Hey, everyone, It's Andrew Luckychewy Lichtenberger for Octopi Poker Today I wanted to make a video, and this really goes out to all the people
who are playing poker and want to improve, in particular ones
who want to know how to study poker but don't really know
exactly how to go about this. So I thought long and hard,
and I came up with some creative ideas which essentially distill poker strategy and poker theory down
into four building blocks. And from there I created ten axioms
with which you can use to consider all the different ideas
that are significant when you're in game playing and
what should be going through your mind. And ideally, you figure out how to weight
all these different variables appropriately so that you can make
the best decision in any given moment. And if I may take a moment here, the thing
that's so fascinating about poker is that the strategic ideas are so simple, but it's their relativity and weight in relationship to one another
that makes the game so complex. So in many ways
you could relate it to life, and that's a whole
nother tangential topic. Let's go ahead and jump in. So these four building blocks
are positioned in particular to your position relative
to that of other people at the table, because that is often one of the largest considerations in range building,
which we're going to get into. So two players playing an early position
is significantly different than two players playing late position is
significantly different than one player. An early position
and one player in late position. So that's the first one position. The second is your stack size and you
can measure your stack size in big blinds and you can also measure your stack size
relative to the pot size. That's more of a post flop idea. But what it allows you to do is understand how much your hand and in a broader sense, your range is worth relative
to that of your opponents. And this is where we start
to get into some more advanced ideas of thresholds
and inflection points in strategy. But we're going to keep things more basic. We can get into that later. So the third idea is actually range
construction, and your range is all of the hands
that you could have in a particular instance or all the hands
that your opponent could have. Now you only get to play
one of those hands, you know, the actual cards are dealt. But the idea of thinking about this meta
of what your range can be informs
all of your strategic decisions because if we only play our hand
for its value that our opponents will too easily be able to read us
and our strategy will become too obvious. So the fourth here, strategic principle
or pillar of Poker Mastery is strategy, and ranges in strategy
are somewhat interchangeable because in order to generate ranges,
we have to understand at least loosely,
what kind of strategy we want to play. And in order to derive strategy, we need to at least understand roughly
what a range looks like. So this is where it becomes
a little bit paradoxical, but if we rely on the positions
and the stack sizes, particularly stack sizes
in relationship to pot, we're able to grasp largely what it is
we need to think about when we're focused on range
construction and strategic ideas. And those two things are really the cornerstone of playing
excellent poker and poker mastery. So let's go ahead and jump into these ten
poker axioms that I created. The first is, the closer
you are to the button, the greater your positional advantage
that makes sense, right? The button is always in position As such, the closer you are to the button,
the more likely you are you are to be in position and the higher
in general your win rate will be. The second is that you must employ very different strategies
when you're in versus out of position. And this is because your range
has different preferences, whether you are playing in
or out of position. Sometimes strategic ideas
can be very similar in certain cases
when you're in versus out of position, but that's not enough necessarily
to rely on at all times. So the third is that the later your position, the wider your range, and that's because you have less players
to get through. So if we're an early position,
we have the whole table to get through. But if we're on the button,
we only have the blinds. And this is a nice way to think about how easy or challenging
it can be to win pots. And I always like to look at things
kind of if we take them to their extreme. The reason that when you play heads up
or one verse one you play so many hands is because there's
only one player to get through. So this idea can be mapped
quite nicely onto full ring games where there's six, seven,
even eight players at the table. The fourth is that
your hand is concealed by your range. And I find that, that this is particularly
helpful for a lot of newer players. And we touched on this idea earlier,
but really what it comes down to is that your opponent doesn't know
where your cards are and you don't know what theirs are either. So given that the best thing we can do is to approach things from this meta
perspective where we consider what are all the possible hands
that a certain player could have, and where
this really starts to get interesting, which we're not going
to get too much into here, other than mentioning
it is the idea of splitting ranges. So you have a consideration
of all the hands that you could have or that your opponent could have. And then we break off
different chunks of those bigger range and take different
strategic actions with them. And what that does is it creates
a very specific composition of ranges and it allows for certain
strategies to manifest. So that might sound abstract, but in time these ideas will make sense
if you stick with it. The fifth is ranges become wider as stack sizes decrease. So the less chips that you have relative
to the blinds, relative to the size of the pot,
the more hands you can play because the cost of being wrong in
some sense is significantly less and it allows for well,
I'm jumping the gun here. Let's go ahead and and wait for the axiom that describes
the concept that I was trying to explain. So the sixth is that as stacks increase, so too does positional advantage. And it's important to take a moment here
and describe the idea of effective stacks. So if you have 50 big blinds
and your opponent has 100 big bonds, the effective stack is only 50 big bonds, Your opponent's additional 50 big ones might have some strategic implications
in the context of a tournament where playing hands and having an all
in won't lead to the elimination of that player who has more chips
in this case, 100 big points. But strategically, often we
want to know what the effective stack is because that allows us to understand
how much can be risked in relationship to the pot. And a common idea
is that we take things to the extreme to understand what the the risk is when those scenarios do happen to occur. And what that allows us to do
is understand more deeply what the risk mitigation
strategies can be. If we understand what hands in our range
are too strong to want to play so aggressively early or too weak to not want to get all in. Not sure how much of this is too advanced,
but I'd like to plant seeds for these more intricate concepts
because in time they will start to make sense
and they will bloom and form an overall strategic
umbrella of understanding. So the seventh year is that as stacks
go up, equity realization goes down, and as stacks go down, equity
realization goes up. And this is what I almost jumped
the gun on earlier. So the reason this is true is because if you think about an instance
where you only have a single big blind, you're going to realize
all of your equity. Now, what does that mean? It doesn't mean
that you're always going to win, right? But it means that your hand and your range
will get to see all five cards. So nothing is left out of the equation. In terms of win rate,
you're always going to be able to maximize the realization of your equity, meaning you always get a showdown and
you don't have to put any more chips in. Now, this is not the case
if stack sizes are much deeper, if stack sizes are a lot deeper,
you're going to face big bets and raises
across multiple betting streets. And you won't always be able
to see showdown so effectively. So this really comes in handy
when forming free flop ranges because in order to understand
how your free flop range looks, you have to know what the implications are
of playing certain hands in certain scenarios. So the eighth is that deeper stacks
allow for more creative and aggressive strategies and that flows
nicely from number seven, right? The deeper stacks,
the deeper the stacks are, the more you can make these large bets
and raises and making these large bets and raises allows you
to increase your equity realization. And this is somewhat of an art form to me. I've always felt
that poker has this creative element and being able to understand again
what the implications are of certain action sequences, both
for your range and your opponent's range. Is that sort of true
artistic component to poker? So the ninth is that proper
strategies are predicated on identifying ranges and accurate, accurately weighting their subsets. So what does that mean? Well, we talked about this earlier. The idea of having a range and then breaking it down
into certain subsets of that range, tell you specifically what types of hands
compose your opponent's range. So now it's not only about figuring out
what kind of hands are in there, it's figuring out what those hands
actually mean. So a common idea
here might be that we end up on the river and let's say a third heart comes
and now there's a possible flush. What we would want to do in order to strategically identify
what makes the most sense is figure out how often we have a flush and how often our opponent has a flush. And at the top end of ranges,
the strongest hands that either player can have,
being able to accurately identify what sorts of likelihood
there is for the relative weight of one player having a philosophy versus
another one player having a straight versus
another asset to pair, etc.. That really is
one of the largest components of dictating that sizing and race sizing,
because if I have a flush four times as often as you do,
I'm probably going to be able to bet really big because I get to exploit
that aspect of my range. And the last here is that precise
strategies are a synthesis of position stacks and ranges,
and that's really all there is to it. Now, what we've done in Octopi
poker is created a social and collaborative learning system for you to be able to come
and take your hand histories, collaborate with people in our community,
bring your friends and essentially learn together
and understand better what poker is, what makes up
these different strategic ideas. So with that said,
we hope that you'll come and join us and we wish you all the best
at the tables. Take care. Peace.
