99 UTG vs Loose BTN 3-Bettor. Did I miss value?

Yeah, I would at least wait a while to show. Not sure what the rule is if he refuses to show or muck and you haven't shown. Once you show, he shouldn't have to show. That he had Q6s is good information for the table.

The 20% flop cbet on a wet board that favors the 3-bettor looks like what it was, air trying to get better air to fold. I don't like that sizing at all, and don't believe he does that with range.

Its not air, so not only is your read wrong, its evident from the results. Gto size mixes on this board pretty heavily, and there is nothing about this hand that indicates he wouldnt bet 20% with a made hand. Very good players arent as deathly afraid of letting draws get a good price as this forum is.

To clarify, I would call and wait for him to show without saying what we have. But if he just says you're good I would table my hand.

Wrong, 20-30% flop bet is very standard. You can even get folds from some bad regs (like I read around this forum that say I should fold flop lol). And you can get very thin calls that could be bluffed on later streets if you have a hand like AJ, get called by a TJ and then you bomb turn with range advantage. You can make your opponent fold pretty easily

this 100000000%

if you wanted to see his hand you just call and wait, you don't insta announce your hand

is the implication here we (you can substitute me if you want) are bad regs bc we said you should fold the flop?

he doesn't really look like a reg from results.

I want to add to this because it’s highly relevant to analysis a hand from a vacuum solver approach vs a population tendency to improperly or in sufficiently follow GTO Strat

Namely: not only are they not properly polarized, their c-bet frequency on boards that benefit them is highly likely to increase (in my experience); I attribute this to either a straighter easy to remember oversimplification of a difficult to follow mixed frequency GTO approach. But also a tendency to simply play overly aggressive in spots that are perceived to better for the aggressor

i just ran a sim and want to explore the flop play in accordance with the idea that folding flop is best or the only answer (let me know which of those qualifications you think more closely resembles your thoughts btw, i dont wanna put words in yoru mouth here)

Sim favors OOP flop check over 90%

Sim favors IP range to downbetting with the highest frequency (49.3%), then checking (42%) and I included other bet size options including 66%, 75% and 150% pot (6.7%, 1.7%, .2% respectively)

Here are my questions and i hope you can help:
How do you understand the difference between our villain's strategy and an the solvers unexploitable strategy responding which in turn is responding to assumption that OOP (hero) is also playing an unexploitable strategy?

If there IS a difference: what are the adjustments/deviations from solver strategy?

Are these differences from the pure GTO solver solution discoverable USING the solver?

AND

If there are no differences between villain/hero in hand and a solver strategy/solution, why is that the case?

i will staunchly favor an analysis based solely off a solver simply because the solver 1) doesnt make mistakes 2) is not basing its strategy on max value/exploiting weaknesses of opposing strategy, it is based on defending ITS own actions from opposing strategies ability to extract value from its overall range/hand decisions 3) it doesnt account for anything people perceive about their opponents correctly or incorrectly adjusting according to conclusions on those perceptions 4) it operates such that the opposing strategy is also unexploitable effectively

those 4 points mean that while a "solution" is optimal, it is optimal against only the most efficient opponents. This DOESNT mean it will lose money over sample size vs ineffecient opponents, it means it will not be able to capitalize and WIN MORE than it should when opposition deviates from GTO.

That said - as a foundation to base our actual decisions on, it is essentially the best starting point. It allows you to develop an unfiltered strategy that can effectively ignore 99.99% of live opponents strategies and remain competitive/winning over the long run.

But our goal isnt just to ensure a baseline win rate, it is to find ways to capitalize in as many areas we can to extract the most value from our opponents given the fact that they operate inefficiently in comparison to the solver.

So as a baseline - i followed the action provided in the hand (my bet sizing options deviate slightly but not considerably) and the solver DOES check jam the river.

HUGE caveat: i forgot to adjust my flop to a rainbow so i fudged the turn to accomodate to accomodate a flush draw coming in the turn, so my results are currently based on a 2diamon flop and a 2 spade turn with brick river. The issue is i ran the solver off the flop so I can try to run it again later but it'll take a while.

Here are the two frequency suggestions for 99 specifically in both a KdTd3s flop with a 9spade turn and then a 9heart turn. Action leading up to the turn followed the action given in OP

9spade
Hero with 99 - both remaining combos follow same frequency
Check (23.5%)
1/3rd pot (37%)
2/3rd pot (13.5%)
PSB (14.8%)
125% Pot (9.2%)
150% Pot (2.0%)

9heart
Hero holds 99 - combos differ by 1% max so i'll just choose the grouped % for frequency of action
Check (30%)
1/3rd pot (36.8%)
2/3rd pot (18.1%)
PSB (12.2%)
125% pot (2.7%)
150% pot (0.2%)

And finally river - 9spade, 8club
Hero 99:
Check (93.9%)
Bet 1/3rd pot (6.1%)

Hero in OP checks, Villain has just under 2x pot in stack, bets 80% pot
Hero
Call (1.1%)
Shove (98.9%)

Same as above but turn is 9 heart
Check (100%)

Villain 80% Pot
Hero
Shoves 100%

Before you gave the hand reveal and we realise villain is a spewey fish and not LAG reg, it is pretty clear that 99 is a fold on the flop even to small size. Even in your post you admit that if the preflop raiser double barrels AJ they put JT in a world of pain. But it is much worse with 99 that only improves on 4% of turns. You're basically forced to fold 96% of turns when you call with 99. The small percentage of time you bink a set and win a larger pot won't even make up for it because that is at a maximum 4% of the time.

Small range bet isn't just good because bad regs overfold. If you play perfectly you are forced to fold enough to a small flop bet to make it automatically profitable. If you call more than that you are just making losing calls and forced to overfold turns, which can also be a leak. It is one of my favorite leaks to exploit because you know the double barrel will get through so often.

Ran the sim with the proper flop this time i'll post all my results but did want to comment that even against the 1/3rd pot bet 99 is predominantly a fold:

Hand Fold%/Call%/Ch-Raise4x%
9s9h: 60.1 / 39 / 0.9
9s9d: 66.2 / 33.2 / 0.6
9h9d: 70.7 / 29.1 / 0.2
9s9c: 72.1 27.9 / 0
9h9c: 76.8 / 23.2 / 0
9d9c: 85.4 / 14.6 /0

So overall folding majority but 60/40 roughly with 9s9h and 9s9d when opponent is playing perfectly

When opponent is playing sub-optimally or deviating from GTO (looser ranges, higher frequency of betting an overall looser range) I imagine 99 might shift closer to a coin flip overall. if i get a chance, I'll fudge some looser ranges right now IP villains range is closer to some recommended PF charts but hedged with some extra BS though not a considerable ammount. If I understand loose to be more of a deviation from a qualifier like "somewhat loose" i'd probably add some more **** into that range.

----

Moving to flop turn to see whats different from when i had the wrong flop in there previously:
9heart - we have 3 combos of 99 in solver range when we ch/call flop: 9s9d, 9s9c, and 9d9c - as seen above the 9h combo was favored either as part of some blocker strategy or in some cases ive seen a solver just pick a combo and favor it without much transparency of reason/rationale - i'll list the grouped frequencies for all 99 combos though and I removed 1/3rd pot form hero's potential options on turn - not sure if best decision or not - would our strategy improve with more bet size options vs only check -> 2/3rd pot -> PSB etc
Check (58.4%)
2/3rd pot (28.4%)
PSB (9.7%)
150% Pot (3.5%)

Of the 3 combos of 99, the 9s9d donks higher than the overall with

9heart
Hero holds 99 - combos differ by 1% max so i'll just choose the grouped % for frequency of action
Check (30%)
1/3rd pot (36.8%)
2/3rd pot (18.1%)
PSB (12.2%)
125% pot (2.7%)
150% pot (0.2%)

And finally river - 9spade, 8club
Hero 99:
Check (93.9%)
Bet 1/3rd pot (6.1%)

Hero in OP checks, Villain has just under 2x pot in stack, bets 80% pot
Hero
Call (1.1%)
Shove (98.9%)

Same as above but turn is 9 heart
Check (100%)

Villain 80% Pot
Hero
Shoves 100%

Ran the sim with the proper flop this time i'll post all my results but did want to comment that even against the 1/3rd pot bet 99 is predominantly a fold:

Hand Fold%/Call%/Ch-Raise4x%
9s9h: 60.1 / 39 / 0.9
9s9d: 66.2 / 33.2 / 0.6
9h9d: 70.7 / 29.1 / 0.2
9s9c: 72.1 27.9 / 0
9h9c: 76.8 / 23.2 / 0
9d9c: 85.4 / 14.6 /0

So overall folding majority but 60/40 roughly with 9s9h and 9s9d when opponent is playing perfectly

When opponent is playing sub-optimally or deviating from GTO (looser ranges, higher frequency of betting an overall looser range) I imagine 99 might shift closer to a coin flip overall. if i get a chance, I'll fudge some looser ranges right now IP villains range is closer to some recommended PF charts but hedged with some extra BS though not a considerable ammount. If I understand loose to be more of a deviation from a qualifier like "somewhat loose" i'd probably add some more **** into that range.

----

Onto the turn to see variation from prior sim with proper board cards now:

We have 3 combos of 99 in solver range when we ch/call flop: 9s9d, 9s9c, and 9d9c, as seen above the 9h combo was favored either as part of some blocker strategy or in some cases ive seen a solver just pick a combo and favor it without much transparency of reason/rationale - i'll list the grouped frequencies for all 99 combos though and I removed 1/3rd pot form hero's potential options on turn - not sure if best decision or not - would our strategy improve with more bet size options vs only check -> 2/3rd pot -> PSB etc

Turn 9h
overall with 99
Check (58.4%)
2/3rd pot (28.4%)
PSB (9.7%)
150% Pot (3.5%)

Of the 3 combos of 99, the 9s9d leads more often than average across with 33.3% frequency for 2/3'rds pot, 10.1 for PSB and 4.8 for overbet. Would be interesting to see distribution of check, 1/3rd, 1/2 pot and 2/3rd now. Weird idiosynratic note - the mixed frequency for PSB and overbet was the highest across the average for all 99 combos when holding 9d9c but only by 1% more than 9s9d so again, not really practical and still uncertain how this limitation on betting options fares against other options.

When villain bets turn 99 should be calling close to 90% frequency with 9d9c opting to raise 2.5x 14.7% of the time and 9s9d only 11.1%

Not sure why beyond simply a solver's ability to play an absolutely insane mixed frequency of action strategy basically the TRUEST version of "nobody can ever get a read on me, I play crazy"

River: 8c
Quick point - villain should be checking close to 60% of the time with their range on this river. 2/3rd pot bet was the action that had the 2nd highest frequency

Check (100%)

Villain's strat differs from prior sim to a much more polarized frequency balance of action with a single whiffed FD vs the above one where there were two FDs by the turn
villain should be checking 41.8% of the time and shoving 46.4% now whereas the bet size villain used in the hand had a much higher frequency before its now down to 10% frequency
Villain bets ~2/3rd pot

Hero
Shoves (100%)

--------------

Regarding the assumptions made about both Hero and Villain's ranges - I gave villain a somewhat loose 3bet range vs Hero's range that calls the 3bet following standard preflop charts. I deviated from them somewhat with regard to frequency for villain and anything that was 3! PF more than 50% of the time was included in Villains overall range. I also added a few somewhat "air" type hands K3s, Q3s to account for wild bs, K3 obviously flopping 2pair. As well as 75s which gets to the river.

SCs that get to river with 0 equity and shove 95-100%:
all 45s, 56 clubs, diamons and spades (not hearts), 57 clubs diamonds and spades
Hands with 0 equity that shove >60% but < 95% on river:
A4 clubs, A5 clubs - both 82.4% of the time, A4 and A5 spades (79.2%), and A4d A5d but only 64.8% of the time
Q3hh shoves 52.3% but has nominal equity 3%

Combos with 0-9% that bet 2/3rds pot on river a practical frequency (~25% of the time or greater roughly)
A4d, A5d, all 4 AdQx combos,

This means there's at least 22 combos of hands that have little to no equity that are either shoving or betting 2/3rds pot on the river.

I point this out for a few reasons
1) demonstrate the complexity of a purely mixed strategy
2) elucidate the absolutely impractical bifurcation of both range and frequency a solver assigns to ranges as a manner of expressing just how ****ing difficult adhering to any GTO strategy actually is in its applicability vs support as strategy without a TON of qualifications around assumptions/caveats

Should we assume that IP double barrels all turns though? There are going to be times/cards when he just checks back turn and in those situations folding flop would be bad. Look it's a 3bet pot, UTG vs button and a King-high board so 3bettor has all the momentum here but for 22% pot or whatever I'm just not sure that calling 99 can be that terrible when different things can happen on the turn, it's not just an auto-barrel and we fold every time. Rest of the hand looks OK to me

I would expect this spot to be over barreled by a LAG. They will have more straight draws than equilibrium and will barrel them more than equilibrium. When they check it is probably a lot of Tx, JJ, QQ. This is assuming someone will have more AQo, AJo, QJ type hands. Since villain actually was as loose as Q6s maybe a call is okay, but hard to know that before hand. When villains over barrel and under-give up, sometimes we need to fold bluff catchers earlier. Villain night even over barrel some Tx hands which is pretty bad for us.

IDK that I would say it's terrible to call but I would guess in practice it loses 0-1bb.

Not trying to insult, but here are my considerations:
- If we fold the flop to such a small range bet with a pocket pair then we will be bluffed a lot to the point that we are overfolding
- Ok, maybe villain Is not a good aggressive reg. But he Is a LAG postflop, that means we shouldn't fold that easily to small aggression knowing he Will use range advantage on his favor

Have you studied the spot in the solver? Yeah, betting 20% pot, you auto profit if your opponent doesn't call 5/6 of the time. But solver is folding 99 here and it is folding more than 1/6 of the time with range. I think it's important to understand that betting small on the flop is not an exploit that targets people who overfold. It's not just because the turn barrel is also really hard to deal with. It's because at equilibrium you just have to fold a lot of your range on the flop. The board is really that bad for us. Trying to prevent our opponent from auto profiting by being more sticky and stubborn than solver just loses us money.

To me overfolding mostly means folding more than equilibrium. If solver folds our hand, folding isn't really overfolding. If you want to make a deviation and overcall the flop, okay, but that's a pretty big deviation and because villain is likely barreling a lot of turns, even if he is very LAG, it is going to be very hard to continue. LAGs don't just profit off of people who overfold to flop cbets. They profit off of people that fold to barrels also, so sometimes the exploitative adjustment vs someone who overbarrels is to fold earlier streets.

i mean you're definitely trying to insult when you say "the bad regs in this thread told me to fold lol".

its wild because it's a really really easy spot to look up and realize you have an incorrect conception about the spot and underlying theory behind it - go to gtowizard and put the spot in and you will see what everyone reasonable in the thread is telling you. the way to combat over aggressive players is not to overcall early in the hand with very low equity marginal hands and pray that they check the hand down. like i said earlier, this is not a hand you should be pure continuing with preflop and then once you see the flop, depending on exactly which solve / configuration you look at, best case scenario you're (at best) randomizing and calling with a very low ev continue a small amount of the time. all of this is easily verifiable. if you want to get upset and tell everyone that disagrees with you that they're bad regs, you're going to have large obstacles to improving and probably going to isolate future feedback to people who don't know what they're talking about.

you don't really have much of a choice here. take a look at the solve, gtow gives u one free solve per day. its more pronounced in the 9 handed sim, but even at 6m (where ranges are wider) you're still going to see it doing what im telling you. the board is good enough for ip's range that he bets range and you overfold so you can be competitive on subsequent streets. this scenario is why not being too loose pre is such a big deal because it's going to happen on most boards (granted Kx / 2 broadways are some of if not the worst for oop)

You're literally not exploitable if you fold 99 on the flop. You ARE exploitable if you call 99 on the flop. You should look at the solve. Solver folds 99 pure on the flop and obviously isn't exploitable.

Does it matter if hero has the 9d in his hand?

I have to admit I wouldn't typically fold 99 to a 20% flop bet here, in a live game against an aggro opponent who 3B to a small size on the BTN, on this draw heavy board.

Hey can you let me know what the assumptions of ranges for villain are in the solver you’re looking at? Additionally, do you know if the solvers bet size limitations affect how you’d act holding 99 at all?

Curious cuz the one I ran is 60/40 weight to folding but if we know villain is loose aggro and playing well below their weight class, why wouldn’t that shift the strategy as it seems like this confirms villain isn’t playing optimal ranges nor playing an optimal strategy WITH that range (bit of a assumption but we can talk about why I think this holds weight vs the pure theoretical too)

gto 3 bets K6s here but if a pro expands his 3 betting range to Q6s we can label him a spewy fish! Absolutely ridiculous. Youre all missing the forest for the trees, i think its very likely this guy is a crusher.

This is some clueless ****. Idk man, youre way behibd his range on the flop, thats the whole point,

he opened q7ss from mp and called a 3b from the btn 110 bb deep in the other thread lol

don't think ive really ever seen anyone good that isn't tilting show up w this sort of combo vs unknown in ep since like pre covid times. its pre so the ev difference isnt substantial but take that for what its worth empirically. is losing decent amount ev wise when i look at solver ~.2 bb at 6m solution and around ~.35 at 9m

think its actually pretty likely when u see q6ss here he's a spewy fish given that kxss combos get 3b fractionally but qxss literally never do. so its not like hes randomizing or even close to the right range and just expanding slightly, he's very likely pure 3betting a bunch of stuff that's supposed to be mixed and mixing a bunch of stuff that's supposed to be never 3bet vs a strong range with a hand that plays poorly at low spr's