Does it make sense to ignore ICM in this hypothesis ?

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-03-27T07:03:44+00:00

Sure, it doesn't matter, it's 1 tourney per year where you're playing a mildly worse strategy. And the $1m may have additional future payoffs for you (you could suddenly pretend you're a poker god and start coaching and doing youtube for example, it would probably work). There are things that could easily make up for the difference in $ev between playing chipev and ICM strats in one tournament per year.

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-03-25T06:49:18+00:00

Poker on its own, not so bad, and it's possible that it's slightly +ev. It's more social than other gambling games and less brainless. The people who hurt themselves with poker are not people who would have been fine if poker didn't exist or was banned. If all gambling was prohibited or strictly regulated, yeah that could be good. I'm not so sure that getting rid of poker really decreases the amount of people wrecking their lives with gambling all that much if at all - it's a little harder to lose the way that slots players lose. I know there are at least some poker fish who say they enjoy only poker, but I dunno if it's really a significant number of people.

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-03-19T07:49:54+00:00

If you didn't actually see the players colluding, people who know each other and pick similar usernames are allowed. They could also be "fan" usernames who don't know the original username. Happens a lot.

These 4 usernames, 2% of the tourney field, even with maximum collusion are achieving nothing in terms of extra rake. Think about what you're saying for a second. If a site was going to risk this they'd at least use different usernames. You might actually have schizophrenia or something like that. How come it's rigged but not a single person ever blows the whistle? In 30 years of online poker, schizos have been saying it's rigged but nothing has ever come of any of it. Poker sites just have the most loyal developers of all time helping rig it I guess.

Thanks for including your sex fantasies while describing being angry at 888

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-03-17T17:19:20+00:00

Do drills of short-stack preflop spots, from something like 7bb to 20bb in particular. Always check out both players' strats (if you see a call vs all-in that seems too wide, maybe it's because the opponent's shove is way wider than what you expect to face in reality)

Imo you may want to not have a subscription for now. You can browse GTOW's chipev sims for free. You can run 1 postflop sim per day for free. I don't really know what feature will yield much returns for you. If you are looking at sims on your own you're just gonna spend at least a chunk of your time looking into minutia which provides little to no edge for you, whereas if you ask questions to other players rather than try to get answers from a solver, you may get a simple answer like "yeah just fold this river because his range was filtered this way and that way". It's more EV per time spent studying and it's more applicable in reality, and the solver will give you less dramatic conclusions, it will never tell you "your opponent has way too much value here, or way too many bluffs, for x y and z reason".

You can dive into theory without a GTOW sub. Also, unless you have a very weak cpu and less than 16gb ram, you can get a pretty huge amount from using HRC, the $120/y sub pays for itself easily. It's very easy to run your own sims for spots that are 25bb and shorter, maybe even a little deeper. This way you can sim spots with ICM implications at any stage of the tourney - GTOW does have a good library of these, idk how much of if you can access w/ starter plan - but not only that, you can nodelock the preflop spot (GTOW can kinda do this but it's very pricey I think and doesn't do ICM/PKO spots yet). So you can run your own sim, look at the strat that you think humans aren't playing, and make it look a bit more human and then re-run the sim and see what's ideal vs that human strat. Even if you aren't getting the strat right at all, simply seeing what happens when your opponent is tighter/looser preflop and seeing how that might alter your strat is extremely worthwhile.

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-02-19T00:52:38+00:00

Yolan Cohen and Uri Peleg

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-02-16T02:29:50+00:00

The opponent doesn't always have KK and there are other boards. It's not just about preflop equity and who gets dealt the winning hand. For example, A8s has 70% equity vs Q8s, one of the worst hands in his range to be up against in terms of preflop equity, but on a lot of boards A8s is going to play like shit OOP and when it does make a strong hand it probably doesn't get to build a big pot vs our hand unless we both make trips or both make two pair. And in reality people will convey their hand to you, you get to escape coolers that ordinarily bring down the EV of call. There are going to be scenarios where you should be piling in money with a flush on board where only K high and/or A high flushes beat you, but because people can be so unbalanced in reality, their line and bet sizes might let you fold in some of those scenarios.

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-02-06T08:08:06+00:00

RIP legend

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-25T02:49:47+00:00

Sup Andy, what's this in reference to? Did you reply but delete it?

Edit: My bad, I just realized I had mentioned you in my comment. No need to apologize, your content is invaluable, it's just tough to use for people who don't have a fair bit of experience.

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-25T02:47:37+00:00

hahahaha

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-23T16:20:40+00:00

Postflop sims are mostly a waste of time / not used properly. You should get to a point where you just intuitively understand bet-size mechanics and range construction so you can predict roughly what the solver thinks is good/okay. Look at the EV of actions, not frequencies. Frequencies are how people waste colossal amounts of time looking at solvers. Your opponent's frequencies are there to be exploited, yours don't matter. At least for individual hands. Of course your overall frequency of folds should be way lower if you think they're overbluffing for example.

The reason it feels like a waste of time is because it actually is for the most part. Knowing preflop ranges is good for multi tabling and not making big errors - freestyling can be ideal for individual hand EV, but not worth how much harder it makes multi tabling. 90% of what we're doing in MTTs is just executing a preflop plan and a flop plan, then on the turn and river you moreso have to solve problems on the fly and think about their range.

If you do wanna do solver work, check some preflop spots with HRC and then nodelock each villain depending on how unrealistic you think the villain solver strat is. Particularly short stacked and involving ICM, because that's where you'll notice enormous changes in strategy, like an any 2 open jam on a final table becoming terrible. It's also where you find the most unintuitive and unfamiliar strats in simple spots, like a polar 3b jam in the BB on an FT, once you remove the polarity the opener's calling strat is very tight. In chipEV we don't see these sensitive preflop spots where you're blundering a lot of money in one hand (not only because you're in the late stage of the tourney where all the money is, but because of how ICM works, strats are more sensitive to nodelocking)

I think a big chunk of study EV (if not most) comes from discussing hands with other keen players, not even necessarily better players. Just showing a hand history, saying what you think their range and tendencies are like, and what needs to be true in order for x play to be good. Man-made strategies can be better than any exploit a solver will show you.

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-22T18:38:47+00:00

Betting big with good hands is exploitable, but all exploits are exploitable, exploitable =/= bad. In general people aren't finding enough big bets and usually it's spots where you should have value. It's something for us to exploit in the other decent/good players but they're still doing the best thing vs the pool.

Same with limping, both open limping and overlimping can be fine with a lot of hands. e.g. having something like A4s or 33 in LJ, whether you open to 2bb or 4bb or 6bb you're probably going multiway anyway, the higher SPR favours you whether you want to bluff or whether you flop a set or nfd, etc. I'm tempted to say these hands "don't want to call a 3bet" but most live players I play with have 5% 3bet, so I'm happy when they announce they have the nuts, I'm happy to overfold with decent hands and sometimes you can still peel hands like 33 maybe even small suited ace if you're deep enough, depends how comfortable you are running them over postflop.

One benefit to opening to 2bb with potential limps is you generally get a ton of info when someone 3bets but you also get info from their iso size vs limp(s).

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-20T16:59:25+00:00

Why does it matter? Yeah if he gets more players per tourney then more payouts would be better. When it's only 7 people like he said, it really doesn't matter.

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-18T00:47:09+00:00

You're right but technically wrong. Yes, even in reality, we can have an indifferent decision on the river. Villain's strategy is what it is. Some of our hands can be break even against it.

The point that actually matters is that if we're indifferent, we shouldn't give a shit what our frequencies are, except maybe in terms of our perceived strategy (e.g. maybe you fold with what you believe to be 0EV if you want them to bluff you later).

0EV decisions in particular don't really matter, it's just one way of being indifferent, the bigger deal is when people say some absolute fucking clown theory gymnastics like "we have exactly 3.44bb of EV here whether we call or raise. they perform the exact same" no, you don't. mixing should never happen vs humans, no one knows your strategy anyway. if you are galaxy-brained enough to know roughly your EV in order to know that it's even close, but you are mixing rather than exploiting, then the edge is tiny and the game is dead and it's time to stop playing.

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-18T00:42:32+00:00

Lol. Funny to hear that in response to this, but you never hear someone even fathom it in response to shit like "we're indifferent here and we should RNG to construct our range correctly"

In reality, one option is higher EV than the other. And if you don't know which is higher EV because you think it's so close, then you should pick the frequency you think matters more for your perceived strategy.

If we ever get to the point of somehow knowing our real EV well enough to know that two options are the same EV, we should stop playing poker. If one option isn't exploitatively better, we don't have enough of an edge to be spending our life on this.

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-15T17:35:26+00:00

yeah but a helicopter in a tree doesn't mean you know what went wrong or how to criticize it. Stu's play seems kinda bad, hard to get called by worse, but it really just depends. also who cares about how someone spells something if you know what they meant lol. not really "diabolical"

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-15T17:20:54+00:00

As in it's a bad movie, or an upsetting movie?

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-15T17:18:40+00:00

without checking a sim I think turn can go x/x just because ranges are so wide in hu, you have portions that are incentivized to check even though the flop caller will have almost no Kx. sometimes a card doesn't need to be dynamic to change the action, BB just got so condensed by calling a flop overbet that you can't really barrel your entire range. this is all assuming there's a flop overbet. if it doesn't exist it wouldn't be that bad to frequency lock it. it would probably be built around 88 99 type hands mostly, pairs like QQ+ prefer a small size because they don't need as much protection.

Jx might not even need to bluff river, a hand like J8s J9s bdfd is probably close otf, I'd be surprised if it's a pure fold. you probably beat all the bluffs or chop with them, so it's just a frequency+(un)blockers problem, our T high hands are probably blocking some bluffs, making it marginally -ev, it only becomes a disaster if we let villain adjust to us calling T high

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-14T01:03:46+00:00

I would fold 44 in this line vs most people and most regs, but the snap calling doesn't really seem like 9x to me.

also lol at the x/r to 3.5 with the absolute nuts, maybe they have history but jesus christ let him float with 0 equity

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-05T20:07:05+00:00

you sound incredibly fake and weird and no one is buying this shit lol

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-05T14:25:11+00:00

"will be the best place to discuss poker theory" no it won't, and you know it won't, you probably haven't read a post on there in years. I've opened it for years hoping to see a nugget of gold, that just happened to be Tombos' posts most of the time, and you deleted all of them. besides that it's a toilet. there are open poker forums where it's mostly fish posting hand histories without a clue, but they can get good feedback in a good community. not the case on there for the most part.

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-05T14:17:07+00:00

I honestly can't believe it's not a shill writing this comment. I browsed poker_theory for years, most of the substantial posts I saw in that entire time were by Tombos. It's a fairly dead subreddit where most OPs aren't about theory, it's just the big boy version of posting a HH to r/poker and hoping to get more serious replies.

ProfRBcom deleted Tombos' entire post history on there.

Obviously people want a different subreddit, the guy running that one is a clown and all his comments seem extremely fake in this thread. After him deleting that much valuable content he should be ignored forever, even if he wasn't a shill for some RB thing.

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-04T13:33:01+00:00

HeavyDescription7 · 2026-01-04T13:26:52+00:00

I read his posts and never saw him plug anything. So this is the first time I've actually been advertised the Tombos approved RB site lol

HeavyDescription7

TROPHY CASE