Poker Combos: Everything You Need To Know | SplitSuit

what's going on everyone how we doing today this is James Sweeney aka split suit and today we're going to be doing in my first video of hopefully a very long series and this is going to be all about combos and how to use combos in terms of hand reading and just how to understand combos a little bit better anyway which will definitely help improve both your post flop and your preflop game so before we get started since this is my first video here I figured I would do a little introduction so those of you who don't know who I am have a better idea of who you're working with so as I said before my name is James Sweeney I go by split suit or split on twoplustwo and I am author of dynamic flowing pucker beyond the basics which was released late last year in 2010 and I have been playing poker for about five years now been coaching poker for about three and in that time I've worked with about give or take a little more than 300 students at this point so I've definitely done quite a bit of coaching gotten very comfortable with it I was a video maker over at stocks for quite some time I did about 25 videos over there I am currently on the card runners roster as well and I am hoping to have better w'sup results this year than it did last year that way who knows maybe some of you who don't know me may actually see me on TV so fingers crossed but anyway so getting right back into it so we're going to talk about today is combos and combos are very very useful and they're useful because they allow us to put real backing and understanding to ranges now for those of you who might not think in terms of ranges what we mean is we don't when we're hand reading we're not trying to pinpoint our opponent on exactly one hand because it's almost impossible to do you know there's occasionally spots where we can do it but most of the time we're working within a range you know our opponent probably has you know the top 5 percent of his range or maybe he has these logical hands but I can't exactly pinpoint him on one versus the other so combos are useful because they can give actual back into that you know if there's quite a few combos of one side or another of that range then we can actually use that info to our advantage so because we like to do everything in a very linear fashion when we're talking about poker we're going to first start this video talking about preflop combos both just the introduction the basics of them and then talk about weight and then also show an example how we can use it in real time that kind of stuff and then after that rest are talking about post flop combos so again basic intro to how many combos there are of this versus that talk a little bit about weight and then also go through a couple of post flop examples so you guys can actually see how this stuff is used and if you already know this stuff cool chances are you probably still take a little something out of this so even if you feel you have combos decently understood maybe you've read my concept of the week maybe you've done some other reading I still think you'll get something out of this and it this video will probably only be like half hour 40 minutes so I definitely suggest sitting through it and I'll try to make it as graphically entertaining as possible as well so sit back and let's get ready to start with some pre flop combos all right so just a rough intro to combos is understanding how many combos of different types of hands there are so just real quick there's effectively three or four different kind of hands we can have free flop we can have paired hands we can have unpaired hands we can have suited hands and we can have unsuited it's effectively that's pretty much all we're dealing with so when we look at something like pairs say pocket pairs there are six combos of each pair so I'll flash them on the screen right here so you can see what I'm talking about and so there's six of each different pair and four unpaired hands there are sixteen combos and just as importantly as how many of their unpaired there are twelve unsuited and there are going to be four suited combos so the four suited combos of course are going to be xx of Hearts xx clubs xx of diamonds xx of spades so now we have a framework to work with so one of the big things we want to think about when we're trying to talk about combos and just as importantly talk about things like ranges is talk a little bit about weight you know if someone is opening deuces plus Ace King where is the weight of that range well the range is obviously going to be very concentrated on pairs but the second we start adding things like say ace Queen Plus or ace Jack plus maybe throw some king queen in there very very quickly we can start talking about the unpair Broadway stuff has a lot of weight in that range because there's 16 combos of each of those hands versus the 6 combos of pairs so when we're looking at things like range we want to think about where is the weight of that range is that Ray is that range weighted towards weak stuff is that range weighted towards strong stuff how is it going to react if we three them how is it going to react if we do X versus Y so these are those things we cost they want to be thinking about and we can get some of this if we look at things like you know EPP fr for instance so let's say our opponent raises 10 percent of hands from EP so that means ten percent of hands looks roughly like all pairs and some Broadway combos so that range starts to become mildly weighted between pairs and unpaired now let's say our opponent only opened 5% now that range looks something like sevens plus an ace king which is a pretty snug range and if we look at that the weight of that definitely starts to favor a little bit more of the pair stuff especially if we say like a 7% open range which is more like deuces plus ace king or definitely the pair of stuff is going to be heavily weighted so let's talk real quick about looking at weight and how we can use weight in an example okay I don't know about you guys but I tend to learn a little bit better when I do things and reap layers and such what I'm talking about real hand examples rather than just try to talk about them theoretically so let's take a hand like this where we get an open and we're deciding whether or not we want a three-bet so let's just start talking a little bit about range and weight and where then we'll go into the example and start talking about that so at this point we always have to assign a range so at this point we can use things like stats we can use how just you know default range of the level you're playing a default range of the player type you're playing against that kind of stuff so let's just assign a range here of deuces plus ace 10 plus and King Jack Plus which is generally a pretty fair open range for someone racing from NP maybe a little bit on the looser side at a flooring table but if you're running any sort of top of the tag spectrum bottom of the lag spectrum you're definitely opening these kind of hands most of the time so I mean that your left isn't completely terrible so with that in mind let's start breaking this range down and seeing what it looks like when we're talking about weight so at this point if we look at the pair's juices two aces we're looking at 78 combos of hands if we look at the suited combos things like a stencil is King suited King Queen suited we're looking at 24 combos of hands look at unsuited things like ace jack-off these Queen off King Jack off we're looking at 72 combos of hands so if we look at it right here we're giving our opponent an opening range of give or take around 174 combos of hands now is the number 174 very important yes and no it becomes important when we're doing math and it's important that we have a basic idea of the number being 174 but when you're really playing the chances of you very quickly say okay he has 174 combos hands isn't really going to be something that you do because it's just really difficult to do that so what you really want to do is just have an inherent understanding and ballpark idea of these kind of things and oftentimes you can get this just from like messing around with pucker stone and basic combos for like an hour you mess around with it just for a little bit till you have a really good innate understanding of this stuff and that way it becomes more automatic when you're playing so you don't have to sit there and count the combos on your hands because that's just a massive waste of time you just want to have a ballpark and hear a good idea and then be able to go forward from there okay so that's talking a little bit about that and that's obviously important but that's not the whole thing we can't just look at someone's opening range and have much of had a clue of what to do so another thing we can look at is say Cassie rich what we just looked at was the O range has opened his original range of hands and that was 174 combos so I always like to look at something like a C range something the range of hands that he would continue with because I like to see if I can get away with things like light 3betting and other such things so if we assign a C range let's say something like tens plus and a skin which maybe is a little loose maybes a little tight or just use it so we have some starting block to start with so at this point if we look at a range of tens plus ace-king we're looking at thirty combos of paired hands tens plus and we're looking at sixteen combos of ace-king the unpaired stuff so at this point if we want to just get a strict idea on how often we thought he was going to fold we would just take a hundred percent minus 46 divided by one seventy four we're taking the amount of the hands he would continue it divided by the hands that he opened one hundred-percent - that number gives us a percent of how often we think he would fold so at this point we think he's folding give or take around what seventy three percent of the time seventy three point six there it is so at this point we think he's folding a lot of the time so actually regardless of what our cards are we can probably actually throw out a very profitable three bet here and that's of course is always good for business and can always help us get a little bit of extra edge but if we look at something like combos and blocker then also we can have a totally different understanding of this and it can actually give more or less validity for going for things like light three bets and such let's go back to the classroom talk a little bit about blockers and then come back to this example and talk about how we can really use that to our advantage all right so in case you've never heard about blockers before when we talked about blockers we're talking about having a card that makes it more or less difficult for our opponent to have other hands that relate to that card so it's just take a quick example let's say that we have one of my favorite three betting hands let's say a sports suit okay so if we have a slore suited we block quite a few combos of our opponent's hands having the four in our hand we block out the amount of ways that he can make things like five four suited if he's opening that three four suited if he's opening that pocket fours which is almost always opening so that's good so instead of our opponent having six combos of fours now also he can only have three combos before we've knocked it in half which is not the most important thing we look at something like say our opponent having fours but it helps a lot when we look at the ace in our hand so us having the ace in our hand blocks the amount of combos of our opponent having pocket aces from six down to three so we knocked out half of this combos of the most powerful starting and that's good for us for sure another thing that we can look at is how it blocks out things like Ace King or ace Queen if he's opening them so what we look at here we're looking at blockers is let's take a skink so our opponent concert' with 16 combos of a skinny 12 suit 12 unsuited for sooted so if we take out one of the aces now all of a sudden he's left with only 12 combos because we've knocked out one of the suited combos it wouldn't knocked out four of the end suit I'm sorry three of the unsuited combos so now this is fantastic now all of a sudden we've taken half of his most powerful handle and from the aces we've taken a quarter of his ace King away which is one of those more powerful hands and if we look at things like remember we were talking about that see range earlier if we're knocking out big pieces of that part of his range we're probably getting a couple extra folds and that's before we even look at the added equity of having a s4 and you know god forbid our opponent calls or whatever calls our three bet all of a sudden we have a hand that has a bit more equity so we have all this good stuff coming from a blocker hands and this is why a sexes hands are fantastic four three betting but you can also take the same rationale with a king because you're blocking out combos of Ace King from 16 down to 12 you knock out combos of Kings from again six down to three so you're taking these hands that are doing a lot of damage to his combos and mind you it does affect his opening combos but more importantly it affects his continuance combos which is what we really care about especially when we're looking at things like aggressive three betting aggressive for betting five bet shifty and things like that so these are things that we can definitely use to our advantage so let's go back to that hand and look and see how these kind of blockers can affect the evie of our of our plays alright so let's go back to this example the one where we were contemplating three betting and say we actually do go for the three bet so at this point let's look at a couple different things first of all let's start looking at his or age let's assign them the same stuff we did last time I think he's going to open deuces + phase 10 + King Jack + and we think if we three bet he's going to continue with tens plus an Ace King okay so if remember from last time we assigned give or take around what we do 78 combos of pairs 24 combos of suited and 72 combos of unsuited so this time because we have the ACE in our hand which blocks out everything from ace 10 + to pocket aces and we have the 7 which blocks out pocket sevens so now if we look at his opening range we're looking at a pair range of 72 combos a suited range of 20 combos and an unsuited range of 60 combos so now instead of him opening that reign cheated last time of 174 combos of hands now he's down to 152 and that's actually pretty dramatic we've blocked out a significant amount of his hands and it'd be even more impressive if our seven were say like a jack something that blocked out his ace Jack combos even further his King Jack combos things like that okay so that's just something to consider is how dramatic blockers can alter both his opening range and his see range so if we look at his see range and again we consider that he's going to open wit I'm sorry that he's going to continue with tens plus an ace king well tens plus now makes up 27 combos down from 30 and the unpaired that is K makes up 12 combos down from 16 so now we've dramatically changed the amount of hands he can continue with thus we're going to change how often he's folding as well so if we take that same formula 100% - 39 / 150 - now all the sudden we're getting a outright fold percentage of 74.3% which is only up about a point from the other stuff but if we run it through an Eevee equation it actually has almost a not quite but almost a 10 cent difference and a 10 cent difference is dramatic I don't really know if you realize this but given how thin edges are becoming and mind you not as much as at the pure micro stakes but especially as you start working into small and medium stakes especially the edges are just getting very very thin so anytime you can generate just a slight bit of extra edge and here we're just looking at math we're not looking at anything else really it's it's very very beneficial to your bottom line now does this mean that I want to 3bet everybody just because I have lockers good god no I still don't want a three-bet people that don't have full buttons I don't want a three-bet people that are going to open up their sea Ridge if they're going to open up and start for betting more and all of a sudden instead of fold in you know the large 74 ish percent of the time now I'll son they're only folding 50 that's not really good for me now all of a sudden I don't know if they're bluff for betting I don't know if they're opening their value range maybe they're for betting nines for quote unquote value I don't know all I know is I don't want to face it it's has something I'm brilliant I don't really want to have to get for bed i'm just looking here for outright folds that's that's the real profit in this play especially when i have something like blockers or if I have extra ways I know I can win this pot so again looking at things like blockers looking at combos both in terms of the au range and the C range can be vastly beneficial to our bottom line and especial we're trying to be more aggressive preflop these are those little things that we can oftentimes look to inject into our game and these are things that we can work on off the table very easily and we should be working on them off the table it should just be automatic if person opens X range and continues with Y range what kind of profit can I expect and the whole thing is it's really difficult to come up with an entire ez of the play because what are you going to do when he calls what are you going to do if he min forbids what are you gonna do if he calls and you catch Tom Perry or he calls me Miss blah blah blah so it's very difficult to come up with the entire evie but if a play is outright Evie I'm really really happy to take it as long as it's easy enough if it's super thin and I could be wrong in the margin of errors against me probably just going to err on the side of being a little bit tighter but if the margin of error is especially in my favor or if I just know it's a good plus EB play no reason not to take it so again these are some things we want to be working on off the table can dramatically benefit our bottom line and again it's all mathematical very simple and do a little bit of work with it and it will become something that is incredibly simple in it you're going to be able to use it in real time and create some extra profit which is always nice so let's stop talking about preflop let's go and talk about post flop for a little bit and talk about how combos and blockers can be useful there as well okay so let's start talking a little bit about post fault combos and how we can use those to become better post flop players so just like with preflop we can look at basic categories of post flop combo so let's just do that now so if let's just throw out a board and XYZ type board where every card is different and look at how many things we can make on it so if we're looking at things like pocket pairs and sets if we look at an XYZ board assuming that every single pocket pairs in our opponents range with time he got there he could have nine possible combos of sets three of each one so again remember each pocket pair number of combos and preflop is six so we have what we call the 631 rule so if six combos of all the missed sets three combos of all the hit sets and if the board is paired there's only one combo of that quads very simple so that's the way that we like to look at sets and again this is what I think a lot of people start panicking post bump so no no there's a lot of stuffs that can be made but really if you look at it yes generally not not a ton of sets that can be made so let's look at the next thing of single pairs so let's say or look at a top pair what you do is you let's say a cyborg we're trying to figure out how he combos of a scalar opponent can have so what you do is you take the for unseen cards times the three unseen cards and you have 12 combos so if the board is Qinghai there's four unseen aces there's three unseen Kings now twelve combos of top pair made with ace king very simple and we can use that all the time but we can also use that when we're looking to something like two pair so say the board is East Kings seven and we're trying to figure out how many combos a piece can your opponent can have well there's three unseen aces there's three unseen Kings so there's nine combos of two pairs very very simple and we can also look at things like flush draws and flush draws are always a little bit weird and I think people tend to overestimate how wide a fluster range really is let's say your opponent preflop really only calls with something like East King and East Queen of whatever suit suit it ends so if the board is xxx or we'll just give it a given by flush draw there's club club on board whatever then there are really only two accomplish you can have ace king of it is queen of it and also if one of those cards is on board possibly zero for looking things like blockers so post flop combos are very very simple and often times it's just very easy multiplication how many combos of excuse me how many unseen X card times how many on the scene of y card you get an idea how many combos you can have and it gets a little bit more complicated when you look at entirety of range but we can also use a program like flop Zilla to get a quick idea so it's both are fobs illa talk about how to use it and have some fun with that program all right so let's introduce some of you guys to flop Zilla if you have flop Zilla I definitely suggest using it a lot if you don't I definitely suggest picking it up if you have a spare 15 bucks lying around which reminds me if you go to buy it let him know that I sent you he'll sell to you for 15 versus 25 so and I just for the record I don't get any kickback on that that's just strictly a deal for you guys because I think it's a great program I think most people should have it so anyway so this is the program on the left we have things like predetermined ranges that you can set and save on the right we have dead cards and dead cards obviously for us we'll just be our whole cards but if you're playing say live and some donk flips up this cards or whatever you can always throw them in there because they will affect things like combos and blockers so let's just do something quick real quick inside here so we can see how to use it so let's give our opponent some sort of 12% range give some sort of board and let's see how to use this program so really what we're looking at is it tells you how your opponent hits each of these given categories so things like pocket pairs below top and if you select it it will show you what they are on the left and also on the top left what how many combos there are so if you want to cheat you can definitely use this to your advantage I don't think you can use this program while you're playing I don't think certain sites allow that but again this is something you do off the table just to get a really quick and grained understanding on how to look at again combos blocker is that kind of stuff so the big thing I like to look at here are things like flush draws and also how blockers affect certain things so let's do something real quick give our opponent a 5% open range put a flush draw board and look at some stuff so at this point what I want you to pay attention to right over here is the flush draw okay so flush draw is 1.7 percent I don't know about you but I can really care less if someone has 1.7 percent of anything in their range yet alone flush draws give a slightly wider opening range so flush draw actually did nothing and also you notice why because the ace Queen suited is blocked out by the Queen on board so now your opponent can no longer have ace queen of clubs so you can still only have ace king of clubs exactly given the range that we're assigning give a slightly opening wider opening range now also in two percents give an 18% opening range now I'll send its roughly 3% I don't know about you but I could really care less about that if you look down here he does have a gut shot in flush draw for 0.7 so let's round that up like three and a half again don't really care about that 24% hands now all the sudden we're looking at some flush draw so seven and change a couple percent from down there so we're talking about less than 10% of flush draws again I don't know about you but I could really care less about that and just to get really crazy it's just throwing every suited combo possible we have what 12% plus a couple combos from down here like Baron Perrin flush draw we're talking about what maximum 15% you know again I don't really panic about 15% of that it's just not something to worry about so those of you that really freak out when you see a flush draw on board that's the standard thing to do most people do do that so you're not you know you're not by your own in that thinking but it's really not that correct because our opponents usually don't have mass amounts of flush draws and we really shouldn't be that petrified of them now obviously if a flush draw fills and our opponent gets active we should probably reconsider how much action we want to give there but I really wouldn't suggest like freaking out just because there's a foster on board and taking a line that maybe is not that good you know maybe it's clinical protecting against the flush draw which is in my opinion horrible reason but let's just say it was that's not really how we play good poker we play good poker by maximizing against his range not by protecting against a small sliver of our opponents range okay so that's my flush draw spiel and then the other thing we can look at are things like combos so let's give our opponent a Thai opening range deuces plus ace queen plus your nose that's roughly eight percent of hands give me a high board and we're see how hit so we notice up here our he has three different sets again so it makes for nine combos three of each and top parry has a lot of those and it's just strictly because there's a wider density or sorry heavier density on a sec stuff so let's say we throw in some of this stuff as well you know now so not top hair density gets really high but the second you start throwing in more things that dilute it say like worst Kings now also you notice that number starts tanking so this is what when I'm talking about weight this is exactly what I'm talking about so if we give him that eight percent range back again you know he's really hammering a sex boards pretty hard only because a lot of this range is a sex but also a lot of his range bricks because he has you know 6 combos deduces that whiffed six combos or 3s to whiff that kind of stuff but you're noticed that if we look at how often he hits if we look at just top pair plus he's only hitting about a third of the time that's pretty good for us I mean we can do a lot of aggressive attacking against him if you see bets this board you know if we think we can raise and get them to fold things like kings and unimproved eights and stuff this can be a really nice board now we also have to look at things like combo or blocker sorry so if we look over here at the dead cards let's say that we give ourselves pocket 5 sure you know as that does definitely change things at least a little bit now also we block out combos of hands the width for him so that's something that we can definitely think about and again when I'm talking about attacking him I'm an only really attacking him if you see betting the entire range if he's always see that in like 40 percent of the time that really means he's seen betting pretty much the nuts and which case I really wouldn't be giving him much action so the other thing we can use to our advantage when thinking about this and just thinking in general is talking a little bit about blockers so if we give them this same range of 8% range and go over here and give her so something like I don't know ace Queen suited sure your notice his top pair percentage two drops pretty dramatically so drops from 125 down to 18 that's pretty dramatic and one thing we want to think about here is when we have ace queen is we block out the amount of combos that he can make with top pairs so if we go over here hover you notice his combos drop down to 14 and this is pretty important and also why we should be kind of petrified when he starts getting really active because we have the bottom of our value range he beats us with ace king he chops us with ace clean there's nothing we can really be beating like a jack or anything like that so if he starts getting really aggressive on this board we should kind of start panicking for the record unless he's really kind of an aggro so again this is the kind of way that I would use flop Zillah is I run through different textures I see how he tends to hit on them I look at things like blockers and again blockers are very simple if I have a sex and I say we take the same example I have East Queen I'm trying to figure out how many combos of East King he has well he has two unseen aces and there's four unseen kings so there's eight combos of Ace King from trying to figure out how many combos of East Queen he has there are two unseen aces there are three unseen Queens so six combos of that again very very simple you're just taking unseen number times other unseen number and just multiplying them and getting a basic idea and really the way that I like to use flop Zillah is start getting idea on what weight does so if I weight the pair part of his reign and the board comes hi what does that do to him if I weight the pair if I weight the Broadway part of his range say I give him this kind of stuff and I put a low card board up you know what does that really do to his range notice he's not hitting hardly anything you know over pairs trip three of a kind sorry say he continues with all those it's really not hitting hard even if we give them every single pair notice where most of his ranges ace high over cards nothing all that kind of junk so this is the way that I like to use flop Zillah just get in here an understanding of range and we - that kind of stuff what I would really suggest doing get it play with it for about I don't know half hour per day for two weeks you probably never need it again unless you get into a really funky situation just you want this you almost want your brain to be able to think like this it should just be inherent variation this up and let's go start cranking through some other stuff maybe some examples and talk about how to use this stuff in real time all right so let's look at a real example and see how we can use this these blockers and these combos and stuff to our advantage so let's take a hand where we steal from the cutoff of nine seven suited my favorite hand get called by the small blind and the small blinds just going to be a tag e dude not a fish or anything just you know your standard unimaginative tag board comes like that he checks and we decided to go for a sea bed and the sea that's pretty standard here if we ran it through flop Zillah and give him a cold call range of say a lot of pairs some Broadway combos like East King ace queen ace Jack King Queen and we're definitely getting folds at least half the time and if we throw a half pot sea bed out there and only ask to work a third so probably making enough profit here justify going for the sea bet plus we always can double barrel occasionally and all that kind of fun stuff and he has up calling which of course he's going to do sometimes not shocking we catch this and we decide to go for a dub so we could look at the dub as far as oh my god we picked up equity and don't get me wrong equity is fantastic I'm not complaining about it but what I'm really saying here if I'm going to go for a bet is okay I think there's enough combos of things that I that will fold versus the combos that will never fall so for instance the combos that will never fold three combos of deuces three combos of fives three combos of pocket eights there are say we give them a king and king queen and his opening range preflop so we're talking about twelve of each of those so 24 24 plus the nine or talking about what 33 combos so 33 combos of that if I bet half pot or say a bet anything less than pot I need less than half I need less than 50% folds so let's just say I need 50% folds I need him to have at least what say 16 combos of hands so as long as I can come up with 16 combos of hands that would fold here pretty good dub assuming that I think he's folding things like tens and Jack's this is really good assuming I think he's folding things like fours three sixes sevens this is really good now I also have to realize that I block out combos of pocket nines and pocket sevens which of course isn't really that good but of all the other things let's say he floats the flop with threes four sixes sevens 9s 10s jacks and I think he's going to fold most all of that that's member six combos for most all of those more than enough to justify going for this bet I mean I only really need them never three full of those and three full that will fold before I can go for this bet and again that's looking at this without even considering the equity that I have you know I do have a gutshot which is sweet and if he calls here chances are I can probably get a third bet off him when I hit and chances are if he calls he's probably the stronger side of his range given the assumptions that were making so going for a trip would probably be kind of bad unless we thought we could like over a bet it and get him to fold a king which probably isn't happening so again it's very very simple what we're looking for you know how many combos of hands beat us or won't fold so to speak especially when we're looking to something like this where we are going for a bluff so how many combos of hands won't fold and then how many combos of hands can he logically fold or will he logically fold and if I have to make a slightly bigger bet in order to try to get some a might answer jacks to fold maybe I do it if I think it's still Plus Evie so these are the big ways that we can use things like post flop blockers post flop combos and just get a better idea on whether or not we should be making dubs or not I mean if let's say our pub we thought our opponent would only call the flop with the top pair or better then obviously a bet here is ridiculous because you're never getting that two fold I left for some one reason you think he plays really oddly so chances are in a positional body or prone it's not going to fold top there but also chances are he's probably going to peel the flop pinch wider than just pair so at least in this situation you're wrapping real the amount of combos he needs to fold are ginormous compared to how many he can logically continue with but also the entire equation starts to change let's say that we throw King Jack and our opponents range that you call preflop call the flop and probably won't fold to turn now all the side instead of they're only being what 33 combos of hands that won't fold now awesome if we add an extra 12 combos how all a sudden we're up to what 45 now we need to find almost 20 inch on both of hands to fold before we can really feel that great about our bet I don't know about you but I'm not really loving trying to find that me and that's you need to find at least that so I'm not really like fist-pumping trying to find that so in that situation where I think there's more King X in this range and probably not as likely to throw out this dub whereas the last king X you know maybe I think III Benzies King so I take that out of this range preflop maybe I think you three bets King Queen sometimes take some some of those combos out so you see when you look at the combos you just constantly in flux you know how many combos do I think he has how many combos do I think he has based on this texture and more importantly how many compost why I think I can get two fold is most the time I'm bluffing most the time I'm trying to get people to fold I don't know about you but I don't hit very many hands so I need to find other more creative ways to try to make edge and profit again very very simple stuff doesn't really take too much time to get used to this kind of stuff you just need to work on this stuff off the table make sure it becomes automatic and make sure it just becomes something that you can utilize in real time if you can't utilize in a real time yet don't go out there and start aggressively double-barreling because if you're going to start exposing a lot of your stack you want to have a good idea on why and when to do it you don't just push buttons for the hell of pushing buttons push button because you know they're plus e fee buttons alright so let's look at another two examples as well so we can look at a couple different ways to look at this stuff all right so let's look at another example let's say we open Queens from the hijack and get called by the big blinds and we end up getting a board of a seven seven and he checks and say we decided we're going to go for a bet here we think he's going to make enough mistakes so we end up going for a little more than a half Potter and just trying to get some value from our opponent and say he ends up cheque raising so at this point what we're really asking or should be asking ourselves is how many combos of hands beat us and after that how many combos of hands I think do it we think you would logically do this with so in this situation if we look at big hands there is one combo of quads again pocket sevens there is there are three combos of aces but you probably three bets that preflop so we can just pretty much take those out and there's a couple combos of say like six seven so two unseen sevens for unseen sixes so there's eight combos of six seven eight combos of seven eight suited I'm sorry of seven eight off if you don't look at just the student combos then there are only going to be two combos of six seven and two combos of eight seven because there's going to be six seven of Spades and six seven of diamonds same with eight seven so again it really depends on do you think he's calling with offsuit combos or just suta combos post-flop that can dramatically alter the way that you give him combos here so let's assume that the big blind is a smart player understand showdown value and we don't think he would really check raise and turn something like say ace jack or YZ queen or ace king into a bluff here because if he does he's really not getting called by much second best may be the occasional east jacker he's queen but probably not a tremendous amount of it so if we don't think he would check raise an ace here he's pretty much check raising one combo of pocket sevens maybe a few combos of six seven and eight seven suited but that's if he even called with that preflop say we think he calls versus steals pretty tightly all of a sudden he's really repping nothing so as long as I think he has some Bluff potential I'm probably going to be pretty likely to call this and intend on getting a little bit sticky or post flop because I'm operating under the assumption in that my opponent can't really have a big hand here and thus has to have mostly Bluffs just given the assumptions that I've made both on his player type his calling range and the way that he would quote unquote value check rates that flop so this is a really really easy situation where we can use combos to our advantage looking at how he calls the open range preflop looking at how he would value checker as the flop for instance against a fish I would be petrified when they check raise that flop because a fish will check raised ace three here and it doesn't make any damn sense but fish or fish so it really can't be shocked about that so I'm going to be a lot more scared against a fish check raising but what a good player check raise is especially one who understands showdown value who won't turn something like East Jack into a bluff here because again that's effective what the check raise does then against him I'm probably going to be more likely to get sticky assuming I think he Bluffs at all against a fish I'm going to be more petrified so again using combos using all the information you have available and creating better lines based upon that is really what we want to use post log combos for and again it's really simple once you get some practice with it and go forward from there let's do one more hand as well because I like the last time that we have all right so let's go over one last hand because I really like this example I think this one was a lot of fun when I originally played it so I open from the cutoff get called by the fish in the small blind go heads up and catch second pair so I go first II bet here thinking that he'll probably call with some second-best hands everything from over cards to gut shots to any pocket pair probably threes through eights type stuff I mean Fisher fish they're going to make those kind of mistakes a lot so he calls turn comes to six and he checks so at this point I decide to go for another value bit because he's a fish he'll probably call with again enough second best stuff will probably definitely call with you know all the gut shots and stuff and I think I'll call with these high and stuff sometimes as well and also fish oftentimes love to do things like check-raise top air for no reason so I actually think it's slightly discounts the amount of hands to beat me that way and also if yes let me like jacks plus he probably three bits that preflop so I'm just going for pure value bets against him no obviously if I face any resistance post flop will probably definitely reconsider the strength in my hand but if he's just going to call I'm definitely thinking that I'm good a very large percentage of the time then the ten comes on the Riv and he checks again so at this point it makes it incredibly difficult for him to have anything 10x because one he didn't check raise it anything on the flop return so it kind of discounts at that because he's a fish and also now that the board paired with that 10 now it's even harder from Avenue 10x combos so at this point I just think I pretty much have the nuts and it really just becomes a question of how big can I bet to get value so I don't think he's going to love if I fire off here for like 23 and try to get value from worse 9 6 7 that kind of stuff so actually go a little bit smaller roughly around half pot try to get looked up by something like high card ace Jack or crack call 9 crack call 6 crack call eights and again I really never think I'm behind which definitely helps the equation for instance against a better player I'd be really hard-pressed to bet this because the combos of hands that would continue I don't really do well against you know a good player isn't really going to call three streets here with anything that I beat so oftentimes the bet against him would be kind of bad but a bet against a fish like this can be purely for value because they get so sticky with just everything so again extra ways you can look at combos and also abuse players that's either play too tightly or play too weakly or whatever it be so again post-fall combos are extremely simple and things that we want to use as much as possible when creating lines when looking at the evie of certain plays when thinking about value bats or Bluffs or any of this kind of stuff and we can also look at it when our opponents betting into us you know how many combos a real hands does he really have could I possibly check-raise here because he's full gonna fold a time ton of the time that kind of stuff for instance I love to check race aggressively on ace high boards against people that seabed 100% of their rage because it's going to be really tough for them to continue so those are those kind of things that I really like to attack and again a lot of this is off the table exercises you can do just so that it becomes automatic and you can just utilize the stuff real time you understand who to attack how to attack that kind of stuff so again hopefully you enjoyed it hopefully you got some extra stuff out of it those of you that already knew some of this stuff hopefully you found an extra application or two that was obviously the main goal and for those of you who this is an introduction to hopefully you definitely get enough out of this and I think if you spend again spend some off off the table time with it you're definitely benefit drastically from it so again hopefully you enjoyed it if you come up with any questions or anything don't hesitate to let me know and if I can be of any help in the future just give me a heads up so hopefully you enjoyed the first vid hopefully I'll have another one out relatively soon and then we can start working on some other aspects of our game so again hopefully you enjoy it if you need anything let me know otherwise good luck out there and happy grinded

Channel: The Poker Bank

Views: 348,960

Keywords: poker, texas holdem, combinatorics, flopzilla, combos, blockers, counting combo, nuts, bluffs, density, ranges

Id: UU8XoH0bRHw

Length: 43min 59sec (2639 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 08 2013