The Poker Zoo 61: Uri Peleg’s Guerrilla Warfare

Estimated read time 40 min read

Continuing our recent tour of contemporary poker coaches, today the Zoo welcomes Uri Peleg, formerly of Run It Once and now founder and head coach at Guerrilla Poker. Joined by online poker strategy innovator Grindcore, Guerrilla offers a very experienced and compelling take on the GTO/Exploitation paradigm that we’re always working with in contemporary poker. I talk with Uri about several hot button issues, including simplifications versus full strategies, the reality of how strategy works versus how it is often perceived to function, the technology arms race in the game, and close with what Guerrilla is offering. Interestingly, Uri and the Guerrilla team are also applying their minds to the live game, and believe they can help in that sphere as well.

Uri Peleg not only comments on the Daniel/Doug challenge, but with unique insight, having been one of Doug’s sparring partners before the match. Here is a video where he reviews their play. The Guerrilla Youtube channel also includes some of Uri’s earlier videos, including this key piece on solver usage which should remain relevant for a long time.

For comparative insights on how the solver should be used, check out our interview with Thomas Pinnock of Zenith, or any of our interviews with Alvin Lau of Overnight Monster.

The first thing to notice is that QJ is solved as a mixed bet and check. It’s not at all a mandatory bet, and if we look at the villain’s range, we see that villain has a 15% check-raising range which is built mainly around AQ, with a few odd bluffs with hands like KQ or A8. This check-raising range is robust enough to cause the EV of QJ to fall close to 0. So our intuition was indeed correct.

On a superficial level, it may seem like there isn’t much more to say here. However, noting that PioSOLVER chooses the IP player’s bluffs from some low pairs and other hands that have some showdown value, and, furthermore, doesn’t necessarily triple barrel these hands on many rivers, we can see there might be more to learn from these choices than it might seem at first glance.

This brings us to the concept of “showdown value bluffs.” To better illustrate how these kinds of bluffs work, let’s take a step back and look at another example hand…

-from Showdown Value Bluffs on Guerrilla Poker

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  1. 1
    FAO

    Fantastic interview about: paying attention, humility, closeness of EV solutions and clairvoyance vs how a human is likely to respond, knowing only step 1 of a tango, no bullshit*

    A wealth of information, in only the first thirty minutes, for anyone with ambition and an appetite for sacrifice.

    F

    *Manscape commercials – my ass!

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