WPT GTO Trainer Hands of the Week: Playing Against a Tough Button
Today you’ll be playing in a cash game with 100BB stacks as the preflop raiser facing a tough player who calls you on the Button. These are tricky spots since your opponent will have position on you in every hand. You will practice this spot from different positions at the table, meaning your hand range (and Button’s calling range) can change from hand to hand.
This dynamic training pack will allow you to see the effect that position has on optimal play. When you raise in the Cutoff and the Button calls, both hand ranges are wider than if you were to raise from UTG and Button calls. With wider ranges, you’ll want to incorporate more hands into your bluffing and value betting ranges.
With your pure misses on flops that favor the caller over the raiser, you will often simply check and give up. On flops where the preflop raiser has both the equity advantage and nut advantage with their range, you should often c-bet the larger size.
With your strong hands that don’t block top pair or better, you generally should consider aggressive actions to build a large pot. When you don’t block your opponent from having medium strength hands like top pair, you often make the most chips with larger sizing.
In addition, when you hold blockers to the nut straight and are facing aggressive action, you should consider bluff catching if you can beat bluffs.
Consider semi-bluffing a large sizing on boards where you hold the range advantage when you hold 4 to a broadway straight. This will provide balance to the times you have strong made hands.
To see more examples and test your skills, you can play through five free solved hands from this scenario.
To access the free five hands, visit this page.
Regular play on the WPT GTO Trainer will help you adjust your decisions closer and closer to GTO strategy.
You don’t have to be the world’s best player to use GTO Strategy, and thanks to the WPT GTO Trainer, now you don’t have to buy expensive software or have expert level knowledge to study GTO.
Why use the WPT GTO Trainer?
The WPT GTO Trainer lets you play real solved hands against a perfect opponent in a wide variety of postflop scenarios for cash game and tournament play.
If your goal is to be a tough poker player then you should try the WPT GTO Trainer today.
Register a free account here (it only takes your e-mail address to begin) to play hands and see true GTO strategy in real-time.
The WPT GTO Trainer has over 4 billion unique solved flops, turns and rivers that are fully playable.
As you make decisions in a hand, you receive instant feedback on the specific EV loss (if any) and Played Percentage for every action you take as compared to GTO strategy.
The full selection of scenarios for the WPT GTO Trainer are only available to members of LearnWPT, however we’re giving PokerNews Readers free access to the Trainer on a regular basis with the WPT GTO Hands of The Week.
Use this series of articles to practice the strategies you learn on LearnWPT (or at the table) and test your progress by playing a five-hand sample each week.
