Lesson 9 Flashcards
What is Textural Awareness?
The ability to understand how different boards affect range advantage, nut advantage, equity mapping, and polarisation.
What are the three broad categories of board texture?
- The Still Lake
- The Choppy Sea
- The Tsunami
Describe Still Lake textures.
They are innocuous, promote absolute hand rankings, and do not interact much with either player’s range.
What characterizes Choppy Sea textures?
They are average, allowing for intuitive estimation of relative hand strength due to medium range interaction.
What happens during Tsunami Textures?
They degrade the worth of decent hands, turning value bets into checks and checks into possible bluffs.
What is the Snap-Identification Trap?
The tendency to quickly identify hand strength based on common board textures (“choppy sea”), leading to misjudgments.
Think about seeing a snake in nature, and instantly being afraid. This was important for survival but might be bad for me in poker.
What factors can affect the assessment of hand strength in smaller pots?
- The action sequence
- The texture
As SB vs BB SRP,
flop comes AA3 X/X
turn 8 X/X
river 8
SB has Q7s
This is a still-lake texture.
Q high is too strong to bluff(!).
Hand strength exercise:
Is the texture still lake, choppy sea or tsunami, and is the hand weak enough to bluff,mediocre so check, or strong enough to value bet?
as SB vs BB SRP,
Flop 773hsc X/X
Turn 4x c/c
River Kc
action is on sb with TT no club
This is a choppy sea texture, the hand is strong enough to bet
Hand strength exercise:
Is the texture still lake, choppy sea or tsunami, and is the hand weak enough to bluff,mediocre so check, or strong enough to value bet?
LJ vs BB,
flop AKJccs X/X
turn 9d X/X
river 8h X/?
Action is on LJ with 66
This is a tsunami texture, we have one of the worst hands we will ever have getting here, this is a mandatory bluff (GTOW never ever checks 66 back on this board with this action!).
What is Range Geography?
The skill of knowing where different strength-bands of hand begin and end.
List the four critical questions in Range Geography.
Bottom up:
- Where does a hand become too strong to bluff?
- Where does a hand become strong enough to value bet?
OR
Top down:
- Where does a hand become too weak to value bet?
- Where does a hand become weak enough to bluff?
What is a common misconception players have about Still Lake textures?
Players often underrate how strong their hand is due to the more common choppy sea textures serving as a template.
For example on 82237r, K5s is too strong to bluff,first hand which bluffs is K4. AT bets for value(!).
What is the effect of action sequence on hand evaluation in Choppy Sea textures?
There is a large degree of fallibility in hand evaluation due to the strong effect of the action sequence, in this lesson it was little to no action.
The lack of action causes on some hands second pair to be good enough to value bet sometimes.
For example,
Q9564 checked through,sb can cet 6x for value.
What do Tsunami Textures do to the perception of marginal hands?
They cause newer players to overvalue marginal hands based on how they would perform on typical choppy sea textures.
For example,
T96hhhQcAh
two pair plus is the threshold for thin valuebetting,Ax no hearts can check, K9dd can bluff.
What should I think about when raising the river?
Thresholds will be higher in the range as players are facing a polarised range.
What are Polarised Ranges?
Ranges that contain higher concentrations of very high equity hands and very low equity hands.
Fill in the blank: In a small pot, a hand with ___ strength is likely a check or value bet.
strong
Fill in the blank: In a small pot, a hand with ___ strength is likely a check.
moderate
Fill in the blank: In a small pot, a hand with ___ strength could be a bluff.
weak
A GTOW exercise for Lesson 9
Practice spots where either it was checked through, or it was bet small called on the flop and turn went x/x.
Identify the board texture, and what I do with the particular hand I got.
