Hello,

There's no general, "Ask your noob questions here" thread so I figured instead of spamming the forum with several individual questions into separate postings, that it'd be easiest to put them all in one post, though they're kind of random and all over the place. Also, for context, I've read Lee Jones' WLLH, and just about everything in GSIH and am now halfway through SSHE.


About the rake:
Why is rake so impactful in turning a profit in small stakes games? At my live 3/6 game, $4 (rake) doesn't sound like a big deal since the pots seem to get fairly large. I have no mathematical basis for this opinion, and barely have 20 hours of live play and probably another 20 in online play, so I'm asking to simply to better understand.


About how short-handed/heads-up games should affect whether or not I should play a hand and how to proceed in that hand:
I think I understand the latter moreso than how I do the former, but I don't really understand how the number of players in a hand should influence my decision in whether or not to play a certain hand I'm dealt. For example, say I'm in middle position in a ten-handed game, the first three to act fold and now it's my turn to act - does this mean I want to lower my own hand range?

Using SSHE to help with some context (I'm literally using these recommendations to make my own decisions), on p.78 it says "...Assume a ten handed, small stakes game..." Then in the footnote, "for a shorter handed game... Assume that the first few players have folded." ...Okay, so then what?


About Equity/EV:
I kind of think this is another case of me just trying to make something simple into something complex. My understanding of equity and expected value are simply just ways of looking at how profitable a hand or action can be. Like a hand/action with high equity/+EV is better because it increases the likelihood that i'll get a greater return on my action in the long run, whether or not I win a pot or whatever, but in the grandscheme of my poker playing... But sometimes when reading about it, and this is especially on the forums or reddit, its like people use these terms with multiple meanings, and adjust how they use it as the hand has gone on. For example, pocket Ace's is obviously a strong hand, but if there's a lot of players in a hand and a lot of action, their value would go down since several people would be more likely to play with drawing hands the larger the pot gets... I get that. But sometimes, people seem to get truly mathematical with regards to that and I wonder how it was humanly possible that they did that. This is probably the most confusing of my questions and I'm sorry that I don't have a specific example to share that would make it easier to understand. I'm hoping that the question itself can just open up some dialogue about it to go back and forth a bit on.


About Pokerforumspeak:
Something about talking poker online is tough. I'm personally a millennial (lots of life experience scouring internet forums and typically don't have issue understanding or deducing meaning from acronyms and abbreviations, or at least finding a post that explains it all) but poker forums are really tough to get a handle on. It's almost as if the acronyms and abbreviations are just for the forums themselves and have nothing to do with poker actions or behavior, so Is there a write-up on the forum that explains some of these? Like the "NC/LC" thread, and there's others as well. What does NC/LC mean?


About value in learning other poker games:
Do most people play multiple games, such as No limit and PLO as well? Right now im a sponge with everything poker related so I picked up Jeff Hwangs PLO book and had already purchased NL Theory and Practice a while back. I literally went overboard and bought about a dozen or so 2+2 books before I knew where the hell I wanted to go with all of this learning. Part of the reason I ask is because at some point months or years down the road, it would be really cool to actually turn a profit along with all this entertainment so I wonder if say, No-limit has a better opportunity for making money in.


Appreciate anyone taking the time and consideration to help me answer some of these questions.

Hey sparks_mandrill, welcome to the forum
The old-school gold standard for being a winning player is about 1 big bet/hour (1BB/HR). Let's say your live game gets 30 hands/hour and the rake is capped every hand @ $4. That's $120 in rake or 20BB/HR divided by the 10 players at the table, or 2BB/HR. Notice how that's twice your expected win rate? Now that 1BB/HR number includes rake, but still you're paying 2x as much rake as you win. This means that it would be rare to actually make 1BB/HR profit after rake in smaller games, so like 2/4 and 3/6. As you say, big pots and terrible players help mitigate the rake. Still, it is hard to win much in smaller stakes games long term. Many of us would suggest running hot in the short term and then taking judicious shots in higher games that are more beatable vs. the rake.
Think about poker hands where everyone has folded to you in terms of how far you are from the button. A first in a 5 handed game and a 10 handed game where people fold to you putting you 3 from the button are the same poker-wise. You open, there are 4 people to act. Two of them have position on you. First to act 10h, you have 9 freaking people who can wake up with a hand.

There is one slight difference, in that your opponents could play differently. Most of the people willing to play 4 handed poker have some concept of how to actually play shorthanded. If they don't and you do, you're printing money. In some full ring games, people don't bother in small pots, "you can have it, not worth it". That makes blind stealing more profitable than it should be, and in many rooms this is rake-free profit. Still, learn starting hand values based on how many seats you are from the button and then adjust based on game texture.
Some of the forum FAQ have glossaries. For those of us who post a lot, the shorthand seems normal. NC/LC is no content/low content -- we ask on the strategy forums that posts in the main forum have content, so we keep a thread specific to jokes, low content stuff, and making fun.
It depends. To play high stakes these days, you probably need to play mix games. Draw and stud games are usually in the mix. If you figure out how to play them well, tell me. The push to learn other games should be in proportion to how good those games are at the places you frequent. So if there are tons of soft NL games, learn that. PLO? Same. Being able to sit the best game in the room is a skill that can be huge if you really want to make money. If LHE is the best or only game in the room, you're not going to get a lot out of other games. If your room has 3/6 LHE and 1/2, 2/5, and 5/T NL with 2/5 and 10/25 PLO, you need to learn the other games.

Hi Sparks,

Nice post, welcome to 2+2

Now let me cover your questions in order.

Rake: Yes, $4 a hand doesn't sound like a big deal when most of the pots you're playing are 6 ways for a raise preflop, and the final pot is usually in the 10-15 BB neighborhood before factoring in rake ($60-$90 at $3/$6 limit). But the issue is, with it being that multiway, you're investing $ into a pot and losing a ton. So say 70% of the time, you invest 3 bets and win 0, and 30% of the time, you invest 3 bets and win 12 (pre rake). But thanks to rake, that number drops to 11 (for simplicity's sake), or a net of +8. 8*0.3 - 3 * 0.7 = 2.4 - 2.1 = 0.3. In an hour, you may repeat this exercise 6 times. Factor in that in 3 orbits, you'll pay 2.25 BB in blinds, and it becomes difficult to overcome such big rake. Generally speaking, if you're committed to playing small stakes, trying out sites like Ignition or ACR is the way to go, as you'll pay lower rake and get rakeback deals. The competition will be much tougher, though.

Handedness: Take a naive approach for a second. Say you're BTN -3 (meaning HJ, CO, BTN, and blinds are yet to act) and you pick up a hand and raise. The chance no one behind you has a top 10% starting hand is (0.9^5) ~ 59%. So 41% of the time, you'll be up against an opponent with a top 10% starting hand, defined roughly as 77+, ATs+, KTs+, QTs+, AJo+, KQo. On the other hand, when heads up, the chance your opponent has one of these hands is just 10% (obviously). So since it's less likely your opponents behind have good hands, you can now profitably play more hands in an attempt to steal the blinds. This is why a lot of the people you will see winning in mid stakes games are playing something close to the above hand range UTG, but playing 45%, 50%, sometimes pushing 60% of hands on the button.

Equity/EV: Equity normally refers to the %age of the pot that your holding or range of hands has against a range of hands of your opponents. For example, if you hold AA and get check raised on a flop of

Q93

By a range of:

AQs-Q9s, AQo-QJo, A9, A9, JT, JT, JT, AA-QQ, 99, 33

Then your AA would have 66.3% equity. You can think of it this way: if you called his raise and he offered to end the hand and do an equity chop (you look at your hands and whatever percentage of the time you'd expect to win, that's the % of the pot you take), you'd expect to get 66.3% of the money, as you've a 66.3% chance of winning if you get to showdown.

EV is a little different. Let's take the above and once again be simple: Your decision is solely based on your equity above, with the following decision tree:

If equity < 1/(size of pot), fold
else if equity < 0.55, call
else raise

The reason is clear. Say you get check raised in 3 bet pot, and you're facing a bet with 9.75 bets already in the pot. Let's factor 0.75 bets of rake taken out. So effectively, you'd be calling 1 to win 9, and need just 10% equity to continue.

So while continuing in the hand, your profitability derives from the pot odds, it's determined by whether you're actually ahead to raise. Let's take a spot where there's 8 bets in heading to the turn, and you face a bet with 30% equity (so now it's 9 bets in the middle). You're getting 9:1. And to simplify, let's assume he never three bets when you raise and continues with his entire betting range (naive).

EV(fold) = 0 (you never win nor lose anything when you fold)
EV(call) = 9 * 0.3 - 1 * 0.7 = 2
EV(raise) = 10 * 0.3 - 2 * 0.7 = 1.6

We add an extra bet to what you'll win and what you're investing to account for the raise. So you can see that while raising is a +EV play (as in, it's a positive amount), it's not as plus EV as calling. But let's say now, you have 70% equity

EV(call) = 9 * 0.7 - 1 * 0.3 = 6
EV(raise) = 10 * 0.7 - 2 * 0.3 = 6.4

Now that you're ahead, raising becomes better.

Poker forum speak: Just kind of something you pick up as you go . Some common lingo in hand histories:

X = Check
C = Call
F = Fold
B = Bet
R = Raise

So if someone says "I xr he call, turn I b he c, river I bc", he said "I check raised flop, bet turn, and bet and called a raise on the river".

Value in other games: Absolutely learn more games. For one, maybe LHE won't be your favorite game. Also, the main attraction of LHE to players you'd want to play with is its simplicity and speed; you play 20/40 live, and your game is getting 35 hands an hour, sometimes more. At NL, it's probably like 20-25 (some tables maybe 30, but that's not even a game you'd want to sit anyway), and PLO moves slower than erosion at times because of all the massive multiway pots, huge bets (thanks to the bloated pots), constant all-ins and the fact that it takes people like 15 seconds to just figure out their hand.

I say this with a caveat, though: Really, when learning, you should try to get good at one game. FL is a nice game to learn because you can get a lot of hands in, get into a lot of postflop spots, and learn skills needed to beat tougher games without constantly having your stack in peril (things like range balancing, theoretically sound poker, hand reading, token mistakes made by the fish, etc). FL is a great game for getting better at poker; one problem with it though is that it's absolutely jam packed with talent relative to player pool size thanks to its simplicity. So if your end goal is to make more $, learning other games once you've a feel for FL is a good idea.

I think I understand now. If the rake wasn't so significant, would it alter the way the game is played or anything like that, or would the gold standard instead be 2bb/hr. I guess my question is why is the gold standard 1bb/hr? The takeaway is that the rake is so high that it behooves someone to get better so that there's greater ROI in the higher stakes, albeit you need to be a better player?

Still a little confused on this - you mean first to act in a 5H vs 10H game doesn't make a difference if I'm still 3 spots from the button? I think I get that, because I'm still 3 spots from the button regardless, just that the number of people in front of me having folded is different.

So how does one determine what hands to play in a shorter handed game, like 6-max vs full ring. I think I just want to lower my range in the smaller handed game because with lesser people, more hands are valuable because less less opportunity to be dealt stronger cards?

I'll just keep scouring the forums then and it will come in time.

I didn't even think about this and it already makes sense. My local poker room has 3 limit tables going at any given time and about a dozen no limit, with some being cash and others being tournament. Ignition is the same I believe, especially with the new changes on how you choose your stakes and are sat at a table instead of being able to choose your table. Already started reading the no-limit section in GSHE and no-limit holdem: theory and practice.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.

Count from the button and memorize a hand chart (start with a known one and then make your own as you see flaws in the known ones). There's a chart in the book Winning in Tough Holdem Games (WITHG) which is fine as a starting point. Small Stakes Holdem (SSHE) has one too but it's counted from the blinds rather than the button.

So let's say you're going to open A7o+ A5s+ KJo+ KTs+ QJs-87s 66+ from BTN-2. Just do that whenever it's folded to you BTN-2, whether you're first to act 5-handed or there have been 5 folds in a 10-handed game.

Start with a very rigid strategy. Then, make small adjustments, one hand at a time. Take the best hand you'd fold and raise it instead, or take the worst hand you'd raise and fold it instead. If you're on the BTN and the BB is a terrible player, play the best hand you'd normally fold. If you're on the BTN and the BB and SB are excellent players, fold the worst hand you'd normally raise.

Beware making huge adjustments very quickly. All the borderline hands are marginal raises or marginal folds, and you'll get into trouble more often than with clear raises. That is, if you flop an ace with AQ, you only worry a little about being outkicked and if all else fails it's fine to shrug and call down. If you flop an ace with AJ, you lose slightly more often and worry slightly more and ultimately see showdown a little less. But if you suddenly jump down to A7, you're not going to be used to the level of hand reading required to navigate the dangerous waters and it's really expensive to put in as much action with A7 as it is with AJ. So don't start raising A7 until you're comfortable with A8, etc.

The main concept has already been addressed -- if your goal is $$CHA-CHING$$ then you should aim for "best game in the room". So a lot depends on your local room or room options if you are in a location with multiple venues.

Now, "best game in the room" doesn't necessarily mean the highest stakes available to play or the game with the most tables. There is a lot of nuance there and you will find information scattered about on choosing the correct "best game in the room" under titles such as "table/seat/game selection" or "choosing a poker room" or "Why I like casino X over casino Y" etc. Andrew Neeme recently put out a vlog on this topic you might find useful, I'll just paste the link here rather than waste the space on an in-line video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muYAf-YiMLs

The most important thing to realize is, even if you are at a major city with a large casino and you can choose between 2-5 NL, up to 25-50 NL; 8-16 LH up to 40-80 LH; 1-2-5 PLO up to 10-25 PLO; even 200-400 mixed game -- the "best game in the room" might be the 5-5-10 PLO game. Or it might be the 20-40 LH game. Biggest stakes doesn't strictly mean 'best game'. Stakes are only part of the formula - you have to be able to beat enough of the table, to win enough pots to make it good. If you don't know the games well, then you would just be straight gambling if you sat at the "best game". So -- as someone said, learn one game as a foundation, but as you become successful in that one game, make sure you are learning other games also to broaden your ability to adapt and when you come into your card-room one day and the best game in the room is a game you have worked on that is not your usual game -- you can move over and not skip a beat.

GL in study and practice.

I think this is a good thing, but your tone suggests that you think it's a bad thing.

Equity and ev are not the same thing except for in rare all in situations. Realizable equity is a useful concept to think of particularly with bluffcatchers and the weaker draws. Here's an absolutely fantastic concept thread that covers the topic of equity realization with very helpful graphs that look at the profitability of individual hands:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/15...alization+yaqh

Even though that thread is about no limit, there are some important takeaways:

Only few very strong hands realize more than (pot) in the long run.

Most of your hands, including value hands, will realize only a fraction of the pot. Sometimes this fraction of the pot is tiny, like 0.01 big bets of bluffcatching profit on the river with a weak bluffcatcher. With the stronger value hands, your expectation will approach (pot) as your hand gets stronger, to the point that some hands actually own part of your opponent's stack, assuming he's a rational agent.

-----

Ev, on the other hand, is simply a function of all of these sources of profit:

preflop value
flop value
turn value
river value
tilt value

Which brings me back to this:

Now if we want to keep the model simple, then we should look at the above values individually. Preflop value with individual hands has to do with unimproved showdown value, draw value, bluff value, and protection value.

Those values remain involved until the river, where draw value and protection value don't have an effect on the model anymore.

Vs some opponents, bluff value and protection value are at a minimum while draw value and showdown value are at a maximum. These are the easiest opponents.

Vs other opponents, like a lag for instance, there's a little of everything involved as far as ev sources go.

----

So how do we actually use all that mumbo jumbo to make decisions?

It all starts with your preflop range, then your opponent's range. The flop will hit and you'll have to put your hand in categories:

junk = check fold
weak bluffcatcher = consider your showdown ev and draw value.
strong bluffcatcher = consider your showdown ev, protection ev, draw ev.
weak value hand = consider your showdown ev, protection ev, draw ev.
strong value hand = consider your showdown ev, protection ev, draw ev.
monster = consider how much of your opponent's stack belongs to you, hint, protection ev is negative here.
weak draw = consider your draw value and your bluff value.
strong draw = consider your draw value and your bluff value.

Do the same thing on the turn.

Then on the river, draw value and protection value disappear.