Hey what's up guys?

I'm thinking about taking up a new challenge unlike others posted on the forum, and I wanted to get some feedback about it.

My challenge would be to post a strategy article about NLHE cash each day over a year. Articles could range from broad strategy concepts to specific hands I have played recently. They could even be live play or strategy videos. I also want to create a forum where we can discuss the articles, so I will probably have them here so you can subscribe to the thread and get them each day, and also on a blog where people can comment and ask me questions.

A little bit about myself: I'm a professional NLHE cash player playing NL100 right now. I'm a coach for CardRunners and I have contributed several videos with more to come. I played on Poker Stars before BF and now I play on Bovada and Merge. Over my last 850k hands I have averaged 3.8 bb/100.

I consider myself a pretty good player but I also realize that I have a lot to learn. I participate actively at CR making videos and on the forums, and I also keep up with the other poker training sites passively. Because of this I feel pretty in touch with the current philosophies taught in poker training, but I also have my own unique take on things. In addition I have some experience private coaching, and I'm looking to get more involved in that area.

I'll start off with one strategy article that I have written recently. Let me know if you guys have any comments about my goal or if you have any things that you would like to see me write about.

Defending Against 3-bets

In most circumstances your best defense an opponent's 3-bet is to fold. Many coaches will preach that you shouldn't fold to 3-bets more than X% or you're exploitable, but honestly that is BS. Your 3-bet calling range shouldn't have much relation to your opening range. You should decide your 3-bet calling range based on your assumptions about your opponent's 3-betting strategy, not on what makes you unexploitable.

It's natural to have an emotional response when facing a 3-bet from a competitor. We all want to be the best player at poker, and our emotional response is telling us to fight back so we can beat our opponent. Fortunately that response causes bad decisions. It's fortunate for us because it allows us to play the situation better than our opponents.

A lot of guys open 50%+ from the button, have good results with their steals, and still worry that their opponents are 3-betting them too much. If we open to 3x from the button, we have to be successful 2/3 of the time to show an immediate profit, if we never saw a flop. That means our opponents each have to defend at least 19% of the time on average for our steal to not be immediately profitable. In reality it would be more like the SB defending 14% and the BB defending 24%. It's fairly easy to picture two regs in the blinds playing quite a bit tighter than that, but it's hard to picture regs playing much looser without making many mistakes.

Fortunately we don't have to win 2/3 of the time preflop for the steal to be profitable. With the more marginal hands we probably only have to take it down 50% of the time preflop because a lot of the time we realize some value when we see a flop. For us to have 50% success stealing we need our opponents on average to defend 29% of their hands. It should be evident that it is difficult for our opponents to defend a range of hands that will make your steal unprofitable.

From the blinds, many opponents are going to 3-bet your button open with a range like 99-AA, AJ-AK, Axs, KQ, and 67s-T9s. Many 3-bet you quite a bit tighter. This range is about 10% of starting hands, and a premium hand 30% of the time. Against this range you can probably continue profitably for sure with 6% of your hands(99+, AQ+, Ajs, Kqs), and marginally with another 6% of hands (AJ+, KQ, 77+, 76s+, Qts+, Kts+, Ats+). Thus, our optimal strategy is to fold to about 75% of 3-bets.

Against someone who is 3-betting us with a weaker range, it makes sense to call more 3-bets depending on their post flop tendencies. If the player tends to barrel a lot post flop, we might be better off playing a tight range and benefiting from them putting a lot of money in with weak hands. If they tend to check fold a lot of flops or turns, then we can really start opening up our range more to make more profit. The value of defending with many of those weaker hands is our steal equity post flop.

Be careful buying into the idea that if you fold to a lot of 3-bets that means you have a leak or are playing poorly. It really depends on the kind of opponents that you play against regularly. Many opponents 3-bet strong ranges, so to exploit them we need to fold a lot to deny them from getting value with their strong hands.

Like where this is going.

Tight is Right

Most of the expert players you see play poker when you turn on the tv or open up the high stakes tables play a loose style. It’s not because playing loose is a more effective style. Think about a common spot: opening from middle position. If you open 22-55 from MP it’s hardly going to effect your results, because those hands are likely to be around breakeven. Thus is it is only a stylistic choice whether or not to open those hands (From a money-making perspective you might as well cut these hands out and play more tables).

The reason why there is a perception that most of the expert players are loose is simple: you notice the loose players far more than the tight players at a table simply because they are playing more hands. In the televised tournaments, many hands that are uneventful are cut out and they make the tables seem looser than they actually are. Plus it’s always fun to see someone try to steal with 27o and run a big bluff on television, so they show those hands.

My advice to novice and intermediate players is not to focus on whether something is loose or tight, but to have a reason for each move that you make. Don’t open up T9s from MP because it’s part of your range for that position; open it up because there is a player in the blinds who calls a lot preflop and folds to a lot of flop bets. Don’t call a 3 bet with KQ because it’s overly tight to fold; call because the opponent’s 3-betting range is weak and KQ dominates a lot of their hands.

A lot of novice players worry about being overly tight. The line of reasoning is something like “If I play too tight, then I won’t get paid off when I have a good hand.” This is true to some extent, but they fail to acknowledge the assumptions that they are making about their opponents: 1) That they are noticing how tightly you are playing and 2) That they are able to take that read and fold a medium strength hand when called for. For fish these assumptions definitely aren’t true and for many regulars they are only partly true. Against a good player you want to start throwing in more bluffs, especially post flop; but poor players tend to call too much anyway to make this a good idea.

If only playing profitable hands and only getting a lot of money in with a strong hands is tight, then I’m guilty as charged.

How to Make Money in NLHE the Easy Way

Making money at poker is really simple - play people that are worse than you. Unfortunately when we play poker at the small stakes, the rake is a huge factor, usually costing us at least 4-6 big blinds per 100 hands before rake-back. That means to turn a profit we have to be a lot better than the players that we are playing.

Think about playing poker with someone that is exactly equal in skill to you. Each time our bet gets called or we call a bet, 5% of the pot is raked. That means that we are only getting 47.5% of the money that goes in the pot back. To compare, if we put money down in roulette we get 47.4% back. This means that we need to have at least a 5% edge over our opponent on the average bet placed to just break even. If we have an 8% edge, we make about 3/5 of the total rake which usually will be around 1.5-2 BB/100. We play most of our pots with the looser weaker players at the table, so most of the bets we place are against those players helping us achieve our goal. In essence, “bum hunting” is our best bet: we need to play poker players who are significantly worse than us to win.

Here are some common big leaks recreational players have and how to capitalize on them!

• Plays too wide out of position: We widen our range in position. The value of our hands goes up because there is a greater chance that we win the pot. Either they are going to call too much out of position or fold too much, either way we make money.
  
• Limps sometimes pre-flop and raises sometimes: We take advantage of the information we get from our opponent’s pre-flop action. If he raises, we play a tighter range than normal because he only raises his strong hands. If he limps, we widen our range because we know we’re likely against a weak hand.
  
• Calls too many 3-bets: We widen our 3-betting range from what it normally would be versus their opening range. Either they are going to fold too much post flop and we get dead money, or they call too much and our hands have greater value.
  
• Donk bets out of position: We know when we’re facing a bet that it’s more likely that our opponent has something, and when they check they are less likely to have a medium strength hand.
  
• Doesn’t bluff enough: We check down our weak hands with showdown value instead of betting them.
  
• Plays too passively post-flop: We bet our strong hands, check our weak hands, and avoid value betting thinly.
  
• Calls too much post flop with weak hands: We only bet when we have a stronger hand than their calling range or a good chance of improving to win a big pot.
  
• Plays too aggressively post-flop with a wide range: We fold our hands that won’t be able to stand aggression early and take down bigger pots with our strong hands.

In all of these cases we have a significant edge because of our opponent’s weak strategy. You will know if you are at a lucrative table when you see players making many of these mistakes. Fortunately, we can use our HUD to greatly increase our perception of these leaks.

wow, great articles op, do you play live or is still mostly ol?

Even though this ( I think) is aimed at online players i see a lot of similarities with LLSNL.

great idea OP!!

Cool idea, will be following!

Thanks for the positive feedback guys. I have played a fair amount of live, but I focus on online small stakes mostly. Right now I am playing 100 NL at Merge and Bovada, and I was playing on Everleaf until it closed to US players.

Solid posts so far. I especially like your "sizing": the posts aren't too long to read. Let them coming, I'll be following this!

Thx for your effort!

subscribed!!!

writing one of these, every single day is nuts. I like it

cool thread

good posts i like how they are short and simple but still very useful for small stakes players

Thanks guys. I started a blog to have these strategy articles on as well, so feel free to leave a comment on any of these articles if you have questions or comments.

Subscribed. Like the content and the sizing. Looking forward to having a "thought for the day" thing going.

Keep 'em coming

Where Da Gold At?

In 2008 on CardRunners a poker player with the handle Nutedawg released a MSNL video called "Where Da Gold At" that changed my perspective on preflop play. One of the concepts that he talked about was that when a bad player is in the blinds, you should open up your range from EP to the CO so that you can get in more pots with them. Against weak players with weak ranges in position, we have a lot more steal equity and/or showdown equity than normal. However, in my experiences opening up lighter than my normal ranges has not yielded a profit.

You can tell whether a certain part of your range is yielding profit by going in HEM and using their filter feature. If you have any questions about how to do this, feel free to ask me questions. The filter I set up was for opening wider than my standard ranges from EP-CO. For reference my standard range from EP is AJ+, KQ, 66+, and suited broadways. From MP my standard range is pretty much the same, but I'll open up AT and 22-55 more often. From the CO my standard range is A9+, KT+, QT, JT, 22+, Axs+, K9s+, Q9s+, J8s+, 76s+. I would recommend you take some time running these filters so that you can figure out what works for you.

While Nutedawg's advice might be good or great for mid stakes no limit, there are a few factors working against us at the low stakes. For one thing, it's very common to have two weaker players at each 6-9 handed game if you are doing a good job table selecting. Since your standard ranges from each position should be based on the games you play in, most of the time they are going to factor in that there are some weaker players in the game with you. Maybe taking the reverse approach is the way to look at it - tightening up our ranges when there aren't weaker players behind us.

One of the issues with opening up a weaker hand than normal without the button is that if the pot ends up going three ways, a lot of our advantage goes away. Our steal equity goes way down postflop, and our hand is weaker so we don't have that much showdown equity. *In addition you have to deal with the rake which is a bigger factor in SSNL than MSNL. Since you're really hoping for a heads up pot with the fish, having only one weaker player in the mix would be ideal.

My advice would be to have fixed ranges from each position based on the average games you play in. Your energy is better off spent focusing on other decisions or adding more tables.

<3 this thread

Sounds great, I've only skimmed but seems like a ton of great info in here ty.

"If you can't spot the sucker..."



“Listen, here’s the thing. If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.” - Rounders, 1998.

When I first heard this quote from the movie Rounders, I was a poker novice. The quote made perfect sense to me. Since poker is a competition between players, you need to be playing against players weaker than yourself to make money. If you can’t spot who the weak player is at a table, then you must not have an advantage.

Now that I’m a poker professional, the quote still makes perfect sense to me, but in a totally new way. Now I’m playing at tables where many of my competitors are of comparable skill to me, many are weaker than me, and few have a huge edge over me. The way I understand the quote now is that if no one at the table is a sucker, then every single player at the table is a sucker.

When you’re playing at a small stakes game you are paying on average 3-5% of each pot you win to the house, including rakeback. That means that on average you need a 3-5% edge on each bet you place to at least break even. If the rake accounts for about 7 big blinds/100(about average for NL100 6-max), then you need at least a 7-8% edge on each bet you place to come out a 4 big blinds/100 winner before rakeback. To me, 4 big blinds/100 is the standard of a solid win-rate at the small stakes NL cash games.

It’s not hard to imagine a table of NL cash where every single player at the table is losing money because no one has a strong enough edge over the field. Recently I switched my play mostly to Merge because of the shutdown of Everleaf. Looking for games it seems like many 6-9 max games are full of regs, where maybe a couple of the regs are worse than average. The FR games are especially weighted towards regs because there aren’t that many tables and each reg plays quite a few tables. Between all the tables though, there seem to be enough to at least get 6 decent tables running, especially if you play across multiple limits.

It’s possible on Merge and any other site to find tables at the small stakes where if you’re a reasonably skilled player you have a decent edge. If you’re not putting in the effort to select good tables then it’s probable that a decent number of the tables you are playing are losing you money. I find that the intro quote to Rounders is mostly true – if there aren’t any fish at your table, then you are better off finding a new one.

Agreed. Nice reads, keep em coming

Great thread. Thanks for the effort going in to this OP

lol op plays 16/13 and bumhunts like noneother. im from chicago so for me to call out a fellow chicago guy for being a talentless nit and ruthless scumbag bumhunter means he must be a real scumbag. and lol that you make videos for cardrunners no wonder i unsubscribed to that site / WOW at you being a coach so lolololol you have zero talent pal

lol that is supposed to impress me? sorry i was incorrect about the 16/13 you are 19/15.... how hard did you bumhunt over this sample?

Hater Gonna Hater. Go write your own article series.

anyways im not gonna derail your thread i just have zero respect for you as a poker player and your antics at the tables disgust me. tho im sure you are probably a nice guy outside the felt