New Product Announcement: Flop Analysis Workbook for 100 BB 6-Max Cash Games

This post was originally published on October 28, 2020, on my personal website, Lukich.io. I have since consolidated all of my poker-related content by reposting it onto Solver School. Please note that the analysis spreadsheet discussed in this article has been retired and is no longer publicly available. If you are interested in discussing custom analysis or ways to replicate for your own work, reach out to me at [email protected].

Today, I’m excited to finally release the second version of this product based on 100 BB, 6-max cash environments. I’m extremely proud of this updated version and think it will be incredibly helpful for people to understand better equilibrium frequencies and concepts for flop formations in the online environment of 100 BB stack poker. I’m about 3-4 months behind schedule with this post, but I suppose it’s better late than never.

In June, I released my first official product — a Flop Analysis Workbook for 200 BB live cash games. I had been developing the analysis for the better part of 2019, mostly to assist in my own study. After feedback from a few friends, I realized there might be a bit of demand for a tool that packages up this much valuable information in an organized format. Cleaning up my workbook to turn it into a product was the best way that I could test the market to see if that was true.

There are some issues with the first workbook. From a technical standpoint, it greatly limited user interactivity with the data. One of the benefits of working within Excel is that you can interact directly with the data, potentially transforming it into additional metrics to analyze. It was also missing some important metrics to analyze, such as SPR.

From a functional standpoint, the major flaw is that the ranges are very specific and exploitative. I suppose that, by definition, all non-equilibrium ranges are exploitative. However, my chosen ranges were not developed from an equilibrium preflop solution. Instead, I used my ranges from the regular $5/$10 games I played at the DC area casinos. For the villain’s range, I estimated ranges based on my observations of the opposing player pool to model an average reg — I essentially started with Upswing’s live cash ranges as a base and widened up the calling ranges, shifted some weaker opens into flats, and cut down the 3-bet bluffs. This resulted in a good model for my games, but the insights might differ when looking at comparable scenarios using different preflop ranges.

I’ll note that this isn’t a flaw because the ranges used are bad or wrong in any way. I deliberately chose to use these ranges as they best model the environment as I perceive it. The only way I could get more personalized is if I had mass data analysis to understand the actual player pool’s aggregate ranges.

But the fact that it’s personalized to me is the flaw. Because I’m using such specific ranges, it’s more difficult to be broadly marketable to others. While this models my game, it requires the Hero’s perspective to be anchored to a specific strategy I use. This can make it more challenging to see concepts from the right perspectives.

Despite the points above, I’ve gotten some amazing feedback about the workbook over the past few months, both from people who have purchased it and others who have offered suggestions. I appreciate all the input — I have considered everything suggested as I looked to improve the product. I haven’t been as productive over the past few months as I would have liked, but I have been improving the analysis.

This second version is fairly expanded from the first. To start, it contains more data. I modeled 52 different formations as compared to 32 in my initial workbook. The formations I used include most single major single-raised and 3-bet pot formations in a 6-max game. It contains more functionality. I surfaced the headings, allowing users to select entire rows and columns to hide them or insert new ones. While users still cannot save changes within the workbook, the data can be copied and pasted into other workbooks for ongoing analysis. I’ve also added some metrics to help better contextualize situations.

The major change is using an approximated equilibrium solution for the preflop ranges. Instead of using my ranges, I wanted to model an equilibrium environment. As such, I am using a preflop solution generated using MonkerSolver. While the solution has some accepted error rate, they are fairly good approximations of an equilibrium preflop environment.

Using equilibrium ranges will be significantly more valuable for broader analysis. The whole idea of game theory is to find an equilibrium strategy. I like to consider it the best baseline from which we can deviate. While it’s impossible to play a strategy that perfectly mimics this, I think we can understand concepts and develop simplifications that can be roughly approximated through implementation at the table.

While the prior work is more beneficial to me specifically, others with different preflop strategies may find situations that contradict what answers would be if they used their ranges. Using my work as an anchor point could create some logical fallacies.

I’ve recorded a brief walkthrough video to go into the creation of the workbook in more detail below:

As I release this workbook, I’ve decided to retire the 200 BB workbook from my product catalog and only focus on equilibrium environments. I may choose to replicate using a 200 BB preflop solution, but that won’t happen in the shorter term. If you buy a workbook from me, you get free updates to that specific version whenever I make them. Because I’m retiring the 200 BB one and unsure if and when I will release it, I’d like to offer those who purchased the initial version of this 100 BB workbook at no additional charge to reach out to me with your receipt of purchase and I’ll send you a copy.

I built the product flexibly and can release additional versions of the same workbook with different underlying data. I can replicate it with any set of ranges. If that’s interesting to anyone, reach out to me to discuss.

I’ve packaged up this specific product using custom software. The download will be in a .EXE file requiring a license key to activate. You also need an Excel license to be able to utilize the product. For more information, check out my product page, where I have much more detail and a video demonstrating everything you need to know. I highly recommend that you watch the video above before purchasing. If you have any further questions after that, let me know.

Now that this has finally been released, I can shift gears back into more exploratory work. I have been planning on analyzing a formation in detail for a while now. I think it’s as good of a time as any, so I will look at a specific formation from my 100 BB workbook to dive into the data.

As always, thanks for the support. I look forward to getting back to work with an analysis soon.

-Lukich