Lesson
Beating Olivier Buski With Discipline, Not Reads
MDF & Indifference · intermediate · 9 min
Tyler walks Eric through replacing river guesses like “maybe he’s bluffing” with a minimum defense frequency default when there is no reliable read. The lesson shows how to translate common bet sizes into required call frequencies, then locate the top portion of your range by hand strength and combo distribution.
Key takeaways
- When you have no read that a player is over-bluffing and no board texture that clearly suggests over-bluffing, default to defending around MDF instead of making a max-exploit call.
- For a half-pot bet, the bettor needs folds about 33% of the time, so the defender should continue with about 66% of range.
- Memorize common MDF call frequencies: 1/3 pot = 75%, 1/2 pot = 66%, 3/4 pot = about 58%, pot = 50%, 1.5x pot = 40%, and 2x pot = 33%.
- To apply MDF in-game, identify the major hand classes in your range and fold the bottom class first; in the discussed example, that means folding the nine rather than calling just because the bet is small.
- Use off-table review tools like Flopzilla to enter your estimated range and board, then practice finding which hands make up the top required percentage of your range.