Intro to Node Locking

All right, guys. We're going to talk about something in this video that we are going to use a lot in this course. And it's super important and it's going to be really important after you guys finish this course and you do your own study to understand how to use this functionality. And this is the gist of everything we're doing. Like I said, our mission here is not to play uh optimal poker. It's to play optimally versus our opponents. meaning cater our strategies every single time we can understand where we're going to make extra money versus them and the best way to do that is to first like I had this solve up to introduce the solver first you want to look at the optimal strat here and then I'm going to give a really easy example of how we do this right so let's just stick with the king queen four let's stick with optimal play it doesn't really matter what the details of this hand are but it's button versus big blind and I'm going to just say I'm we're going to look at what the button is supposed to do at equilibrium. And then we're going to talk about what we think maybe one certain player type might do and how we are going to cater to the strategy, use the solver to emulate the type of people that we're playing against and use it to help us make extra money. So, this is going to be our intro to node locking. And nod locking again just means make the computer play like the guy we're playing against. so that we can practice playing against different opponents in our games. The way you're going to use this is basically whether you're reviewing a session and you had a hand versus a player in your games that you know is over bluffing or under bluffing and you want to figure out what you should do against that type of player and sort of have the computer solutions help you go beyond what you're capable of figuring out with your brain, which is uh a lot at least for me. And then that's a lot of stuff that the computer can help me with. I mean, so yeah, we're going to take our assumptions, toss it in the computer, resolve it, and then see how we actually want to play against our opponents. But first, in order to do that, we need to know what we want to do at baseline, right? So, this is actually just 75B pot, just a solution I'm using as our example. So, king, queen, four. Let's just go down at a very simple line. Check. Back. Call. Turn. Jack. Could be a 10 two to illustrate this point. Check. Now, let's look at our in position strategy. He's using a lot of Ace2, Ace3 offuit. He's using a lot of Ace2, Ace3 suited. But the other A6, he's really not using too much. As soon as he gets to Ace5, Ace 6, 7, 8, not using a lot. Now, let's say he bets, we call Rick River. Check. Now, what happens here is that he's on the river going all in a lot. He's got value. He's got some bluffs, right? Technicals of this hand are not important. This hand is actually part of the MTT, the deep stacked MTT section of this course. But the point is, do we think our guy is going to play like this? If we do, then when he goes all in, we'll just call the hands we're supposed to if we think he plays perfectly and has perfect frequencies with everything that he's gets there with. But is that going to be the case? Very likely no. So here you can see all of your bluff catchers, king three, king seven, king eight. Another functionality is we can show the EV of a play along with our strategy. So if we hover over something like a king seven, king eight, a jack n, every bluff catcher, they are of course losing slightly losing full zero EV. Some of these are close to zero. The nature of a mixed strategy is that it'll be pretty much zero EV both ways. So king two here is a mixed strategy. So again super super just like micro differences in terms of suits and stuff. King five basically a pure fold most of the time. So basically the idea is if you have a bluff catcher you're not making any money. If it's an indifferent bluff catcher where it's a mixed strategy you're just mixing it sometimes so that you don't get over bluff but it's not making any money. And then obviously once you get to a hand that like pure calls of course that's you know queen jack beats some value you'll make money there. So the point is remember this strategy. So basically if we're playing computer poker we don't think that this guy has or anyone has the precision to make sure that he has the right amount of hands by the time he gets to the river. He may bet Ace8 too much, Ace7 too much. He may not check at all. He may check way too much. So, basically, we need to start right here and be like, what is our opponent going to do? If we think he's going to pure bet, we need to change that, right? Cuz he's going to get to the river, the turn river with more hands. If we leave the flop somewhat reasonable here, which seems humanly possible that people would kind of play like this in this example, let's just make the assumption that we think we're playing against a very aggressive opponent that likes to put people in tough spots, lose, um, probably played the flop as a pure CB bet. Now he views this turn card, it's king, queen, four, now there's a jack. He views his turn card as a very good card for him because out of position doesn't have much by way of sets. You know, they have ace 10 and some nine 10, but otherwise they're lacking ace king, of course, kings, queens, jacks, and they have a lot of 4x, they have a lot of ace highs. So, in position decides he's going to really put this guy to the test. And we think it's a spot where our opponents are going to overuse the ax bluff. not necessarily overusing it like something crazy but just using it more than zero which is a very human thing to do here. So if we want to change that and I already have the lock solution so you guys can see how this works. We just pop up this feature and now we have our opponent's range and yes we are in computer world but we are about to make it. What do we think our guy does? So, we can change all of his hands. Like, let's take the hands that we think he's going to over bluff with. Choose Ace8. Choose A7. Maybe jack up the frequency with Ace5. Not really important what we're doing. It's just the idea here, like strategy-wise. I mean, so let's say Ace2 56 78. Ace 23 56 78. So, now we've got these hands selected. And now we're gonna say, "H, let's just have him bet more often. Let's have him bet with all those hands maybe half the time." And then we would lock it. And then the computer is smart enough to know that we just changed its strategy. So if you don't lock all, this means lock the rest of your strategy. It'll compensate for over bluffing somehow. It might add some extra value. It might just take out some other bluffs. But the point is, we think our opponent's going to keep a lot of the bluffs and value the same, but use too much ASEX in his bluff on the turn here. So then we have to lock all because the computer will make up for the fact that it's overluffing with ASEX if we don't lock all. We save and close it. And then we would go here and we would just run it again as if just the same way we did in the initial solve. I've already done this for us, so we're just going to have it up here. So now this is this is all resolved for having him bluffing too much ax. Now in the previous sim on the turn, we were folding all of our queen x and all of our kingx were continuing. But now we see we've jacked up the frequencies and not insane just like using Ace8, A7, A6 more than zero. And now it's all every queen is continuing, right? Every king is continuing. So we call get that same river. Now we get this strategy where we believe he's going to continue overusing the AEX to bluff with. Not a ton as you can see, but just not zero. We'll get into the theoretical stuff about why this is the case, why these bluffs are not great uh on the turn and river in the actual video about this hand, but this is just to illustrate how node locking works. So we have now locked him to overbluff the turn with A6, over bluff the river with A6. So if you had a guy in your game that you think is capable or you read in the situations that in wide range spots he loses track of how many combos he's bluffing with and would likely do this. Now when he goes all in, you literally never fold the bluff catcher. And this is why we're using the solver to figure out how to play against people. So, I'm really trying to dispel the myth that the solver is not for live games. It's not for my soft games. It's not for 25 because I don't know what people are up to. Like, if you're playing poker, most of playing poker is understanding what your opponents are doing and how you want to counter that strategy. Except for pre flop, which still there are opportunity for exploits. Poker is not memorizing some sort of scripted strategy, memorizing how the computer plays, and then putting that in play yourself. Poker is understanding the tendencies of your opponents, adjusting to them, and making the right decision at every node verse them. So, here we've decided we're facing an overbluff. So, we've edited our opponent's strategy with the software to tell us what to do. And now we figured out that we can just call every time if he's bluffing this much with ASEX. And our strategy is going to make a bunch of extra money because we figured out that based on our assumptions of what he's up to, this call is now going to be worth 14 big blinds instead of zero or negative. So this is a very important part especially against playing live cash against soft opponents and we can nod lock every different spot if we think somebody's not check raising enough if we think they're not barreling enough vice versa. And this is what we're going to do in this course. So I hope this is pretty clear for you guys. The limitations of node locking. I will say this. Like I said already the computer knows how to make up for strategies, right? So if you don't lock things from the first street and then go to the next street and lock it again and then go to the next street and lock it again, which is very tedious work, the outputs will be wonky because it's trying to make up for the EV that's being lost from an inferior strategy. So it is really thorough, tedious work, but it's really important to use this software to understand how you want to adjust your opponents. Because my tagline, what I'll say all the time is we got to know equilibrium. We have to know the baseline before we know how to deviate. Then we need to put our assumptions in, lock them, resolve, and go with that strat. That makes the most extra money possible. That's how we want to approach every single spot. We're going to leave ourselves open for exploits. And if people want to counter exploit us, we'll play that game when we get to it. But for right now, we want to find all the little spots in our games where we think people have leaks, and we want to pounce on those and uh make that extra cheese.