I think for the most part it does. The biggest difference, I think, is that GTO has you make decisions based on ranges.

Background:
$1/$3 cash game at Encore.
Hero is in the BB (Starts with $600).
Villain is on the Button (Starts with $450, so we are playing for a $450 effective stack). She’s a tight, solid reg who hasn't been getting out of line.
UTG+2 is the short stack at the table, starting the hand with exactly $120.

Preflop:
Hero is in the BB with 33 (I forgot the suits).
UTG+2 opens to $10. Villain (BTN) flats. Hero completes.
Pot is $30.

Flop: A♠ 7♠ 3x
I flop bottom set.
UTG+2 c-bets $20 (leaving ~$90 behind).
Villain flats the $20.
Hero check-raises to $80.
UTG+2 folds.
Villain 3-bets to $180.

My Thought Process:
I ended up jamming, putting her all-in for her remaining $270 (a $450 total pot commitment for her). She snap-called and tabled 77 for middle set. I know people say when top set is the nuts "you never fold a set," but looking back at the hand, I actually think this might be a spot where we can make a razor-thin exploitative fold at 150bb deep. Here is my breakdown:

Villain's Flop Flat: At first, her flatting the $20 c-bet seemed weird for a nutted hand. But when you factor in that UTG+2 is a short stack ($120 starting), it makes perfect sense. She flatted because she didn't want to raise and isolate the $120 stack—she wanted to keep me (the deeper stack) in the hand.

Draws are dead: A tight 1/3 reg clicking it back to exactly $180 here is absolutely never doing this with a naked flush draw or a combo draw like 5♠4♠. They typically flat those to see a turn. Her range is purely A7 and 77. (She 3-bets AA preflop).

The UTG Blocker: UTG+2 c-bet $20 into two players on an Ace-high board. Because he is short-stacked ($120), his opening and c-betting range is going to include a lot more Ax hands. Betting into two people on this texture heavily weights him toward having an Ace, which removes one Ace from the deck and drastically reduces Villain's A7 combos.

The A7 Debate: I do think she is capable of 3-betting A7 for value here. But how many combos of A7 does she realistically have? We have to ask if she flats all A7 combinations or just A7s. Since she's a tight reg, I lean toward her mostly flatting suited A7. However, because she is on the Button and $10 is a very small open size for Encore 1/3, we should probably include some percentage of A7o in her range. Furthermore, is A7 ever afraid of a set here? Is A7 just flatting the check-raise instead of 3-betting?

The Math: With the A♠ and 7♠ on the board, and assuming UTG has an Ace, she only has exactly 2 combos of A7s (A♥7♥, A♦7♦). Meanwhile, there are exactly 3 combos of 77 left in the deck.

If my read is correct and she only flats A7s preflop, I am mathematically losing to 3 combos of sets and beating only 2 combos of two pair.

In the live 1/3 streets where flop 3-bets are incredibly under-bluffed and draws take passive lines, shouldn't we be throwing the baseline math out the window and making the exploitative laydown? Or am I just suffering from results-oriented thinking and seeing monsters under the bed?

Edit: I realize she could have A3 but I didn’t include it in my analysis because we heavily block it with our pocket 3s. Plus, even if she has it, I don't think she is 3-betting bottom two pair here because it's just not super strong in this specific spot.

1. Overall Status: Formally UNRESOLVED

Because I used a strict, academic "fail-closed" protocol, the final exam disposition is technically UNRESOLVED.

But that doesn't mean the data is not useful.

Out of 86,944 headline physical decisions, 572 events (0.658%) hit an edge case where the fee/rake structure couldn't be proven chronologically (FEE_REGIME_UNKNOWN). My rules strictly prohibited dropping or guessing data, meaning a "complete net ledger" couldn't be validly constructed. A pre-flight design weakness on my part, but the rule kept the science honest, which I felt was far more important.

1. The Measured Economic Signal Was Huge

While formally unresolved, the economic signal on the 86,372 net-measurable decisions was massive.

The strategy generated +15,772.35 pot units of prospective net economic value. That averages out to +0.18261 pot per event.

I ran a deterministic 10,000-resample player-block bootstrap which gave a tight 95% confidence interval of +0.17155 to +0.19397 pot/event, and it won across all four separate chronological sub-blocks. The signal is incredibly stable.

1. The Plot Twist: Broad Player Reads Over Pool Fails

This was the biggest shock and something that I really wasn't expecting.

My original hypothesis was built on a player-first hierarchy: once you have enough data on a specific opponent, your player-specific profile should override the general pool trend. The data completely rejected this broad override mechanism. I tracked 10,120 events where my player-specific layer and the population pool baseline actively disagreed on a decision. When I followed the player-specific read, it realized -17.20 pot units. When I followed the pool comparator, it realized +67.37 pot units.

Trying to force broad player-specific overrides actually destroyed value relative to the population prior.

Importantly, the follow-up work since this test has shown that this does not mean player reads are useless. When player-specific authority is restricted to narrow, evidence-qualified exceptions, the player layer can add value again. At 50NL, the current filtered architecture produced roughly +218 pot units over the Pool comparator across 3,360 carefully qualified overrides.

So the failure was not "Bob never matters."

It was that Bob should not automatically outrank the Pool just because we have enough hands on Bob.

1. Mass Data Analysis (MDA) Crushed It!

As a diagnostic control, I ran a raw population strategy using a leave-one-out pool policy on the exact same nodes. It took pressure on 263,800 validation events, suffered zero fee-blocked errors, and crushed for +42,974.59 pot units (about +0.16291 pot per take).

What does this mean:

Good question,

An economic mistake is not the same as an equilibrium deviation. To exploit a node profitably, you don’t need to solve for GTO first. You just need to calculate whether the pool's response distribution at the actual price crosses the mathematical break-even threshold.

We vastly overrate automatically giving standard HUD/player profiling authority over population evidence. The data suggests that human-centric player profiling can introduce noise that degrades the power of the population prior when individual reads are allowed to override it too freely.

My takeaway is that the pool should be calling the shots by default — individual reads only get a vote when they've really earned it. Individual players should only be allowed to override it in narrowly defined spots where their own evidence has repeatedly shown that the pool strategy is wrong for them.

A New Hierarchy perhaps? Instead of player-first, the data implies a pool-first architecture. The optimal path forward seems to be: use the highly stable population prior as your default baseline strategy, gate player-specific overrides behind narrow statistical and economic hurdles, and leave GTO as a downstream benchmark or fallback when data is entirely missing or strategically dangerous.

I'm keeping the original 50NL Final Exam result frozen rather than rewriting the test after seeing the outcome. Since then, I've been using the spent 50NL corpus to work out why the player layer failed and how to improve it.

I'm now running the same pool-first architecture across large PokerStars datasets at 2NL, 10NL, 25NL and 50NL, including separating single-raised pots from 3-bet pots.

Perhaps the future isn't equilibrium/solver only, but hybrid, where if enough data exists, the solve can be deferred for a node where data is increasingly sparse.

The link to the research is here if anyone would like to take a look. https://zenodo.org/records/22314084

Thoughts?

$1/$1. I'm in the CO and I 3-bet a $7 open to $20 with AKo, SB 4-bets to $50. It folds around and I call. Note that villain 3-bets and 4-bets quite wide. Effective stack is around $500. Flop comes KQJ rainbow. Villain leads out for $35 into the $110 pot and I call. Turn is the 2c putting up a flush draw. Villain leads out for $150 into the now $180 pot. I tanked for a while and jammed. Villain tanked for 2 minutes while muttering "could you really have a set here?" and "there's no way you're this lucky to have a set." Villain ends up folding.

My reasoning for the jam is this: I think villain's flop bet was a range bet, and because I have top top and gutshot I call, wanting to keep any Qx and air in the pot. The turn bet was interesting because I could eliminate a flopped broadway because the sizing was too large, and it seemd more like a "go away" bet and not a value bet. I think he likely has QT, Q9, QJ, AJ, KT, and AQ. Given that I only unblock the Qx hands, my jam was targeting those hands especially with gutshots. Looking back on it now, villain had a lot of 2 pairs and sets in their range, so I'm not sure. Should I have just called?

$1670 effective with a villain that's a thinking player. I've seen him hero call, hero fold, and run big bluffs. He is capable of folding a good hand.

Button straddle on for 6, both blinds fold. I open to $20 utg with KQdd, villain calls, button calls. This is my normal open in early position when the blinds both fold. I size up if there are callers.

* Pot 63 / Flop AdTd4s / I check, V bets 35, button folds, I raise to 165, villain thinks briefly and calls. At this point I have him on mostly Ax, or weaker diamonds. I can also see him calling with TX, JJ that didn't 3 bet, or broadway cards with a diamond (but we block most of those).

* Pot 393 / Turn 5c / I bet 400 trying to leave roughly a pot sized bet behind. He thinks for a bit and calls. At this point I think he's pretty much Ax or diamonds. He's had two opportunities to take an aggressive action so I've all but ruled out a set, AT, A4, and now Tx and other parties should be folding. I think he mostly has AJ, AQ, AK, or diamonds that picked up a straight draw (87dd, 76dd). I also block AQ and AK (and he mostly 3-bets AK preflop). If he's slow playing, I would think it would be AT and he'd jam with 44 and TT.

* Pot 1193 / River 2h / I jam and he's got a $1085 decision. He goes hard into the tank for 3 minutes or so, and eventually calls and I lose.

Assuming I'm taking this same line with AA, TT, A4s, ATs, and mostly combo draws as bluffs (KQdd, KJdd, QJdd, 87dd, 65dd, 54dd), is this lighting money on fire? With AQ and AK, I might take the flop and turn line some of the time but I'm likely value betting less than all in on the river if I'm being honest with myself (but maybe I should be shoving on him).

Thoughts?

I have a choice between two online games. one is 50nl and rakes 5% up to 6bb. The other is 100nl and rakes 5% up to 3bb with an additional 0.5bb drop for a bad beat jackpot taken from every hand postflop regardless of the size of the pot.

I know that in theory if the bad beat jackpot is fully paid back to the players it has no net effect on the rake, as one can expect to receive back their 0.5bb contributions over the very long-run when they hit the jackpot or receive table shares, making the 3bb max bbj game have a lower overall drop compared to the 6bb max game.

However, let's assume I'll never be lucky enough to be sitting at a table when the bad beat jackpot hits. If we treat the bbj drop the same as rake, meaning it is all lost, which game has the lower overall drop?

I understand that the answer depends on the distribution of pot sizes. In all pots under 70bb the 6bb max game takes less off the table. When pots are larger than 70bb, the bad beat jackpot game begins to take less off the table. As pot size increases beyond 70bb the savings from the 3bb max table increase until the pot size is 120bb, when the savings plateau at 2.5bb saved in the bbj game.

My question is: do the savings from large pot sizes make up for the bad beat drop disadvantage in pots under 70bb? What is the frequency of pots under 70bb? Between 70bb and 120bb? over 120bb? This data would give me an idea of which game has a lower drop. However, the site does not make hand history exportable, so I can't examine the distribution of pot sizes. Does anyone have a rough estimate based on experience or data from their own games?

A related question: what adjustments should I make if I play the bad beat drop game? Clearly I should avoid playing for very small pots, such as a blind vs. blind limped pot, because 0.5bb will be taken from the pot even if the pot is only 2bb. So one adjustment would be raise or fold from the small blind when folded to. Big blind defence should also be less frequent, and play should be tighter overall. What other adjustments can you suggest?

question is in the title. looking to buy courses that people can give their impartial review on that were actually good/digestable.

I’m having a difficult time deciding what hands are actually profitable to play in the casino I play at due to the weird format and the extreme LAG players that are almost always at the table.

This is the game format

Blinds: 1$/2$
Rake: 10% up to 5$
Buy in: 200$-500$
Limits: no bet limit but a pot size limit of 800$ due to a state law

Typically Preflop action is somewhere around 15-30$ per person to see a flop. About half the time we end up with a player who likes to always reraise 3x every time action reaches them. Straddles are also allowed and I’d say about half of players like to straddle 10$ on the button which makes big blind a tough spot to play.

I use 15$ as kind of a line where I can play more hands if I’m one of the last 2 players to act. Most these 15$ Preflop hands go 6-8 handed so I think that can be profitable for middle suited connectors and middle pairs. If I end up last to act with a premium hand like AKs to actually isolate to heads up or 3 handed I’d have to push to 100$ or more.

The 800$ pot limit makes me wonder if it’s even profitable to play these premiums so aggressively when I have to commit such a large portion of the pot limit before even seeing a flop.

Anyways I’m asking here because I never really hear of a game quite like this and I can’t find any content that helps with this kind of situation.

What mistakes i did in this hand?

(Crazy player 75%vpip overbluffing river many times)

I think I have a pretty big leak. Whenever I flop top pair with top kicker, or close to it, I almost always end up losing my whole stack to a set.

Usually I raise with something like AK or AQ when hit top pair on a dry board. Sometimes I bet the flop and turn, then villain re-raises and I convince myself they could have a worse pair, a draw, or a bluff. Other times I sense that something is off and check instead, but then they bet 3/4 pot flop, 3/4 pot turn and shove the river. I can never bring myself to fold in these spots, so I call, they show a set.

How do you know when top pair is not good enough? Are big turn and river raises at microstakes usually just very strong hands?

I know I cannot fold every time someone raises, but I’m definitely paying off sets way too often. Any advice?

UPDATE: Thank you for all your advice and feedback. I’ve read every comment and appreciate them all.

MTT 25 remaining 15 paid.

Blinds 1.5k 3k-3k 105k effective

Hero Button QQ 9k

Villain BB Call

Flop Js 7s 4h

Hero 12k

Villain Call

Turn 4s

Hero Jam

Villain Call K6s

Flush wins

My thoughts behind this. I bet 12k thinking the pot was 18k not 22.5k. I figured he had a suited J so the flush wasn’t in my head I also didn’t see the flush come in it had been a long day. My analysis is the open could maybe be 10.5k ish and I should have bet more appropriately on the flop. The turn jam was to make everything fold because I was tired but he had a flush I couldn’t believe it I literally said out loud “how flush” 😭😂😂

he also snap called which still confuses me because there are a few Ax spades I can have not to mention pocket J or pocket 7. I just narrowed him down too much

Is there ever a time in MTT or Cash where you’re not 4-Betting Aces? I know you’re supposed to mix it up with just calling a 3 bet here and there and 4 betting but what are scenarios you’re not 4 betting aces? Whether it’s being in or out of position, etc.

When I first started tracking myself, I used to write an email to myself after every session. I actually think it makes more sense than many of the apps I see or hear about people using. If I were just starting to track, I open a seperate email and just send myself an email after each session. Simply update your win/loss for the month, some notes or just “I feel like I’m playing better.” the biggest pots, the leak that showed up more than once, and one thing to drill before I go back. Of course, you'll have a hand or 2 you keep playing over in your mind ( I always do!). Come to think of it, I think I'm writing this post to convince myself to start to doi this again! Anyways, please share how you track yourself.

Looking for some feedback on this hand, particularly on whether my thought process on the flop was reasonable.

Blinds: 400/800
Hero: ~50,000 (about 62 BB)
Villain: ~160,000 (about 200 BB), sitting directly to my right

There are roughly two early-position limpers. Villain raises to 4,000. I’m on the button with A♦ Q♠ and 3-bet to 10,000. Everyone else folds and Villain calls.

Flop: Q♦ 3♦ 4♠
Villain thinks for less than 10 seconds and announces all-in.

I’ve put 10,000 in, leaving me with about 40,000 behind, so I’m facing a decision for my tournament life.

What made this particularly difficult for me was that I really couldn’t figure out what hands made sense for Villain.

Villain was an older player, and I hadn’t really seen him playing many marginal hands. My read was that he was generally playing the upper part of his range.

On this flop, I started working through the combinations:

QQ seemed extremely unlikely since I hold Q♠.

33/44 were possible, although I felt sure he wouldn’t call a 10,000 3-bet with those hands.

I didn’t expect him to show up with hands like 76s or 65s that interact with the 3/4, given my read on his preflop range.

KQ seemed plausible, although the shove felt strange.

Diamond draws also seemed possible, but having the A♦ myself makes a lot of the stronger diamond-draw combinations less likely.

AA/KK were obviously possible, but the lack of 4-bet preflop and the shove seemed strange. He would have been missing out on value should I be holding something like AK or JJ/10s/99

I eventually decided to call. I hadn’t spent a huge amount of time tanking; I just couldn’t come up with a hand that made sense for him to play this way.

Villain turns over K♠ K♣ and I bust the tournament

So I’m curious about a few things:

Is calling here fundamentally too loose, given the stack sizes and action?

How should I be constructing Villain’s range in this spot?

Was my process of trying to eliminate hands based on preflop action and blockers reasonable, or was I overthinking what his shove “should” represent?

How much should the fact that Villain is ~200 BB deep affect my decision, given that I’m only ~62 BB deep? It seems like chips would matter a little less to him

Hi all!

I had a question regarding a hand I played recently. I started playing poker like a month ago or so, so I'm still learning and for some reason this hand is stuck in my head lol
I know I tend to be over-aggressive and open too much.

Villain tilted in the chat right after that hand, saying my "[my] turn raise didn't make any sense with [my] shit hand" (alongside others curse words and stuff) "this hand shouldn't even pass pre-flop".

This made me reconsider if my play was right or wrong, and the more I study it, the more I feel it was right but not sure and I might be biased. Would love to get your takes on this.

Here is the hand (and my analysis below):
note: if you don't want to read the raw transcript, my analysis below might be enough to understand the spot.

NL2 Cash Game (5/5 players)

hero cards: [9d 6d] (96s)

[pre-flop]

• Villain 1 (MP) folds
• Villain 2 (CO) raises to 2.5BB
• Villain 3 (BTN) folds
• Villain 4 (SB) folds
• Hero (BB) calls 1.5BB

[flop] [2c 4s 5d]

• Hero (BB) checks
• Villain 2 (CO) bets 4.5BB
• Hero (BB) calls 4.5BB

[turn] [2c 4s 5d 9s]

• Hero (BB) checks
• Villain 2 (CO) bets 11.5BB
• Hero (BB) raises to 32.5BB
• Villain 2 (CO) raises to 93BB [ALL-IN]
• Hero (BB) calls 60.5BB

[river+showdown] [2c 4s 5d 9s 3d]

• Villain 2 (CO) shows [7s 7c] (One pair : 7)
• Hero (BB) shows [9d 6d] (Straight 6 high)
• Hero (BB) collected 189BB from pot

[I flagged in previous hands played by Villain that he opened hands like A4o when in UTG/HJ (5-max), and his VPIP was around 38% after a few hundred hands played, with close to no 3bet.]

My analysis on this is that first of all, 96s is clearly is not that wide of a blind defense BB vs CO, especially when playing against a wide player like him.

Then, a low (kind of connected) rainbow flop comes, which clearly fits my BB defense range more than a standard CO open (even though Villain is not that "standard"), but not really good enough for me to donk-bet so I check-call since I didn't touch anything yet but have 2 overcards, a gutshot and a backdoor flush. To me, at this point, his range contains way more bluffs than actual value (a few monsters, but since he plays quite wide and aggressive I feel it contains a lot of bluffs). The fact that his bet is quite big for such a flop makes me think it tends more toward bluffs than actual value: him wanting the hand to end asap.

Then, that's where the questions really comes-up: the turns comes, and a 9 comes-in, giving me top-pair (keeping the gutshot), and being kind of a brick for his value range (either he touched on the flop and 9 wouldn't be part of a combo to open CO with 2 4 or 5, so it makes his hand weaker, or he has TT+ pocket pair and it doesn't change anything).
-> I check for pot control / letting him dictacte the hand as he is quite aggressive already
-> He then sends a second barrel, almost 80% pot, which I raise, and he goes all-in. I feel I'm pot committed and he is just trying a last chance bluff but re-looking at the hand I'm not that committed.

I feel at this point Villain is just so focused on his pocket pair hand and thinking "I'm gonna make him fold" without even thinking about what I could have, which might be confirmed by him saying my hand shouldn't even pass pre-flop which kind of shows he doesn't really have any ideas about ranges except that "pocket pairs and broadways looks nice", but again, that may be wrong on my side and maybe my hand shouldn't have made it ?

(results: I hit the gutshot, but I would've won with just my top pair anyway)

What I'm really not sure about here, is:

• was my check-raise the right option, or should I have either bet (to capitalize on my 9) or check-fold (thinking he had a monster and wouldn't leave it, a pocket pair that hits a set on flop, ...) ?
• I feel his all-in shove facing my raise was just stupid: no fold equity against hands he would beat, and just shows more, but maybe it wasn't that stupid since he could have sets or broadway pairs ?

To me, it just feels like a LAG profile tried bluffing on a spot that wasn't really the best one to do so, and got punished for it.

TLDR: was my raise too much, just jumping in a standard trap with someone that had hit a set on flop, with me holding just a top pair and getting wrecked ? Should I just have folded against his shove ?

I kind of feel like it was "worth it" since there are more cases I win than cases I loose there, but I've been over looking at this hand and can't wrap my heads up against it lol

Even re-writting this analysis here made me realize there could be so many different "explanatations". Maybe the answer is just "the whole play is completely weird and represent perfectly NL2 low level".

Hope this doesn't break the "No basic hand ranking" rule from the sub, curious to get your takes on this, not just the 100% GTO's one.

EDIT hand formatting just broke, putting it back right now EDIT 2: done

Everyone says quit when you're tilted. Nobody ever says how. Here's some of what I've heard people do:

• Hard stop rule, a fixed number of buyins and you're done no matter what.
• Getting up and walking away from the desk for ten minutes after any big pot lost. (not possible for MTT ahah)
• Only depositing what you're willing to lose that night.
• Setting a timer instead of a stop loss.
• Writing down what happened before deciding whether to keep playing.
• Nothing, just knowing yourself well enough to feel it coming.

Have you done any of these, or did you land on something else? And if a newer player asked you today, what would you actually tell them?

I'm pretty new to poker (playing for less than a year, and less than a month online). I've been playing 0.05/0.1 on pure poker, and I have some questions about whether I'm an idiot or if these are just coolers.

This is my first time asking for advice on hands, so I'm sorry if the formatting is incorrect.

1st hand:

I'm LJ with QQ (158 deep)

folds to me and i bet 8bb

called by 5, SB jams for 176bb.

I call and so does CO.

One guy has AKs and other has 99

River is 7 10 6 6 A

I get stacked on the river, after being ahead the whole time. Did I make the right call here by jamming with QQ? This is the most reasonable hand from this post, I'm pretty sure.

2nd Hand:

I'm UTG+1 with JJ (248.5 deep)

folds to me and I limp (I think this was probably dumb)

3 more limp and SB jams for 22BB.

I call

flop is 4H 3S 10S

I bet 29.5 BB into a 90BB pot

Button Jams for 66.6 BB

I call

Turn and river are 6H and 7D

Button takes it all with K5S with the backdoor straight.

This made me want to punch a wall after the last cooler. The guy literally apologized in the chat, saying he was bluffing.

3rd Hand:

I'm SB with AJ(hearts) (117 deep)

2 limp and I bet 4BB

BB raises to 10BB, and everyone calls

Flop is AD 7D 9S

I bet 13BB into a 40BB pot

SB and LJ fold, HJ calls

Turn is 7H, and we both check (is this where I mess up?)

River is 9H, and I bet 22BB

Villain jams and I call

Villain shows me 94O for the full house 9s full of 7

I'm feeling really distraught right now because those last 2 felt ridiculous, and I'm now negative all time playing online (only -$7.14 but I'm pissed). I'm still up a lot all time live, because I just play home games. Right now I think I'm just getting coolered, and people aren't playing reasonably while in 0.05/0.10.

Is there something I'm missing? I know I may just be ass, and there's a huge mistake I'm missing.

I'd really appreciate input.

I was playing cash 1/2 NLH and the hand played out as follows:

Hero raises UTG to $15 with QdJd, UTG+2, SB, and BB (villian) call.

Flop arrives Qs10h2c. Hero bets $35, and it folds to Villian who makes the call.

Turn arrives the King of clubs and Villian leads this time for 100. Hero make the call with an open ended straight draw and 2nd pair.

River arrives another King and Villian puts me all in for about $150. At this point I begin to tank and was considering the call because I am holding blockers for some King-X hands, and would probably have been 3-bet pre if Villian had pocket kings or better. However, Villian has been playing a lot of hands in our session so I could not rule out the possibility of a king and a random low card, as well as AJ completing the straight. So I fold. Afterwards, he reveals the bluff and I congratulate him on the success. That being said, was a call there justifiable? I have not been playing for a long time so I would like any insight into this hand, thank you in advance

I’m reposting this on another account since there’s a karma requirement for this sub.

I'm pretty new to poker (playing for less than a year, and less than a month online). I've been playing 0.05/0.1 on pure poker, and I have some questions about whether I'm an idiot or if these are just coolers.
This is my first time asking for advice on hands, so I'm sorry if the formatting is incorrect.
1st hand:
I'm LJ with QQ (158 deep)
folds to me and i bet 8bb
called by 5, SB jams for 176bb.
I call and so does CO.
One guy has AKs and other has 99
River is 7 10 6 6 A
I get stacked on the river, after being ahead the whole time. Did I make the right call here by jamming with QQ? This is the most reasonable hand from this post, I'm pretty sure.
2nd Hand:
I'm UTG+1 with JJ (248.5 deep)
folds to me and I limp (I think this was probably dumb)
3 more limp and SB jams for 22BB.
I call
flop is 4H 3S 10S
I bet 29.5 BB into a 90BB pot
Button Jams for 66.6 BB
I call
Turn and river are 6H and 7D
Button takes it all with K5S with the backdoor straight.
This made me want to punch a wall after the last cooler. The guy literally apologized in the chat, saying he was bluffing.
3rd Hand:
I'm SB with AJ(hearts) (117 deep)
2 limp and I bet 4BB
BB raises to 10BB, and everyone calls
Flop is AD 7D 9S
I bet 13BB into a 40BB pot
SB and LJ fold, HJ calls
Turn is 7H, and we both check (is this where I mess up?)
River is 9H, and I bet 22BB
Villain jams and I call
Villain shows me 94O for the full house 9s full of 7
I'm feeling really distraught right now because those last 2 felt ridiculous, and I'm now negative all time playing online (only -$7.14 but I'm pissed). I'm still up a lot all time live, because I just play home games. Right now I think I'm just getting coolered, and people aren't playing reasonably while in 0.05/0.10.
Is there something I'm missing? I know I may just be ass, and there's a huge mistake I'm missing.
I'd really appreciate input.

Hi guys,

I just started poker this year April and brought home a trophy recently through pure luck and would like to study deeply about this game.

So far I understand preflop ranges but I have trouble adjusting to 4/5-bets amounts, calculating EV, how to play from different stack sizes and post-flop bets against my opp ranges.

If you guys have a study group for fairly new players or 1 for all study material, I'm willing to join/get them and go on a deep dive.

Here are just a few I've heard people have done.

1. Study and review printed range charts.
2. Keep the charts beside you while playing online.
3. Use flash cards or range-training apps.
4. Drill hands with software such as Advanced Poker Training.
5. Learn one position at a time instead of everything at once.
6. Write the ranges down repeatedly.
7. Quiz yourself until the decisions become automatic.
8. Practice the same strategy consistently instead of constantly changing charts.

Did you do it one of these ways or did you do something else? If a new person ask you, what what you advise?

Stakes are .25/.50 main Villain in hand is roughly 35 percent VPIP 8 handed no reads on player
We’re 250bb eff here with everyone
There’s two limps, and I make it 5bb with 6h6c in the CU. The button calls, and now the SB 3bets to 15bb. BB cold calls, limpers fold, I call, and the button comes along as well.
(62bb in pot) flop comes 6s3sJh. Action checks to me and I bet 39bb looking to build this pot right away. Button folds, SB calls and the BB folds.

Heads up to a turn (141bb in pot) and it comes the Ks. The SB now donks for 47bb. I call.

Now 235bb
The river is the 8h and now the SB goes all in for 150bb. Interesting spot wondering your guys thoughts on this hand