Calling is Underrated & Gives You a Lot of Info: thejericho2’s AMA on Reddit

I started around 10 years ago at NL2, the v bottom! My starting bankroll was 50$. The high stakes players will put you in tough spots continuously; they give you no breaks. And they don’t like to give up either. At midstakes, you’ll get a Bvb hand where the reg clearly checked out and is just waiting to move on to the next hand. Or You’ll get a 3bet pot where you just know that once the reg checks the turn after c-betting, that he’s always check/fold. You always need to be 100% focused at high stakes otherwise, you’ll get eaten alive.

Insane question! I had loss aversion. I come from a very cheap family where we were kind of always told that we were “poor” and that we never had any money. I was raised in a way that every purchase that was not 100% necessary was criticized and shamed. So obviously, in a way, this transcended into a big loss aversion. And if I’m completely honest, it never fully went away. The theory didn’t convince me even though I knew it was the right way to play. I just forced myself to take the aggressive line and live with the discomfort. If I’m being 100% honest, the discomfort never left. Whenever I bluff and jam the river, I cannot look at the table and I feel sick to my bones. I used to minimize the table fwiw whenever I would bluff so that I would take my attention off of it. It was more so the fact that I knew that in order to move up, I needed to change something. Otherwise, I would be stuck at small stakes forever.

I was getting run over at NL200 lol. I was just being a nut peddler… And my results were not great; I knew that I needed to change something. I did a whole 180 and saw that it was way more fun to be aggro. The results eventually came along.

X/r flops and river raises are like the easiest ones to abuse imo. Turn raises are much harder to get OOL. River donking was quite unintuitive as well. Yeah, I used to be a super risk averse in real life. Now, I couldn’t care less. I see in real things way more in terms of EV since I started playing poker professionally, or like in terms of %. I try not to have any expectations. I treat life bad beats like 80/20s, AA vs KK getting cracked basically. Sucks when it happens but there is not much you can do about it and should just move on.

Wake up early in the afternoon. Drink a bunch of water and kind of stay still in silence for like 30min. Head for a work out/stretch. Go to the pool and sauna (works best if the pool is not heated for thermal shock). Have lunch between 4-6pm. Grind form like 6-7pm until midnight. Review some HHs until 1am. Diner/cook from like 1am to 3 am. Watch something educational until 5am. Head to bed. Rinse and repeat.

I don’t like deviating from solver play that early in the hand because it skews your whole range on later streets. I also hate to make big assumptions on player pools. You usually want to deviate from solver play and adapt to the player pool when you plan on staying at a stake for a long time. If you want to move up and head to higher stakes, I would suggest not to overly adapt to your current player pool

It’s not so much about signs as it is to board runouts/blockers/unblockers imo. If the runout is good for my range and my blockers/unblockers are good, then yeah I fire. If the runout sucks for my range and my blockers/unblockers are bad, then I will most likely give up. RNG obviously plays a role in either case.

I stick to GTO and I assume that if I’m not reaping the benefits of the bluff now, I will reap them in the future.

Run them in the solver and make sure that I’m not spewing or getting OOL w frequencies.

Tie between turn and river. Turn lacks the raises, river lack the barreling. I don’t like MDA at all tbh; it has its limitations. It’s good up until a certain limit and then it just doesn’t work.

I tend not to care at all about what the population does and make them adapt to my game instead of me adapting to their game. I trust the process even though it might not be the highest EV strat at that current stake; I know that it will benefit me later.

I mean, the RNG helps a lot in that regard. There are also combos that are great for bluffing like 22 for example. I know some regs that will bluff w 22 EVERY TIME. I doubt that they are using an RNG. Or they will bluff every time with the Ah flush blocker on the 3 flush board, etc.

Blockers/unblockers are everything. Like sure, when you are bottom of range and have near nut low, it doesn’t matter if your blockers/unblockers are bad, the money is still going in. I’m going to answer like Doug here and say that “it depends on the situation”. For bluffing, you generally want blockers. For calling, you generally want unblockers. But like I said, it depends on the situation and this is nowhere near to be set in stone.

You can apply this aggressive style when you are HU in a hand. In multiway pots, which should be the majority of the hands at 1/2 live, I would suggest to be quite passive and wait for the goods.

Calling is underrated and gives you a lot of info.

The number one mistake that happens is that you start wanting to win every single hand. And you keep pushing the boundaries more and more. And then, you stop RNGing. Every blocker is a reason to bet, every unblocker is a reason to raise, every good runout is a reason to go all-in. That would be poor play; when it goes from aggressive play to spewing. Though to be fair, sometimes the line between both is mighty thin.

There used to be a play that worked all the time back in the day. You would flat an IP open from the BB. You would x/c flop. Turn would go x/x. And then once IP would reopen the action on the river with a bet, you could raise almost any two and you would generate a fold. That is not the case anymore and I find that line from BB’s perspective to be quite regfishy to be honest.

Elite players construct their strat before the hand happens. Usually it goes, one sizing on the flop, one sizing on the turn, two sizing on the river. That way gives you the most accuracy with your range when you get to the river. And you can realistically know quite well with how many value combos and bluffing combos you get there with.

Elite players basically know all the spots. So sometimes, something peculiar will ring a bell. For example, I’ll play a hand where I c-bet flop and get x/r (SRP CO vs BB let’s say). Turn comes and the villain uses a sizing that just isn’t right for the spot. I’ll write down the spot so that I can study it later. After my sesh, I’ll run to the spot and double check the villain’s play. If the play turns out to be incorrect or not a thing in PIO or Wizard, I’ll just assume that the villain was playing his hand and not his range. That usually happens when someone doesn’t know the spot; they will defer to their hand strength and play face-up.

It used to be Stefan/LuckyCPS. Nowadays, I think that Davy is really into redlining with a lot of raising and such.

Not sure given that I was a huge nit when I played there. I would prolly say to call down quite a lot; there must be some crazy spews/bluffs at those stakes given that it’s almost like play money.

I had coaching back in the day when I was trying to move up from Zoom $200 to $500. That jump was massive, both in terms of skills and bankroll requirements. It helped me build my game in a more structured way and gave me a new set of eyes on how to approach the game. From my personal experience, one should start looking for a coach when you’ve hit a brick wall or when you want to save some time.

I mean, whenever you encounter a spot that you don’t know, you’re always going to be improvising and trying to do what you assume to be correct. When those spots happen, your creativity kicks in. Playing a lot and getting into many unknown spots does help. Also, watching HHs from high stakes sickos is always cool. I watch a lot of HHs from the guys that play super high and it helps develop those abilities.

It naturally stays up usually. There are stretches where it will go down though. Especially when you have one of those sessions where you’re giving up a lot because of blockers/runout or you just have hands that naturally want to c/c/f.

There are timing tells, sure. And I’ll read into them to some degree at times. But to be honest, if a combo is a call, I am calling it unless I’m vs a nit fish or unless I have a dead read. I never tilted but I would curse a lot when playing if I was running bad. Not the way to go. I took some mental coaching lessons and it helped me quite a lot. I also did a lot of work on myself. When the cards are not going my way, I tell myself that if I stick to my winning strat and keep calling what I need to call and keep folding what I need to fold, I will be fine in the long run. That’s it. Easier said than done though.

Learned outside of poker: to be in tune with my emotions and to accept them. Learned because of poker: trusting the process.