Has anybody over a large sample analyzed where they win their money from in LLNL?

Conventional wisdom might be just value betting, but really looking more deeply at bluffs, semi bluffs, c-betting, raising in position, etc.. Hard to break it down I guess, but just interested in anyone's deep analysis or failing that their gut.

That is simple and has been known for years. The vast majority of your profits comes from your play on the button and getting AA. As the founding mod of this forum once posted, everything else is essentially meta-game.

/forum

theoretically speaking, there are 2 and only 2 ways to profit in poker

1. your opponents making mistakes
2. folding equity

Why is #2 not one of those components that make up #1?

heads up in position against bad players. I can make money in this situation without even looking at my cards. As such, preflop play is pretty much by far the most important skill. You need to be capable of knowing when you can regularly isolate a fish in position, and the bet sizing to get it done.

By far the most common error I see at live poker is not raising by enough preflop.

you can fold the best hand without it being a mistake

There are multiple ways to answer your question, but it feels like what you're trying to look at is how important it is to bluff/semi-bluff/c-bet with weak and medium strength hands. The truth is the obvious majority of the money you win is generally going to be off of sets you hit and in particular the strength of aces in NLH. Analysis from online says that most hands are marginal, while AK, AA, KK, QQ and some other pairs make the large portion of your money since generally you will win a pot preflop with them if you reraise, or you win a significant pot more often than you lose one postflop.

But winning the battle with suited connectors and such contributes to your winrate for sure. If you just fold and lose with these hands all day, it takes away from the strength of your big hands.

That being said, you are asking about LLNL specifically. I feel in general that at 1/2 and 1/3, the mistake that you exploit from the large majority of players is that they overplay their hands. Whether they are playing too many weak hands and calling down too much or overplaying overpairs in the face of aggression, that's the most common and biggest leak you'll find. You'll also find players that play too aggressive too often and don't have the discipline to properly utilize their bad "LAG" style. They raise like 50% of hands at a full table and are willing to 3-barrel with bottom pair. Therefore, you're are finding easily exploitable opponents and taking advantage of that. Patience is often the key at full table lowest stakes NLH. The occasional semi-bluff or total bluff is fine but when players are willing to call down too much, it becomes so marginal that it often isn't even worth the risk.

You can honestly try to only play big hands post flop and still make a good amount of money at 1/3. You'll still c-bet and such to balance, but you don't have to make 50BB bluffs at any point to win.

As you move up, the number of easily exploitable opponents will generally go down, and that's why table selection becomes more critical. Simple exploitation play becomes less viable and now you need to put pressure on your opponents more often. But my experience past 2/5 is basically none, and I can't comment further on that.

Even against a calling station? What if he is short-stacked? Do you really want to bloat the pot to an SPR of 3 when you are holding 87 suited?

Maximum exploitability doesn't have a strict set of rules. There are table conditions where the risk/reward ratio is much, much better to limp speculative hands in late position that play better in multiway, high SPR pots.

We exploit the fact that:

a)our opponents play too passive to iso-raise our limps, so they let us see flops for cheap.

b) in the long run, we will lose much less from our marginal hands than our opponents, and profit much more from our monsters. For example: we know not to pay off 3 streets with TPGK in a limped multiway pot, while our opponents will go the distance with their TPGK against our sets/straights/flushes.

c) we keep the game-flow passive and face up. The last thing we want to do is force our opponents to play better against us by having them start to 3-bet us with light holdings because we are opening 2-3 times an orbit.

This is just a counterpoint to your iso-limp-da-fish strategy. The other opponents at your table can change your approach to beating one specific opponent.

The main point is that the conditions in your game have probably lead you to believe that isoing da fish limper is the most +EV strategy, without taking into consideration the other types of game conditions that occur across the country and globe.

That's why a lot of the advice in this forum can get "lost in translation" since posters are offering insights on strategies that work in their game, but could be completely useless or harmful if applied to someone else's game.

OP, you need to learn how to think for yourself, by analyzing your opponents tendencies and going through the decision tree on every street to see which play is best given your opponents tendencies in regards to how they play their range in similar spots.

In my nearly 20 years of playing poker, this has never happened to me. I open approximately 30% overall, so I am right in your 2-3 times per orbit. They may start calling you wider, but their 3 bets are still monsters (They are proud to show 'em too, usually saying "Thought I had ya that time...."). I do agree that games are different depending on where you are, I just hope I never get in a game like this.

I have to disagree. IMO the most important aspect of poker is properly playing the river. Thin value betting. Knowing when to value bet a straight even though the board paired or the flush hit the river. Bluff raising the river when you know the guy cant call. Folding the river at the right time. All of those things will make you or cost you a heck of a lot more money than preflop will.

Preflop is important obviously, but if you are great preflop and Im good preflop...but you are good on the river and Im great on the river. I will win more than you.

Umm... Tell me more.

Unless you can see the villain's hands, you're always playing against a range.

Example where folding the best hand is right.

Tight villain only raises pocket pairs, but all pocket pairs. Eff Stacks 35BB. He raises to 5BB with 22 UTG. Folds to you. You fold 33 in the SB.

That's exactly the right decision knowing villain's range.

The original statement was:

"2) folding equity"

The reinforcement was:

"Folding the best hand can be correct"

These two don't go together. The reinforcement statement is actually the exact opposite of the original statement.

Then the justification is to imagine a spot which backs up the reinforcement statement, which was the exact opposite of the original statement.

So...

Maybe try again?

If your opponent bets pot-sized bet otr and you have a bluff-catcher, you need to be right 33% of the time. Let's say you somehow know he's weighted 80% towards value 20% bluffs. You always should fold here, and it's the correct play regardless of whether you folded the winning hand or not

To answer OP's questions, most of your profit comes from 77+, AQo+, AJs+

We're getting into the weeds here...

How much equity does hero have against V's "80% value" range?

13% is all that is needed to make calling correct.

This is 1 in 8, essentially.

(Nevermind that V could be bluffing with the best hand.)

Not sure how that's possible since I'm on the nittier side and I 3 bet a linear and much wider range vs loose players if I'm in position.

I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say.

If we win 2/10 times on a river call facing a PSB, we should never call, no matter if he's actually bluffing or not. If we do, it's a -EV call and at that point it's just gambling

I'm saying you need to accurately range, figure out your equity, and calculate the pot against your villains. Just saying he could be bluffing here X% isn't nearly enough.

But we are in the weeds here.

Venice's statement is a particular case of a more general axiom of LLSNL winning.

1) position

2) playing stronger ranges vs your opponents

yoi have 200 bb and find QQ in ep and raise 5 bbs. get 2 callers. the first is a pro who has you covered. the second is a fish who has 100bb

flop is QJ6

you bet 10 bb both call

turn 7

you bet 35 bb

only the pro calls

river 8

you check and v bets slightly larger than pot

you ask v if he will show if you fold and he agrees

you fold and he shows KT

do you think either player made a mistake?

1000% the player folding top set is a massive loser in the game.

If we are talking about live poker, no one has come remotely close to answering the question.

Imagine a toy game with 9 players with stacks from 50bb to 200bb and 50% of them are forced to vpip each hand preflop up to a 5x raise and they must continue postflop with any pair or gutshot draw or better.

Ask yourself how you maximize profit from this game.

Man this thread developed into a trainwreck really fast.

We should specify first that what we mean by "winning money" is gaining EV. We don't mean taking a pot down. We mean Sklansky bucks.

Your opponent correctly folding the best hand is not a way you can gain EV at poker because poker is a zero sum game. If you are winning money then it means your opponent is losing it (compared to some other strategy he could be playing), and we just specified that he's folding "correctly", so that is not true by definition. Yes, sometimes you raise 87s and your opponent check folds on AKx with the best hand. But that isn't "winning money" in a Sklansky bucks sense. If both of you are playing a well balanced strategy, that hand could have been dealt either way around and the outcome would be the same. Saying "my opponent just folded the best hand therefore I made money" is like saying "I had AA and my opponent went allin with a worse hand, KK, therefore I made money". Over time you won't make money with AA v KK, it's just a crapshoot who gets dealt what.

To answer OP's question, we make most of our money at LLSNL because people are insufficiently aggressive. Not getting threebet off raises preflop, being able to value bet without fearing checkraises, being able to make ridiculous folds because people's betting ranges are far too tight, etc etc.

This is a bizarre way of looking at things and seems pretty unhelpful in terms of figuring out who wins and why. Yeah, if you look at how much we profit with AA, it's a huge chunk of our overall profits. But losing players win a lot with AA too and the problem with their game is not that they need to become better at playing AA. In the question of where our Sklansky bucks come from, AA is a near irrelevancy.

It's easy to get sucked into fallacious thinking if you don't get your definitions straight. In Theory of Poker, Sklansky originally defined a "mistake" as something a player does where they would have done something differently if they could see the opponent's cards. That's one way of looking at things, but it's not very helpful if we're trying to come up with an optimal way to play poker. A more useful definition is that a mistake is something a player does where they would do something different if they knew what their opponent's range consisted of. (You might notice that if this is never possible - that is, if each player knows their opponent's strategy but cannot ever unilaterally improve their outcomes by altering their own strategy - that's precisely the definition of a Nash equilibrium, i.e. that's what GTO play is).

So yeah, JB is correct that players can fold the best hand and it's not a mistake, under that definition. But the corollary is, if our opponent isn't making mistakes, then it's not possible for us to be making money.