If you’re a Poker player and you don’t know who Linus is you must have been living under a rock! Linus Loeliger is a Swiss Pro Poker player that has absolutely crushed the 6Max games online for the last few years, one of the most winning players in recent times he is an absolute beast and we are going to take a look at how he plays some of his spots in this post.
Exploitative Sizings
Here Linus backs into a sneaky straight but rather than putting his opponent all in for around $35,000 they have in their stack he chooses to bet around 60% pot instead.
This is believed to be an exploitative approach that Linus takes to his specific opponents if he believes here that the Villian will only call a smaller bet with a one pair type hand then he will adjust and go for a value bet that is much more likely to be called.
Poker is all about knowing your opponent and if your opponent gets a little gun-shy against overbets and thinks they are only weighted towards super strong hands then we need to adjust and size down to get paid and that is exactly what is going on here, throwing GTO values out the window and getting paid.
Leading on dynamic boards
Here we see Linus facing off in one of the many crazy battles against Trueteller, we see the donk lead a bunch of times in this match, it usually takes place when Linus doesn’t have the pre-flop betting lead he will try and regain control of the pot on the flop.
We see him do this with fairly weak holdings sometimes as well as very strong hands, so by doing this he puts his opponents in some weird spots as to whether they want to raise or not.
In this particular pot, he is doing it with a strong hand that he wants to induce a raise so he can get the final bet in and move all-in.
However, Trueteller doesn’t let this happen, he simply Jams all-in on this board raising to $42,600 with around $18,000 in the middle.
This isn’t the best move at all from Trueteller, better hands to do this with would include QQ or KK that would get protection from overcards but I think with AA flat calling or raising this board to a normal sizing are better plays, moving all-in here with a nut disadvantage is over-playing this one pair hand I feel.
Linus is an amazing player that will be able to play perfectly against the hand that is obviously just an overpair. So whilst this bet deters hands like open-ended straight draws from continuing with these poor odds it allows all two pairs, sets and flopped straights to get the money in as a huge favourite.
There are some worthwhile lessons that can be learnt from this pot though, sometimes when we get led into in pots like this it means different things, I would have to say that against a strong player it can mean different things, different times and against a weak player they might make this move with just weak top pairs like KJ and QJ but even these have pretty good equity against the one pair here.
If ever there’s a board we don’t want to go broke on with Aces, it’s one like this… so let’s just pump the breaks in these types of spots and think about all the hands our opponent can have that either has 35% against us or has us as a big underdog.
Betting Small makes even the best opponents trip up
In this pot we see Linus betting around 25% of the pot on the Flop, the reason this is such a good bet is because it allows opponents to make mistakes.
Let’s look at another example of someone who gets scared for some reason on this great board for AKo and bets huge, something like 80% well then no worse hands can continue and by using this bet sizing we allow our opponents to just play perfectly and only continue if they have a tonne of equity.
In this pot, the Villian ends up floating with JTs to try and hit there backdoor draws, with the best cards for their hand going to be a Heart, Q, 8 or 9.
Linus’ opponent ends up leading out on this Turn card which is hard to know what he is representing for strength, maybe some two pair combinations or some straights, but it’s likely any flush draw would have raised the flop.
Linus just calls this bet, with little value in raising as this would just push out all the bluffs in our opponents hands and would only get action if he was in bad shape, I could see some raises if his hand didn’t have the second nut diamond as then he could get some equity denial against flush draws.
Moving to the River Villian then Pots it, putting Linus all in and he gets to make the easy call with the nut flush on this run-out.
All of this was set up with a tiny flop bet, that most people may not have sized that way and may not have kept a weak hand in the pot that then went on some crazy bluff.
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