Quote:
Originally Posted by mikeca
Since no one else has replied, I will try to explain my thinking.
At 8/16 in my experience you will find a lot of players skilled at hand reading. This can result in you winning a lot of small pots and losing most of the big pots. To counter this you need to widen your raising range. A hand like Q9s from late position is a good hand to raise. It can make straights that hand readers will never put you on after you raise, If you show it down after raising pre-flop they will have to give you a wider raising range which makes there hand reading more difficult.
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it. Not sure I totally agree with your first sentence however. From what I've seen the majority of 8/16 players tend to be first level thinkers in that they don't care about reading hands...they just care about what they have and trying to make their draw or get to SD with bottom pair.
When I lose big pots it's not because I've been outplayed or something. It's usually because this happens (which happened two days ago): I pfr AK and triple on AQ587 and lose to 77.
I'm a nit from utg and my opening range is typically TT+/ATs+/AQo+. Yet despite this every time I open utg I can expect four callers. So clearly no one cares much about hand reading or ranges at this level (which makes it juicy of course).
I'm open to being told that Q9s is a standard raise in LP over several limpers but I don't necessarily think the main reason is to widen my range and make it more difficult for my opponents to read my hand.