What Makes Players FEAR The Poker GOAT - Linus' Bluffs Analysis pt. 1

Hey!

A few days ago I published a video about LLinusLLove on my YouTube channel. If you haven’t seen it I highly recommend watching it, because the following breakdowns are referring to the hands in the video.

What Makes Players FEAR The Poker GOAT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwpXGwLW1Ds&ab_channel=2CardConfidence

In there, we watched Linus make 2 bluffs where we saw his hand. Regarding GTO, were these hands actually good combos to bluff with? Or did the GOAT punt off his money?

Let’s find out.

Note: After writing the breakdowns to both of these hands and including images I noticed that this email would get way to long if I included both hand analyses. So to make it easier for you to read, I'll split everything into 2 separate emails, each containing the breakdown for one hand.

So here's hand #1 and hand #2 will be sent out next week!

Hand #1

In this hand ($50/$100 on Pokerstars), Linus has 33 – clubs and diamonds. He open raises and gets called by Nacho124441 in the big blind. On the AK9 rainbow flop, he cbets a bit more than a pot size.

Looking up GTO Wizard, we see that this bet is done with a quite polarized range, meaning mostly strong and also weak hands. Strong hands being sets like KK and 99 (AA prefers checking since it blocks Nacho’s calling range), 2 pair, most good top pairs (AQ/AJ) and some medium top pairs.

Weak hands being gut shots – QJ, QT and JT and then random 4 high to T high combos. All of them being suited though and including the backdoor flushdraw. So all of these high cards are hearts, diamonds and clubs and none of them are spades. Which shows the importance of that extra equity when bluffing.

And then we also have a section of second pair and lower that cbet. Including a few Kx, many 9x and a few low pocket pairs, especially 44, 33 and 22. With Linus’ combo of 33 basically being a pure bet.

We also see that the spades combos like to bet a lot less often overall. Why?

To understand that, we’ll have to look at the turn.

The turn is the T of diamonds. We see another pot sized bet by Linus which would happen around 50% of the time.

Here we see that only the diamonds would barrel. Why?

Well it’s likely because by blocking the A3dd combos we’re blocking a hand that would check call with a 100% frequency, while other A3 suited combos start to mix in some folds. So having the 3 of diamonds in our hand improves our chances of getting a fold.

Also, barreling 33 as a bluff has the nice benefit of at least having 2 outs to a very strong hand. And when we have the 3 of diamonds, one of those 2 outs can’t be an incoming backdoor flushdraw, which improves our EV quite significantly.

For those same reasons, we don’t like to bet 33 with the 3 of spades as much on the flop: we obviously don’t know which card is gonna hit on the turn, but what we do know is that the 3 of spades will never block a bdfd on the turn. So we already start to bet those less often on the flop.

On the river, we do see that threes are just a give up, however.

In contrast to the turn, when barreling a pocket pair at least had the small chance of hitting one of 2 near-to-nut-outs, it simply doesn’t bring any benefits of choosing it as a river bluff.

We’d rather take J high and Q high combos, which block the nutstraight, or even combos that are a pair of Kings, Tens or Nines AND block the nut straight.

Though 33 has zero showdown value, it simply doesn’t do a good enough job of blocking calls – in fact, it even blocks folds in form of A3 suited and offsuited.

So from a GTO perspective, this was not an approved river barrel and the play would only be profitable if Nacho would be overfolding on the river.

(Considering 2 pair hands like K9, A9 and AT are already folding half the time according to GTO, I’d honestly dare to doubt this, as it would have to mean that he is even folding them more often – which I don’t know if it is a realistic assumption).

Sooo... it looks like hand #1 might have actually been a punt by the goat...

Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week for hand #2!

Victor

2 Card Confidence

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