5 Live Poker Tips to Help Your Game w/ Garrett Adelstein | Upswing Poker Level-Up #66

This article is a transcription of the Level-Up Podcast, hosted by Upswing VP Mike Brady. You can watch or listen to the entire episode via the links above or read on if you prefer a written version.

00:00 — Introduction

Mike: Let’s level up your live cash skills with five tips from the actual goat. I’m Mike Brady and my guest really needs no introduction, but here I go anyway. He’s the most feared live stream player of all time. He came up from the lowest stakes online and eventually worked his way into one thousand two thousand nosebleed games. And by the way, he just released a book detailing his rise and the multiple falls he took along the way. Welcome to the show, Garrett Adelstein.

Garrett: What’s up, guys? This kind of content is obviously not my typical forte, but let’s get into it. A oneoff five live tips. Should be a lot of fun.

Mike: Just like Garrett said, he’s about to reveal his five top tips for live poker players. Number five is amazing. It’s actually a lesson from a six hundred thousand dollar pot that he played verse Rick Solomon, which represented eighty percent of Garrett’s bankroll at the time. I’m going to guess none of these tips will be about bankroll management.

Garrett: Definitely not. Definitely not. Has never been the strongest aspect of my poker game twenty years ago, ten years ago, or even to this day.

Mike: All right, so with that, let’s jump right in. Garrett, what is your first tip for the live poker players listening?

01:15 — Tip #1: Game Selection Is Everything

Garrett: You know, it’s going to be obvious, but I think the devil’s in the details here. Game selection in live poker is everything. A lot of you guys are playing, you know, the two, three, the three five, the five ten games at your local casino. Sometimes there’s three of those games. Sometimes there’s ten of those games. The difference between them can be absolutely massive. It can be a headache. It can be annoying, but game selection is just absolutely everything in live poker. Even if you play in higher stakes, I mean, that is absolutely true. During my rise in live poker, man, I grinded away, a commerce, graveyard shift, late night, worked eight p.m. to six a.m. every day. Why?

Because otherwise I had to play nine-handed ten twenty. Whereas overnight I was often able to play heads up or three or four-handed and I’d be playing fifty one hundred, one hundred two hundred, often just exclusively with VIPs or VIPs and one elite player. I mean, I was very often making 10x to 100x more. So, in live poker, game selection is everything. Put in the work to do so. You know, when we talk about my live stream years, it’s kind of the same concept, but just like a different method. You know, you need to figure out how to add value to the games. And you know, for me, that was connecting with an audience and having them be interested in watching me play, right?

Whether, you know, we’re talking about live streams or privatized casino games or whatever the case may be, especially for those of you playing in bigger games, you have to figure out how to add value. You have to build relationships. In short, you just have to play the poker politics game at an elite level.

Mike: I think your situation is kind of extreme, obviously. I mean, a lot of players don’t even play ten twenty, let alone have a chance in the, you know, the opportunity to play one hundred two hundred. A lot of people listening aren’t going to find themselves playing the stream politics game in Los Angeles. But there is still a key lesson to learn here for people who are even playing as low as one three or three five, which it’s pretty simple: try to play in the best possible game. Switch tables as needed. Switch seats as needed. Don’t be afraid to do what’s best for your bottom line. And sometimes, Garrett, that’s not just going to be about picking the right table.

It’s also going to have to do with when you decide to keep playing and/or quit. Would you say that that’s true?

Garrett: Oh, yeah. That’s that’s everything, you know. I think it’s kind of just along the same lines. You know, just as I worked the graveyard, it didn’t matter if it was four, five, six, seven a.m. When I was in a great game, I just never quit, period. Like, I have so many twenty-four to forty-eight hour poker sessions because we’re playing super big, two hundred four hundred, no limit or bigger. And I’m just not leaving, like until that game breaks. If I think I can execute even at a decently high level, you know, I’m going to play. And that was kind of part of my training physically, mentally, psychologically. Whenever I went and sat down at a live poker table, that was the mindset.

You know, again, for some of you, that may or may not be as relevant. Let’s say your typical game is two five and that’s always the game you play. You know, that game is going to be running around the clock either way. But if you’re in a game where your win rate is 3x, 5x, 10x, because, you know, there’s just two or three incredible VIPs, I think it’s worth, you know, trying to battle fatigue if you think you can still execute well.

Mike: I think that might be tough for some of you out there. If you have a regular job, you know, if you have other responsibilities, you might not have the full freedom to put in a sixteen hour session that goes until seven a.m. when you have work at nine a.m. But I think there’s still something to take away here, which is to push yourself. Try not to just lock up wins, especially when you’re in a good game. Try to make the decision that’s going to be better for your bottom line. Maybe you can’t play until seven a.m., but maybe you could push it until two a.m. in that really good game, and that is going to have a major impact in the long run on your poker results.

Garrett: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I break all this stuff down, you know, quite a bit in my book, but it was like, you know, in my early online years, it was all just about being the best, playing the best, taking them on, and hopefully beating them, even though more often than not, that’s not how it went when I played the very, very best players. But once I really kind of dove into my live career, the mindset changed. You know, even my identity overall kind of changed quite a bit. You know, I think a lot of people may argue, you know, is Garrett one of the best? Is Garrett even one of the best at high stakes live cash? You know, ultimately, I don’t actually even care about the answer to that question.

What I’m supremely confident in is I’m one of the biggest winners, you know, in live poker history. I’m elite at that specific skill. And you know, ultimately, as far as I see it, that’s how you kind of truly win in live poker, not you know, eking out a three big blind win rate against, you know, the next five best players in the world.

Mike: Yeah, definitely does not make sense in most live settings. And on that note, I think we can jump on to tip number two. So, Garrett, take it away. What is your second tip for the live poker players out there?

06:11 — Tip #2: Pay Attention

Garrett: Tip number two, I know it’s difficult, but pay attention. Yeah, you know, I think most live games are incredibly soft. Probably most of the audience would agree with this. People play super transparently. You know, obviously I played on live streams a lot. I was able to watch every single hand. It was as if every hand went to showdown. That is incredibly valuable. But even in your live poker games, even if let’s say ten, fifteen percent of your hands are going to showdown, a lot of your opponents are going to play so predictably that there’s just so much information to take away from those showdowns.

You know, I think a couple specific things I’d really focus on is when the big money goes in, do your opponents usually have it or not? I mean, it is just so common amongst so many, let’s call them decent regs at medium stakes-ish to just always have it whenever they put a hundred big blinds in the pot, especially if they put two hundred big blinds in the pot. Especially if they’re playing twice as big as they normally do. Right. Another question, and I’m going to oversimplify a lot here, but try to bear with me, is, you know, a lot of the regs in your games, sometimes they’re going to take lines where it makes no sense or they’re repping very, very little.

You know, what I found is a lot of kind of okay players, decent hand readers, when their line makes no sense, they just always have it, right? And they think they’re tricking you because their line doesn’t make any sense. when really if you understand that you can sort of pinpoint those scenarios and know they just have no or minimal bluffing range in those spots, you know, you can just make some huge calls in situations like this, right? Obviously, the vice versa can be true as well. Against great players, you’re going to just be guessing a lot. And then more importantly, against big VIPs, a lot of times when their line makes no sense, you’re going to want to call them, right?

So, just being able to pinpoint the player type and you do that, of course, through repetition, through paying attention. It is everything. You know, I can’t tell you how many coaching sessions I’ve had over the years with students and I’ll ask them, “Well, what do they know about the guy?” You know, and sometimes they’ll be like, “Well, we’ve only been playing this session for six hours.” Honestly, there’s no excuse for that. Like, if you have an hour of play against someone, you should have some information. Some of my students will say, “Well, we play every week for five years,” and they don’t know the answers to basic questions, right?

So, paying close attention, especially against weaker opponents, the worse they are at poker, the more transparently they play, the more value there is to be gained. You know, I spent way too many years of my life studying live streams, things of that nature. And honestly, the guys who I review tape of the least would be the guys who approximated GTO the best. You know, I played on the Lodge pretty recently. I didn’t look at one hand Doug Polk played, even though we’d barely played against each other, because it would just be the least valuable use of my time because I know he’s going to more or less approximate GTO, where some of the guys in my games are going to be doing anything but that.

Mike: I think it’s tempting for a lot of live players out there to take this tip, pay more attention and really focus in on showdowns and showdowns exclusively, but Garrett, that’s not all you should be paying attention to, right? What else other than just when the cards are on their backs are you looking for in hands that you are or aren’t in?

Garrett: Yeah. You know, when you’re playing in a live game, you don’t know if the hand’s going to go to showdown or not. So, you don’t really have the luxury of paying attention to hands that go to showdown versus not. In order for you to learn anything, to extrapolate any of that data, you have to have been paying attention throughout the whole hand, you know. So paying attention to certain lines people take, whether they often have it even more obviously and transparently, certain bet sizes people sometimes take. You know, generally the bigger the bet, the bigger the hand kind of thing. These are all things that you just have to be hyper aware of.

If I see two guys in the middle of a big pot that I’m not in and one guy puts two hundred big blinds in the middle on the river, you better believe I’m checking out his body language. I don’t know if he’s going to get called. Of course, I don’t know for sure whether he has it or not, but in case we do get a showdown there or in case he just goes, I miss, by studying that body language, you’re learning quite a lot. You know, I think some of you might be thinking like, “Man, isn’t that a lot of work?” What I would argue is: I think live poker is remarkably easy compared to the first decade of my career playing online, you know, where I’m playing eight tables at a time. Live poker is remarkably slow.

You really only need to be paying attention to twenty, twenty-five hands an hour. It’s really not particularly difficult to be doing all of that while also being a social presence at the table. And what you might find, for those of you who just feel bored to death with live poker, is it might sort of reinvigorate your interest in it. You may find the game more stimulating, you know, by locking in more.

Mike: I know, for me personally, the sessions where I’m dialed in and I am watching every hand, and you know, I like to go play one three with my wife in particular, and I’ll literally just sit like this like hand on my face at the table just enjoying the show of how people are choosing to play their hands. I’m really enjoying it, and that’s often when I’m going to be playing the best poker. And there are other sessions I play where I feel like I’m not dialed in. I’m checking my phone a little bit too often, and those are the sessions that I’m more miserable.

So, I do think that there’s a real temptation to escape into your phone in those boredom between moments at the poker table, but if you fight that temptation, not only is it going to be better for your win rate, it’s going to be better for your quality of life and you know, how fun you are at the table in general.

Garrett: Yeah, you know, presence is such a gift. You know, I know a lot of you aren’t asking for life lessons beyond the poker table, but man, you know, that device in your pocket, you know, can definitely lead you down a a negative slippery slope. And I would just highly recommend to try to be as present as you can with as many things as you can in life. Keep that phone away. And I mean that is especially true at the live poker table where there is so much to be learned. And life is honestly so much better than swiping right on Tinder or, you know, uploading your Instagram every 15 seconds.

Mike: Hey, real quick before we move on to tip number three, show some appreciation for Garrett being here and drop a like on this video or rate the podcast five stars if you’re listening on one of the audio platforms. If this video doesn’t get over a hundred thousand views, Garrett told me he’s never playing on a live poker stream again. So, please help us get there. We all like watching him play.

12:24 — Tip #3: Play Hands Against the Biggest VIPs

Garrett: Now, moving on to tip number three. Play hands against the biggest VIPs. We already talked about getting into games with the weakest opponents, but this one is specific to the way you’re playing and constructing your ranges preflop to ensure we do everything we can to play with the weakest players at the table as often as possible in as big as pots as possible, whereas we do what we can when reasonable to kick the good players out of the pots. Right? Now, this tip of course applies to all of poker, but it is so much more pronounced in live poker. Why? The difference between the best and the fifth best and the ninth best player in a live game is often enormous, right?

This is certainly true in high stakes games, but I would argue it’s true in games all the way down the line. You’ll see many five ten, two five, two three games where one guy is just a lifetime worse than everyone else at the table, right? What does this look like? Preflop, we want to, let’s say, we’re in position, be iso-ing the weakest players, making the pot bigger against them, where they’re almost never going to fold preflop, because that’s generally what not particularly strong players do. They don’t fold preflop while shutting out the strongest players. Right?

If we have the best player in our game raising us on the cutoff and we’re on the button and we have two or three people who are incredible for the game behind them, then we really need to strongly consider doing a lot of calling to invite those players into the pot. This same idea is true postflop. It becomes more tricky, a bit more nuanced then, but the general idea remains. And so much of my win rate over the years is by really being elite at this specific skill. It requires some outside the box thinking.

It certainly requires, I would argue, deviating from theoretically optimal play preflop, or at the very least, looking at a multitude of situations that are mixes preflop, which is, of course, very common, and leaning one direction or another depending on where the VIPs are seated at the table.

Mike: I think it would be super helpful to jump into some specific examples to help cement our listeners understanding of this approach. So, I’ve popped up the Lucid Poker Trainer to look at some preflop ranges in a live cash game. Don’t worry if you’re listening on an audio platform. We’re going to walk you through this in a way that you’re still going to be able to follow along. So, we’re going to look at this one hundred fifty big blind deep situation. We’re going to have the player in the lojack. That’s four off the button. Raise it up. And then the player in the cutoff is going to call. And now we’re looking at the buttons three bet range.

So it is more helpful to have the video version here so you could see what we’re seeing. But to walk you through generally this range, we have a lot of mixing going on. There are some hands that clearly prefer one or the other option. Aces, Kings, Queens, Ace King suited. Those hands always three bet. Pocket Sevens, pocket Fives. Those hands always call. But a ton of other hands are mixing between multiple options. Just to name a couple examples, King Ten suited is about an even split between calling and three betting. King Jack suited is pretty similar. Ace Queen offsuit mostly three bets but sometimes calls and actually folds a small frequency as well in solverland. Ace Five suited splits between two actions.

Six Five suited splits between raising and calling. The point is, a lot of hands are indifferent between the two options. And that’s where Garrett’s tip comes into play. When you have a reason to pick one of those options based on where the VIP is sitting, you’re going to want to pick that option. So Garrett, off the top of your head here, let’s say this player who raised from the lojack is the VIP and the cutoff is a solid player who called. How are you adjusting this range? What types of hands are you more likely to three bet given that the VIP raised and a solid player called?

Garrett: Yeah, I mean we just need to be going super ham here. That would be the first thing off the top of my head. I mean, looking at these ranges, the first thing is it just breaks my heart. These no ante environments. We just need to play pretty tight in a general sense. You know, doing something like folding Eight Seven suited, Nine Eight suited, you know, if I have a VIP raising the lojack here, like we’re going in. You know, those hands are certainly not going to be folds either way, but I would argue that, you know, you can just do a ton of three betting here. You know, to what extent that’s true, I think depends on a couple different things.

Let’s first discuss this, is it the cutoff that called us in this spot?

Mike: Yes. Yeah.

Garrett: Yeah. So, if the cutoff calls us in this spot, you know, the first thing I want to be thinking about is: how good is this player, right? Because most cutoffs worth their salt here are understanding of the same thing I am here and they’re just iso-ing quite wide themselves, right? And so oftentimes, this means this cutoff range is really not all that exciting, right? If they’re not a particularly great player, you’re going to see a lot of Deuces through Sevens exactly kind of stuff, right? In either case, I would argue against most small medium winners here.

This isn’t a range we’re overly concerned with, and so, because of that, you know, I think we could take the vast majority of this range that’s highlighted green or orange and just go ahead and three bet with it. I think the other thing you really want to be thinking about in this situation is the blinds. In this sim, we have two blinds, and so I definitely want to be thinking about both of those players. One of the big perks we have here is we’re on the button. So if we have a strong winning player, a tough opponent, you know, in the blinds, they still are going to have to three bet us out of position, play the whole pot, you know, out of position throughout. This is why this configuration is so advantageous.

If it’s something like the lojack opens and we’re in the hijack, it’s a bit different. We’re super incentivized to isolate the lojack still, but we have to worry about two potentially strong players behind us, right? But as played, we need to at least consider the small blind and big blind. If they’re the types to mostly leave us alone, then I think we can go even harder. And these hands that are like fifty percent splits, I think especially in low stakes games, they can just be sort of pure three bets, right? Now, I think the other thing you just want to ask yourself here, too, is “Well, how good for the game are the small blind and big blind,” right? Now, the possibilities here are endless.

And in my course, I try to give in a lot of these spots like two or three situations that have enough difference that it would sort of alter my decision. So, I’ll do that for us here just very briefly. Let’s say the lojack is pretty good for the game. And the cutoff calls. He’s a winner. It’s on us. The small blind’s a tight pro, and the big blind is the biggest VIP ever. In that scenario, we have some pros and cons here, and it becomes quite close, right? But I would argue because that VIP in the big blind is so incredible for the game, you know, a hand like Ten Nine suited, which is a mix, I would just put it in the flat. You know, a hand like Ace Queen offsuit that doesn’t play as well multi-way.

Okay, maybe that one still works as a split, you know. So, it really kind of just depends on what class of hand it is, you know, looking at a couple other splits here like Ace Four, Ace Five suited. Those may also go in my flatting range if we’re really trying to keep a VIP in the blinds in the pot, right? And I know this is already so nuanced, so what the hell? Let’s make it one step more complicated than that. If the VIP also lives to cold call three bets and he’s just playing half the deck whether you call or whether you three bet, well then none of this matters and we just want to put even more money in the pot and let’s go willy-nilly and three bet all of them, right?

So no matter how far you’re taking this, oftentimes there’s often one more question to ask yourself to really capture as much EV as you can get.

Mike: Speaking of, I do have one more question for you there. So, when it comes to the properties of the hands, let’s say you do have that VIP behind who lives to cold call three bets. Like, you could three bet here. It’ll get to him in the big blind and he’ll just call ten blinds cold or thirteen blinds cold or whatever. In that scenario, how are you going to adjust if at all with a hand like Six Five suited?

Like, this is a hand that plays well multi-way, is definitely a hand you want to be playing here because you feel like you have an edge, you’re on the button, but is it a hand you want to be three betting and then playing this like really bloated big pot when, you know, traditionally these types of suited connectors prefer a bigger stack to pot ratio. So my kind of pointed question I want to ask is: are there properties like a low suited connector has that would make you not want to three bet when that guy behind is going to cold call three bets? Would you rather keep the pot small in that case?

Garrett: For sure. You know, I think the answer to that is pretty straightforward. You know, calling is better. But I have so many different caveats to this. You know, like when we look at so many of these sim outputs, you know, it treats a hand like Six Five, Seven Six suited, you know, the same way it treats the King 10 suited, the Ace Five suited because it’s, as I like to call it, kind of part of a balanced breakfast, right? It’s how we’re able to have board coverage throughout. Okay. Well, that’s if you’re playing against god, right? And we are talking about playing against huge VIPs and not god.

So, we don’t need to look at Seven Six suited the way we look at certainly something like King Jack suited, which is just a much stronger hand, right? That even when we make top pair, we can often get three streets of value in against some of my opponents, right? So, that’s kind of another argument I would say to kind of looking at these suited connector hands, even if you’re a student of the sim, let’s say, and understanding that in many ways it’s just a totally different thing when we’re not as nearly obsessed or even focused on board coverage, right? Let me give you one more. Now, we’re really going to go out on a limb here into the weeds here a bit.

You know, I played with a lot of very bad wrecks over the years who had this specific thing in common. They called preflop way too wide. They called the flop too wide. The turn they kind of accidentally played like at around GTO to oversimplify. And then the river they wildly overfolded, right, which is a total mess given the way they played the earlier streets. And what a lot of these guys had in common is they just been getting beat up in live poker for forever. And all of their decent opponents realized, “Oh, we shouldn’t bluff this guy. He doesn’t fold,” right? So, they just had it over and over and over and over and over again.

And a lot of even the biggest losers in the game eventually learn, “Okay, when a lot of money goes in against me, they just have it always,” right? I used that against these opponents once I had the data points. Now, it is critical that you have the data points, which goes back to paying attention and seeing showdowns and things like that that we talked about, but the point is, is there are worse things than taking the Six Five suited for a ride and having your opponent, you know, call your three bet with Queen Deuce suited and Ten Nine offsuit from the blinds, right?

The reality is is that player in conjunction with their sort of reluctance to get all the way to showdown, there can be a lot of money to print off of a guy like that as well, right? Very nuanced, super oversimplified, but I think a lot of you even in very good two five and five ten games, for instance, can do better than “Okay, let’s just make sure the worst player is in the pot, and let’s just make a big hand and then double up,” because a lot of them are really kind of focused on avoiding that exact scenario.

Mike: Just to rattle off some takeaways here from Garrett. When there is a VIP involved, whether they’re the person who raised, the person who called the raise, or they’re still to act in the blinds, you’re going to want to be playing looser. You’re going to want to try to isolate that player, build the pot, and get them to the flop with their too loose range, which you’re going to perform really well against. There were a couple specific hand notes in there, like when you have a hand like Ace Queen offsuit, you’re going to want to try to steer it to a heads-up pot rather than a multi-way pot.

So, a little bit more likely to three bet it whereas maybe if you have a hand like Six Five suited, you can just call and let that VIP come in from the blinds. Did I get all of that right, Garrett? And do you have anything final to add before we move on?

Garrett: Yeah, no, I think that that’s it. You know, I think just one final note just to keep it real simple here. When you’re playing against people you think you’re better than, especially if you think you’re a lot better than them, make the pot as big as possible. You know, I think one of the most fun nodes with this is in limp pots preflop. You know, it’ll show the small blind limping and you’re in the big blind and it wants you to do crazy stuff like check King Queen off sometimes. Like, man, if you are better than your opponent, that is absolutely insane, right? Same thing is true when we’re discussing whether to keep something like King Queen offsuit in your SRP or your three bet pot range.

If you’re better than your opponent, we just want to start mashing money in the middle. Why? It’s very simple. The bigger the pot is, the more expensive each of their mistakes will be. If they’re not good players, by definition, over time, they will be making a lot of mistakes. So, for that reason, it’s really important that we understand how to utilize solvers best. Understand that a solver, as most of you know, assumes that you are playing against god, not some very weak opponent. Against a weak opponent, we need to be making the pot as big as possible, as early as possible, especially if we think we have a range advantage against them.

Mike: All right, that was some strategic gold. Let’s mine for some more. Garrett, what’s your fourth tip for live poker players?

26:03 — Tip #4: Know the Theory

Garrett: All right, this one’s going to be controversial. Not everyone’s going to have fun with this one, but you got to know the theory. Okay. Now, am I saying you need to spend a thousand hours or like some psychos like me and players who are even stronger than me at theory, thousands and thousands of hours? Definitely not. You know, in my upswing course, I break down countless what I refer to as heuristics.

Little tips, little tricks, little rules, things that you probably will remember, especially when I review them five different times throughout the course, that give you just small theory nuggets that even if your theory game is quite poor now, you know, over the course of, you know, the forty hours or so in in my course, you’re going to get much, much better at it in a much more fun and honestly easier sort of to incorporate, digest, etc. way, you know, than studying sort of theory outputs yourself, you know?

But ultimately, no matter how good the games you play in are, if you don’t know the baseline strategy, if you don’t know, if you will, sort of the GTO solution, to an extent or within a decent range, I just don’t understand how you’re going to know if, when, and to what extent you should deviate from that play. You know, ultimately when I think back to my poker career, you know, it was around 2017 when I started playing on live streams and started playing with the Dan Zacks and the Art Papazyans and the occasional, you know, Euro superstar that traveled into play, you know, these guys at the time were much stronger than me theoretically.

And I think even if I was better than them at certain skills, I just couldn’t overcome that sort of lack of theory knowledge. And thankfully live streams in many ways kind of saved my career. I was just so competitive and I was able to literally watch myself get outplayed time and time again by some of these guys that that’s when I really sort of locked myself, you know, in my office for the next several years. The good news is again, you don’t have to do that. You can get eighty, ninety percent of this in some ways by just taking my course and really locking in.

And when you don’t understand something, watching it again and sometimes three times, but definitely a lot of ways to do it far more efficiently than the way I did years ago.

Mike: I hope some of you out there find this inspirational. I think it’s really tempting for certain live players to just hand wave away theory. I think it’s a convenient position to take that “Theory isn’t relevant for my game, so I’m not going to spend any time on it.” Who likes to do work? So, I don’t blame you for wanting that to be true, but you just heard it from Garrett firsthand. Arguably the best player at exploiting of all time. And he felt like he needed a strong theoretical background to compete and it was kind of live streams that saved him and enabled him to do that.

So even if you are playing one three or two five and you’re succeeding and you’re crushing because your intuitive game is really good, your exploitative game is really good, I think there’s a strong argument to be made that you’re actually succeeding not because you’re not studying theory, but in spite of not discovering theory. You’re probably really good at exploiting people. Your intuition is probably really dialed in. But if you learn some theory to back that up, you’re only going to get better. It’s not going to trip you up. And by the way, Garrett’s course, Destroy Live Cash, is available right now on Upswing Poker.

This one is for the live cash game players who are serious about improving their bottom line. Use code levelup to get fifty dollars off on upswingpoker.com right now and start learning that theory so you can take your win rate to the next level. Speaking of exploits, Garrett, what is tip number five?

29:48 — Tip #5: Exploits

Garrett: Yeah, I mean obviously number five is bread and butter in live poker. Bread and butter of my poker game. You know, how I was able to find success going all the way back to 2004 playing online cash, then heads-up, then live poker, exploits, exploits, exploits, exploits. Man, if you were good at this pre-solver area, you are going to just crush, you know. And yet, especially in live poker, which is kind of ten years, twenty years, depending on the game, thirty years in the past, exploits are still my bread and butter. They absolutely should be your bread and butter as well. Again, live poker is soft. It doesn’t matter whether you’re playing one two, or one thousand two thousand.

When you play live poker, people on average are going to be far more predictable. They don’t think you’re paying attention. And it’s just really important that you lock in, you find out what your opponents are up to, and then you build attack strategies against each of them. Now, with that in mind, again, it’s kind of the Goldilocks thing. You don’t want to be too hot or too cold here. Don’t take those exploits too far. If you do, you risk them kind of figuring out what you’re up to. Then they may counter-exploit you. Sometimes it can be difficult to know if and when they’re counter-exploiting you.

You know, I’m sure most of you don’t play on a live stream, but that’s even more true if it’s on a live stream, or more specifically in your games, when a showdown goes down. If you go super hard in the paint when it comes to an exploit and your opponent sees it, you know, the most obvious one is like just playing a hand that’s totally out of bounds preflop, uh, it’s just very important that you sort of figure out if and what they’ll do with that information and then you make the appropriate adjustments, right? That you are willing to engage in the leveling game.

Yet another sort of central part of my live poker game and one that, you know, I certainly advise you guys to to play yourself if you think that, you know, you can out-level your opponents or that you are stronger than them when it comes to metagame. You know, the reality to kind of just sum this all up, number four, number five, but really all five of these is: you don’t need to be the best in the world at game theory. You don’t need to be the best in the world at at exploits.

But if you’re solid at both, if you can weave between both worlds competently, if you can sort of evaluate the variables in a given hand and understand if and to what extent exploits should play a role in a decision-making process, well, I got to tell you, you’re going to be a tough out. And I wouldn’t want to see you at the table.

32:16 — The $600,000 Pot

Mike: On the topic of exploits, Garrett, there is a hand in your book that I think speaks really well to how you went about exploiting people. Uh, it’s as I talked about the intro of this episode, a 600k pot that you played against Rick Solomon. I’m going to run through the action. This one is straight from the book, and then you can kind of walk me through what your strategy was in the situation and how it is a deviation from how you normally play, how you are deviating to exploit the very fun player that is Rick Solomon. Tough player, but a fun player, no doubt. So, you’re three hundred thousand dollars deep. You’re playing one hundred two hundred with a one thousand dollar big blind ante.

So you’re, what is that, like fifteen hundred blinds deep, but there’s a huge ante. So you can kind of approximate that you’re only maybe eight hundred blinds deep, something like that. Would you agree?

Garrett: You know, this game played so loose and wild. I think this game was more like five hundred one thousand, you know, without any ante way it played. A lot of times to oversimplify these things, a little heuristic you can use is just add up what the size of the pot is and then just figure out what that would look like without an ante. So in this case, we’re talking about one hundred plus two hundred plus a thousand that’s thirteen hundred in the middle. So something like four hundred eight hundred but again five hundred one thousand is what I think it kind of played like, just given, you know, sort of how wild the players and the action was. And it does get pretty wild in this one.

Rick says make it a dime on the button. He tosses out a thousand dollar chip, raising it up to a thousand dollars. And then you’re in the small blind with Queen Jack offsuit and you decide to three bet to five thousand dollars. And then Rick called. Any notes on the preflop? Is this standard for you, especially with the big ante or were you making any adjustments here?

Garrett: You know, this was probably pretty standard for me just because people played so terrible with this big ante. They just did not adjust at all. They just did not fight for pots nearly as much as they should. And coincidentally, in this hand, I had Prahlad Friedman in the big blind. And man, despite what sort of a strong player he was historically, he just didn’t understand, I think, just basic math when it came to this big ante. And so, I was so heavily motivated to keep him out of the pot, and he just almost never punished me for this, you know. So, in this exact spot, Rick raising the button, me in the small, Prahlad in the big, I just didn’t even have a flatting range, right?

And again, we’re just so incentivized to get in there because there’s already, you know, now twenty-three hundred in the middle with Rick’s raise, but it didn’t matter because I was going to be able to get the pot heads up against Rick often enough, you know. So, I have Queen Jack offsuit here. Far from a great hand. Far from your dream hand playing out of position, you know, infinite deep, but given the variables at play, to me it felt like a no-brainer.

Mike: Well, maybe you knew what the flop was because clearly it was a no-brainer when it comes Ten Nine Eight rainbow heads up to the flop with about eleven thousand in the middle and you go for a six thousand dollar bet on this flop with the pure nuts. What are you thinking on this spot? Is this a board that you might check in theory a little bit more often, but you decided to bet against Rick? What how are you approaching it?

Garrett: Yeah, that’s that’s actually spot on. You know, so first of all, you know, everyone has a different opinion of Rick. He’s the best ever. he’s the worst ever, you know, like whatever, right? My experiences with Rick, is someone who has incredible feel, who had just put in the reps, thousands, probably tens of thousands of hours playing high stakes live poker for big money, and yet his theory game, you know, certainly left a little something to be desired, especially preflop and on the flop. He really liked not to fold, right? So, you know, this Ten Nine Eight arguably is a pretty defensive board for me. This of course depends very specifically on how many offsuit combos I’m raising here.

If I’m raising combos like Ten Nine, Nine Eight, Ten Eight offsuit, totally different thing, right? But that’s even for me just like way too wide in spots like this, I’m just going to dump the the Ten Eight offsuit preflop, right? The point is is that even though we probably want to be playing a little bit more defensively here, because Rick is definitely raising preflop and then calling my three bet with every single combo of the offsuit hand that made two pair or a straight in this scenario, probably even the Jack Seven offsuit. The reality is he just did not like to fold nearly enough. And so when that’s the case, we have to start mashing money in the pot, right?

Now you’ll notice, this is review for a lot of you, that I don’t just pot it here. And if I had Aces, I half-pot it. Or if I have Ace King, I check. Or whatever the case, right? There are certain ways that you can cheat a little bit. One of them is I just described, which is: we’re going to take our strongest hands and pure bet them. That is remarkably difficult for Rick to ever figure out we’re doing, right? But if we pot it with our two pair plus here, and we half-pot it with everything worse than two pair plus, whether it’s Aces or Ace-High or whatever the case, that is so transparent. And honestly, it’s incredibly offensive to a really smart person like Rick, right?

And so, this is, I think, the name of the game when it comes to playing live poker: is understanding where your opponent’s at, understanding how much you can get away with, and then executing. And I’m going to give you a hint. My gut is the vast majority of you are cheating way more than you should. I think you’re using egregious sizings with big hands way too often, and you assume your opponent just isn’t catching your drift at all. And honestly, they probably are, right? Because that’s human nature, and that’s what happens in poker, and we all just live to assume we’re the smartest person in the world and our opponent is the dumbest.

So when in doubt, I highly recommend you lean more towards conservative when it comes to certain repetitive actions like flop c-betting, right?

Mike: So you decide to go six thousand here, which you would also do with Aces, which you would also do with a set, which you would also do with your bluff c-bets. You’ve got the nuts this time, though, and your opponent just calls. You get the beautiful brick of the Deuce of Diamonds on the turn. Full rainbow board now. No flush draws. And there’s twenty-three thousand in the middle. You’ve got something like two hundred and ninety thousand behind. You go for a twenty thousand dollar bet into twenty-three thousand. Pretty standard size for you here? Is this again kind of just the size you’re using with everything you’re betting?

Garrett: Yeah, I think so. I think on the Ten Nine Eight, this is just the sizing I like. You know, my hand is just like a slam dunk both in theory land and in exploit lands, as I like to refer to them, to just go ahead and bet, right? For exploits, we’ve already kind of talked about it. Rick doesn’t love to fold. Yeah, he may play a little bit more snug, whatever the case may be, but he’s going to start to manage the pot here some, you know, if he has a hand like Ace Nine or something and I check, he’s never going to bet the hand himself, as an example, you know? So, I’m highly motivated to keep getting money in the pot here. It’s sort of as an exploit.

But man, in theory land, this is the biggest slam dunk ever, right? This is going to be review for some of you. But with a Queen and a Jack in my hand, whenever you have a straight, it’s such a dream spot to on average put more money in the pot because you’re unblocking all the good hands your opponent can have, right? So, we talked about Rick being quite likely to even take a hand like Eight Nine offuit for a ride preflop as well as call the three bet. We’re just unblocking all the sets, all the two pairs. And we’re even doing pretty well with a bunch of pair plus, gutter, pair plus open-enders that he can have. We just have the dream hand to start putting money in the pot.

And I mean, let’s face it, the pot’s only twenty-three thousand and we got another two hundred and ninety or something to get in here. So, it’s time to get to work.

Mike: Luckily, Rick decided to do some of the work for you. He quickly, as you noted, raised it to seventy-five thousand dollars. Quoting you directly from the book: “Keeping a poker face externally, in my head, I was jumping up and down screaming, ‘Yes, we’ve got him. We’re about to win three hundred thousand dollars.'” So, you’re feeling pretty confident in this moment. And you end up deciding to just move all-in now. You don’t fuck around. All the money goes in the pot. It’s about two hundred thousand more for Rick to call. Is your thinking here, “This guy’s just got a lot of two pairs, a lot of sets, and he’s not going to fold them. I don’t want a scare card to come. Let’s just get the money in now.”?

Garrett: Yeah, that’s exactly it. You know, when we think about exploits, I think we can often kind of group them to oversimplify into individualized and population-wide. And from what I had seen from Rick in spots like this before, when we’re playing big pots, big money goes in, especially on later streets, turns and rivers, you know, a raise like this kind of meant business. You know, it was going to be quite unlikely that he was looking to raise fold in a situation like this. You know, an old school term we used to use back in my day is backdoor aggression, right?

Qhich is putting in the big money and generally on later streets, when he made it seventy-five here, I just felt very confident based on our hundreds of hours of play together that he was not looking to fold his hand. And so there’s just really no reason to get cute here. No reason to slow play, play tricky. We just need to move the money in. We need to hope that read is right. We need to hope he has a two pair plus hand, you know, that he can’t fold. Again, Queen Jack is the dream kind of hand to have in this spot. Unblocking all of those hands. And so I never really you know considered calling in this situation, and you know why was I so happy?

Honestly because I was playing way way above my head, and it was incredibly irresponsible, and you know in my head I stood a decent chance of potentially you know nearly doubling my net worth here in in one hand. So I was I was pretty stoked without knowing exactly you know what he was holding.

Mike: Well so on that note you know this is your story. I’ve went through all the action. Rick does call off. You want to share with the audience what he had and how this ran out?

Garrett: Yeah. So, as it turns out, you know, Rick doesn’t have my favorite hand here. He has top set for three Tens. So, he obviously has ten outs or roughly, you know, twenty-two, twenty-three percent to make the best hand on the end. What I was really hoping for was the Six Seven just drawing stone dead or maybe like I said the Ten Nine, the Eight Nine, a hand with only four outs. But alas, we can’t get too greedy here. You know, we have seventy-seven percent equity in what’s now a six hundred thousand dollar pot. So, you know, I’m feeling great.

You know, the kind of cocky, reckless kid as I was, who puts, you know, nearly all of his net worth on the table, is not the kind of guy who assumes he’s about to get sucked out for nearly all of his net worth, you know, when the money goes in. So, with that being said, you know, it’s obviously time to discuss how many times to run it in this spot. You know, with almost all my net worth on the table, I’m trying to just realize my equity, right? Like, I want Rick to run it twenty times. Now, of course, we’re not actually gonna do that, but I ask, “Hey, Rick, can we do four of them?” And and he pauses. And it’s funny because Rick, I mean, everything he did was snap act.

He bet, he raised, he called, he folded, everything was a snap decision. But in this case, he pauses for about five seconds, thinks about it for a little bit, and goes, “You know what, Garrett? Usually I just run it once as you know, but like and he doesn’t say it like this, but you could tell in not so many words he goes like I could tell you can’t fucking afford to lose this hand, dude. So I’ll run it three times with you, you know? So we get to the first river and it pairs the board. I think it was a Deuce. Gives him a full house. And at this point, now, you know, I’m melting down, right? Like I can’t afford to lose this hand. I just assume I’m about to lose all three runouts.

I’m gonna be crippled financially. Like really won’t even have much to play in these incredible games that I discuss. I refer to them as the never win games. And you know it’s getting pretty bleak in my head here in the the ten seconds between when the dealer flips up that first river, which was the Deuce pairing the board and the second river, which thankfully was the King of Diamonds. So now I know I’m going to win at least a third of the pot. Starting to relax a little bit. And on that third and final board, the dealer pulls up a Five. I end up taking two out of three, which is obviously a pretty good outcome here. You know, when your opponent has ten outs.

So, you know, there was a bunch of obnoxious guys in this game. Some of which weren’t my favorite people. One of this was, one of them was this private home game guy named Chris Smith. He’s freaking out. He’s like, “We got to see the fourth river. We got to see the fourth river.” So, they show it. It also would have paired the board. I think it was another Eight, and so ultimately three run outs is just the very best it could have been for me. You know, if Rick would have run it once as he normally always would have, I would have been in a really dire situation, and twice only win half the pot, four times, only win half the pot, so it was incredibly serendipitous.

And as you can imagine, I’m just kind of floating in the clouds after winning two thirds. Played well the rest of the day. You know, ended up booking a six figure win and we were kind of off and running, you know, from there. Ended up, you know, winning a lot of money, millions, in those games over the subsequent couple years, and, you know, if not for Rick generously offering to run it three times, even though it doesn’t cost too many EV, you know, it’s hard to know, you know, how it would have played out. These are, you know, I’m an old soul now. I just turned forty. And so, these are the kind of things I spend a lot of time, you know, contemplating is, you know, why me?

Why did my career turn out to be just honestly just like this wild sort of run of ups and downs that ultimately was way way way up, and I definitely, you know, recognized the role of luck in these situations. You know, when you play way over your bank roll, you’re going to need things to go well. And a lot of times when I did that, that, that’s exactly what happened for me.

Mike: Let’s get some Rick Solomon appreciation in the comments because without Rick Solomon deciding to run it three times, we might not ever have Garrett on the Hustler live stream and all of those fun streams he played because these never win games, as he referred to in the books. Neverwin was actually one of the players in the game. I bet you can get some of his characteristics based on the nickname Garrett’s given him. It’s one of my favorite parts of the book. These games are just absolutely bananas. This guy literally never wins. And yeah, this pot was was very notable. So yeah, let’s get some Rick Solomon appreciation down there.

46:20 — Final Thoughts

Garrett: You know, I think just one final thing I want to throw in here is, you know, maybe some of you might be thinking like, “What do you mean, Garrett? You had the best hand. Like, you should have just won the pot. Like, you have the best hand, right?” That’s not how poker works. That’s not how life works. You know, when you play poker, when you choose to make gambling your living, you don’t deserve to win. You don’t deserve anything, honestly. And I’m not going to sit here and pretend like in my teens and twenties I probably didn’t have some level of entitlement, you know, but I certainly sit here at forty years old and I know I don’t deserve much in life, you know, and I’m grateful for what I have.

I’m grateful that I, you know, won two out of three in that hand. I’m grateful for my kids’ lives. And, you know, I think it’s one of the really beautiful lessons that applies from poker to everything else in life. If you’re sort of grateful for the things in your life instead of feeling entitled or deserving of them, it’s just a much better sort of head space to be in.

Mike: Let’s wrap up on those nice words from Garrett. If you want more strategy content from him, he has been a workhorse on his YouTube channel lately, putting out a ton of deep hand analyses, which are directly from his course. So, if you want a little preview as well, you can go check those out. We are going to pop one up on your screen now. So, if you want more deep strategy analysis for live poker games from Garrett Adelstein, click that video and we’ll see you in the next one.

Garrett: See you guys.