back the Flop a lot of Ace highs a lot of pocket   pairs so quite obviously there are quite a lot of 
hands now which are benefiting from the fact that   we now have the option to check behind in position 
instead of facing a check raise twice as often as   we&amp;#39;re supposed to so against a player like Steve 
who is a complete Maniac check raising way too   often in position we really benefit from Simply 
checking back and realizing Equity here as opposed   to Growing the pot and having to decide what to do 
against the check race of course the flip side of   that is when we actually have value we want to get 
money in when we have high Equity draws we want to   get big money in and of course Steve is playing a 
fixed strategy he&amp;#39;s not going to exploit us he&amp;#39;s   not going to adapt to us so we&amp;#39;re just looking 
to get him to shov all in and create the biggest   pot that we possibly can so we saw here that the 
Flop is a range bet at equilibrium considering the   very wide range that Steve is defending here but 
Steve&amp;#39;s overall tendency to check raise too often   increases the value of checking back for us now 
while we can&amp;#39;t account for Steve potentially   over bluffing the turn after we check we can 
make some broad assumptions that most of our   middle strength hands are going to realize Equity 
more effectively after checking back than after   betting and calling arrays from Steve however it&amp;#39;s 
not easy to establish exactly where our threshold   should be here since depending on the exact flop 
bet and raise sizings we use for our game tree the   ideal response from Steve is going to shift around 
and the extent to which certain hands increase or   decrease in EV as a bet will also change in 
order to make this spot a little simpler and   make sure we capture the most EV possible we can 
start by focusing on the top of our range since   that&amp;#39;s where the majority of our EV comes from in 
any given spot in this case our strongest hands   wanted to shovel as much money in as possible 
and take advantage of Steve&amp;#39;s overall level of   aggression the hands which do prioritize checking 
back or betting smaller will be the ones which   really don&amp;#39;t want to get raised or create bigger 
parts and that&amp;#39;s going to be a lot of middling and   weaker hands and again if Steve is playing a fixed 
strategy he&amp;#39;s not adapting to us we&amp;#39;re not going   to get exploited for that lastly now let&amp;#39;s look 
at a spot when we&amp;#39;re defending against Steve&amp;#39;s   open and this time we&amp;#39;re going to be the one out 
of position at the same 50 big blind stack size   so this is our last spot in this case we&amp;#39;ve got 
a 654 rainbow flop and as you can see I&amp;#39;ve given   very wide range or very wide range to Steve I&amp;#39;ve 
given him any two cards and our range is a little   bit wider than what you might expect against the 
3x open here but I&amp;#39;ve kind of tried to hedge a   little bit between a tighter range because of 
the larger open versus also a range that looks   a little bit more like a traditional defending 
range except we are three betting a very linear   range against Steve here so I&amp;#39;ve taken out a lot 
of the strongest hands now this would be a spot   that would create some leading at equilibrium 
and when I ran this completely unlocked we did   see about 40% donk Bing here from the big blind 
but I&amp;#39;ve forced big blind to check and I&amp;#39;ve also   forced button to C bet any two cards with 50% 
size so we can tell that you know Steve is still   range betting he&amp;#39;s still doing exactly what he did 
before in response I&amp;#39;ve given us two check raise   sizes and what&amp;#39;s really interesting is that we 
do use both of them quite a lot we actually have   a very very split response here but in particular 
there&amp;#39;s something noteworthy about the difference   between the two sizes if we hone in on the Allin 
size we can see that it&amp;#39;s a lot of top pair it&amp;#39;s   a lot of pair plus gutshot it&amp;#39;s a lot of pair 
Plus open Ender and if we hone in on the smaller   Ray size the non Allin Ray size you can see that 
sets 87 and maybe some some gut shots some weaker   Bluffs some Straits like the dece 3 those hands 
are populating this range a little bit more if we   look at the breakdown to see the Manhattan graph 
you can kind of see this a little bit better you   can see to some degree up here that the very very 
top of the range is populated a little bit more   if I just highlight it here with populated a 
little bit more with the very very strongest   stuff and the bulk of the stuff just below that 
is vulnerable enough that it doesn&amp;#39;t really want   to play more streets but it also does have enough 
equity to check Jam then you&amp;#39;ve got chunks like   this over here you&amp;#39;ve got this chunk over here and 
you&amp;#39;ve got little bits and pieces of some pretty   weak hands actually down here but in general you 
can kind of see that there&amp;#39;s two very distinct   raay sizes emerging here as part of our strategy 
and if we lock in what we think Steve is going to   do against each of these sizes hopefully we will 
see it become an even more pronounced difference   between the two approaches so if we lock in by 
saying well Steve is never folding let&amp;#39;s say top   pair plus maybe we don&amp;#39;t really know what he&amp;#39;ll 
do with second pair so we&amp;#39;ll keep that open we&amp;#39;ll   also say we know he&amp;#39;s never folding an open Ender 
but beyond that uh we&amp;#39;re just going to kind of let   him make his own decisions at this point we&amp;#39;re 
not going to lock every single hand but we are   going to lock a lot of them and then when it comes 
to the more moderate check rise size we&amp;#39;re going   to Lo his response there by saying we think that 
he&amp;#39;s going to raise all in with let&amp;#39;s say all of   his top pair plus and all of his open Enders same 
sort of a thing and then from that point onwards   we&amp;#39;re going to once again keep things unlocked 
and we&amp;#39;re not going to necessarily force him to   play a certain way we&amp;#39;re just going to say we 
have a pretty decent idea that he&amp;#39;s going to   be willing to get it in very wide and let&amp;#39;s see 
what strategy looks like as a byproduct so we&amp;#39;re   now going to lock Steve&amp;#39;s response against the 
more moderate raise size and in this case what   we&amp;#39;re going to do is assume that he gets it in 
with a lot of hands of course gets it in with   his top pair plus and all of that stuff and then 
we&amp;#39;re also going to assume that he has a certain   region where he responds very passively third 
pair second pair low pair he&amp;#39;s just going to call   Gut shots he&amp;#39;s going to call and so on so that I 
think is going to alter our response a little bit   just put the ray back in there in the overpair 
and top pair categories so now we&amp;#39;ve got this   response where he&amp;#39;s actually being quite passive 
uh in a lot of ways and if I just put all of this   stuff over here on fold because the Sim does want 
him to actually call at least a little bit with   some of these back door hands we now have all of 
his range locked in and if we have two different   responses against these two different sizes for 
him here let&amp;#39;s see how our range is distributed we   actually prefer the small size so this is what&amp;#39;s 
really interesting here that in theory originally   we now came to a point of we really wanted to 
just check Jam but because he&amp;#39;s making a lot   of passive mistakes against the non Allin size 
here we actually benefit from that and when he   does Jam against this size we now just basically 
call it off with every single hand so we&amp;#39;re never   folding to the jam if he does Jam but because the 
smaller size generates additional calls from him   that shouldn&amp;#39;t call so he&amp;#39;s calling with any 
Deuce any gutshot he&amp;#39;s calling with any four   he&amp;#39;s never folding a pair here because we&amp;#39;re now 
getting additional value out of that it&amp;#39;s going to   incentivize us to use this size we don&amp;#39;t want to 
necessarily stop him from making those mistakes by   being passive here we could still Jam the jam is 
still going to have value attached to it and you   we haven&amp;#39;t locked his range in full here so maybe 
if we had him never folding a pair he uh he we   might be able to gain more value from the Allin 
but this is greater than a 2X pot all in and we   did say before he never folds a pair to less than 
2x pot but above 2x pot we don&amp;#39;t really know so   in general here even if we kind of attribute some 
frequency to calling off with bottom pair here the   Allin is not as valuable as the small raise the 
67% raise here so we&amp;#39;re definitely prioritizing   that as one of our main tools to exploit Steve and 
his overall passiveness against that raise size   so in this spot we saw that there were some flop 
donk bets existing at equilibrium against Steve&amp;#39;s   wide opening range however if Steve is always 
SE betting this board we should check and let   him make this mistake our check raise frequency if 
Steve range bets half pot is extremely high mostly   because our calls are going to under realize 
their equity on a highly Dynamic board texture   and a lot of our potential check raising hands 
are simply going to shov all in if they get three   bet or call off against the three bet shove 
if we&amp;#39;re a little bit shallower a little bit   deeper there&amp;#39;s going to be some slight variations 
there one downside of check raising a lot here   and taking advantage of Steve&amp;#39;s continues is that 
since the board is highly Dynamic it&amp;#39;s definitely   going to be pretty tricky to play the turn here 
after we check raise and we could consider using   that larger check raise or the check Jam as a 
counter to this but of course there is going to   be a little bit of an EV sacrifice that comes 
along with forcing ourselves to check Jam some   hands which might do better as a smaller raise to 
get value from that passiveness of Steve&amp;#39;s so this   may not be an optimal approach it might just be 
a practical simplification and of course if you   are looking at getting better at these spots I 
would recommend practicing them run them through   GTO wizard AI run some node locks put some trainer 
drills together and give yourself a chance to get   better at playing these spots so this brings us 
back around to establishing an overall strategic   framework for how we&amp;#39;re going to crush Steve even 
in a full ring environment against a maniac like   Steve the bulk of R comes from the earlier streets 
and from the fact that he&amp;#39;s putting in far too   much money with far too many hands our goal is 
to build pots with higher Equity hands even if   those are some fairly thin value hands and extract 
the maximum value at the top of our range this is   going to mean we use larger sizes and more linear 
ranges overall to maximize the amount of money we   can get into the pot on the earlier streets 
while our Equity is still high our goal here   is to realize our own Equity as much as possible 
being all in pre- flop or on the Flop if necessary   while denying Steve the chance to realize his 
Equity since a big part of the reason why his   Maniac style is a losing strategy is because most 
of the hands he plays aren&amp;#39;t strong enough to   realize enough equity against our range if we play 
too passively against Steve and don&amp;#39;t get enough   money into the pot on the earlier streets then 
we allow him to realize his Equity more easily   we end up with more spots where he unexpectedly 
sucks out on the turno river or more spots where   we simply can&amp;#39;t get any value from a very good 
hand because he lands on the river with nothing   which can pay us off the exception here is when 
our hands Equity is highly robust for example   if we flop a full house or another hand which is 
virtually Invincible in those instances we might   benefit from allowing Steve&amp;#39;s extremely weak 
range to realize some more equity and pick up   a hand which can pay us off to some extent finally 
when it comes to post flop play if Steve is always   going to bet when we check to him we should not 
bet from out of position check raising should   be a huge part of our strategy against him when 
we&amp;#39;re in position we may want to have more check   in order to neutralize his ability to check Rays 
at a higher frequency but from out of position   our main source of EV is to allow him to put 
far too much money into the pot with too many   hands that about does it for this video thanks for 
sticking with me all the way through if you have   any questions I&amp;#39;ll be around in our Discord server 
to answer them otherwise I&amp;#39;ll be back soon with   another video here on YouTube thanks for watching 
everyone and good luck at the tables [Music]

Transcript for:Battling Maniacs in MTT Poker

Transcript for:
Battling Maniacs in MTT Poker