This is Ed Balls. He's a member of the opposition Labour Party front bench. Every Wednesday at Prime Minister's questions time, he sits opposite and does this flat-lining gesture all the while David Cameron speaks. It really winds him up and is quite funny.

Checking my monthly graph today, I could see this gesture staring back at me. It didn't wind me up though! Checking my zillion leggo and private blogs, to my credit I can't find a single time I've whined about runbad. Every losing or breakeven stretch is an opportunity to improve.

At the risk of coming across all Donald Rumsfield, in poker knowledge there are known knowns, known unknowns, and then unknown unknowns. So correct 3betting strategy VS a 90% folder is a known known. Optimal strategy VS a reg minraising IP a lot is a known unknown. I like known unknowns, I can work on them and turn them into known knowns.

Of late, many more unknown unknowns have become known unknowns. So in English, I'm becoming so much more aware of how little I know about much more stuff!

Take this board:

Flop: ($17.40) 9 4 Q (2 Players)

18% UTG+1 raiser cbets this board. We're on the button. He cbets 65%, but higher on this board, and we believe it to be a semi depolarised range where 9x gets cbet, but QT, JJ and TT might check. What % of his range is:

Sets?
TPTK?
TPTK?
2nd pair?
3rd pair? (I'll group all ~77 type hands here)
OESD?
Overpair?
Air?

I honestly don't know. I can count combos OK in the moment, but counting combos wouldn't answer the above questions without counting all the relevant combos and doing some super fast maths. There just isn't enough time, and I feel like I should be able to give a very good instinctive answer based on work I've done when not playing. I bet Sauce knows, and I know a bot knows.



So by a very rough estimate, here's his cbetting range. 17.6% ......... I'm aware that i've taken the raw stove % and K9s is out but T9s should be in etc, but anyway.

Sets, 1.4
TPTK, 2.4
TPGK, 2.4
2nd pair, 1.2
3rd pair, 1.8
OESD, 0.3
Overpair, 0.9
Air, 7.2

Proportionally:

Sets, 7.95
TPTK, 13.64
TPTK, 13.64
2nd pair, 6.82
3rd pair, 10.23
OESD, 1.7
Overpair, 5.11
Air, 40.91

So for a start, the above is actually new information for me. Did I know that typically on this board VS this range he has air ~ 40% of the time ? No I did not.

So, I might be thinking of a bluff raise. We don't rep a ton, but villain is on 16 tables and is slightly risk averse. Should I bluff raise? Should I keep firing if he flats? I'm going to assume for the sake of this that all nuts flats and he never 3bets.

Will fold to a raise: Air+3rd pair + 2nd pair = 57.96%
Will flat a raise and fold to future action: oesd + half of TPWK = 8.52%
Will flat a raise and call future streets: TPTK+half TPWK + overpair + sets = 33.52%

So obviously very inexact, but already I'm starting to get a better feel of this spot. As I've already said, I think Sauce probably knows this stuff. A bot knows this stuff. Someone like D2TheMFI knows this stuff. I don't know this stuff, I haven't looked at it enough. You probably don't know either.

So in summary, as edges are getting smaller I think the future for me getting better lies in getting this type of technical knowledge seared into my brain. All that crEV stuff that D2 has videos on really interests me. Of late I've been much better at adjusting individually to players ....... getting reads on certain ranges and then inferring weaker and stronger parts of said range based on these reads. To properly act on them though, I need all this stuff.

Yeh, so that's me going forward anyway. Time to get rich!