We are sure you're thinking, "what does my score mean?".

• View The Strategy Behind The Correct Answers Below

The way we measure our performance against the Trainer is by tracking "EV Loss" or Expected Value Loss. The best possible result after you pick your action is an EV Loss of 0. This means your action breaks even against a perfect player.

When EV Loss isn’t 0, the number shown is the amount of big blinds that we would lose taking a specific action in the long run.

It is possible to make a poor play (high EV Loss) that results in you winning a specific hand. I’m sure you’ve all seen players make bad plays and win the pot or make the right play and lose the pot. Over time EV Loss will track closer and closer to actual losses.

We only care about EV Loss, we don’t care whether or not we win any one particular hand.

This allows us to have a long term mindset towards poker that focuses on the quality of our decisions and not short term results.

Learn The Strategy For The 5 Tournament Hands You Just Played!

This week the featured hands showcase correct play when you open on the Button and are called by the Big Blind with 30BB effective stacks. There is a big blind ante in play and you made a standard opening raise to 2.5BBs and were called.

It is important to recognize when the Big Blind calls their range is wide and capped. Your range is also very wide but it is uncapped. The Big Blind’s wide preflop calling range is appropriate given that they are getting tremendous pot odds at better than 3:1 in this spot. Even though the Big Blind’s calling range can be quite wide by default, they are at a substantial postflop disadvantage being out of position with shallow stacks versus a Button raiser with an uncapped range postflop.

Your advantages combined with the shallow stacks in this situation and a postflop stack to pot ratio of around 4, puts a tremendous amount of pressure postflop on the Big Blind. The result of this pressure means you can continuation bet most flops with the only exceptions being highly coordinated boards that slightly favor Big Blind’s range.

A small c-bet size is often enough to put an appropriate amount of pressure on the Big Blind, however there will be coordinated flops where a larger continuation bet sizing is warranted to protect your hands that have significant equity in the pot.

Button versus Big Blind confrontations are extremely common situations in the late stages of a tournament. Mastering how to play in late position and the Blinds in the middle to late stages of tournament play is crucial to long term success.

Making systematic adjustments based on the stack depth and wide ranges in this spot will give you flexibility to win more pots and run deeper in tournaments.

See how close you get to 0 EV Loss and high percentage plays, then reread the advice above from the LearnWPT Pros.

Keep practicing
-Team LearnWPT

P.S. LearnWPT Platinum Members can play more hands from this scenario by clicking here.