Yea ... that's the problem one right there.

Really great post. Bolded above super important. It really is a pretty simple game for the most part imo

disclaimer: only referring to the games I play (low stakes, 1/2(5) bring in)

In many nights it's even simpler where we play.

1. Limp premium starting hand.
2. Cold 4 bet over two "pots."
3. If not all in already push remaining chips in pot on flop.
4. Expect to have 40-50% equity multiway.
5. Run good.

I'm still working on this part.

The last couple of times I've played RxR have actually been slightly less insane than usual, as I think I've convinced the main floor person that a $2 bring in makes for a 'better' game and they've been playing that. You still get a lot of the pot bets preflop, and a string of callers. But it's a pot to $15 and a flop pot of $60-90, instead of a pot bet of $40-50 preflop. Even saw some limped pots I think it allows you to make it to the flop with a much wider range of hands than just playing super-premium. And since people are still so bad at it you can get paid on a good board.

Then again I also just saw a $1700+ pot in NLHE with a flopped boat vs a turned straight flush, with about $1400 going in OTT. Oh and none of the cards was higher than a 7.

Tuesday I made it out to the city and ran into a great table. One player was shoving $500+ effective into any size pot with top pair. I eventually got to his left so that I could catch him more easily.

An hour or so into my session a guy sat down who looked like he was drinking heavily. He began opening every pot to $20. The table predictably reacted by nitting it up. I went the other way. I limp raised him about 6 times. He folded four of those (with a call or two in between) and I was making a killing. I was doing this with Ax type hands that were totally cool with taking it down or seeing a flop. Unfortunately, the two times we saw a flop, I whiffed and he hit bottom pair on either flop or turn including one time when he turned 2 pair and jammed. Because I was going after him he singled me out and said he was coming after me. He never shut up. He kept telling us how great he was and how he was going to stack people. blah blah blah. He did stack a couple people, but not me.

What i came to realize rather quickly was that this was all one terribly executed hustle. He wasn't really drunk. He wasn't really crazy. After the first 30-45 minutes he stopped raising every hand. He didn't bluff much except for the first hand I played against him which he showed. He was making large preflop mistakes in order to get others to make massive post flop mistakes. I was out of position to him on most hands so I couldn't really do too much because we were between 150-250bb deep the whole time. It became clear that while he was hustling everyone, he did have his eye on me. I told him I thought it was fun, and he took that as a challenge to get all my money and make it not fun. I told him he could take every chip I had and I'd still have fun. That was his cue to start poking at me.

My adjustment was instead of limp raising, to just open my value hands huge. That would keep others out and keep him from trapping me when I limp raised. It worked like a charm. AQo raised to $30 and we went heads up. He hit his 96s and got nothing more from me. ATs raised to $20 and we went heads up. He called my cbet on a 7 high flop and I shut down. He showed a flopped pair of 2's. So, I ended up losing like $100 to him total. He felt like it was way more because he didn't realize I had taken like $80 off of him in preflop folds (not to mention about $80 from others. It was an interesting session.

I never did get a chance to catch the overbet shove guy. He eventually got caught 2-3 times to bust. There were also people there who were cold calling 3 bets with things like KTo. It was a dream table. Unfortunately, I never got a true fat value spot other than one frustrated short stack. So, I won $44 and went home happy yet a little irritated with the lack of spots.

Today, I played in the day game and had a very similar player. He was Vpip'ing about 90% and calling any raise. He liked to lecture me when he out flopped me (which was almost every time). The difference on this day is that I had two blow up hands.

Hand 1: I limp in an OK spot, then decide to call a true OMC's lead on a flop with a gutter and backdoor flush draw. The turn completes a flush that isn't mine and he bets very small. I raise to rep the flush thinking he can't really call much and he surprises me by calling. I think a solid river bet will almost always take it down. The river is a brick and he leads tiny. I assume he's just blocking and raise again. He deliberates and I'm actually feeling pretty comfortable because I don't think there's any way he can call. He proceeds to jam the rest of his stack in my face and I get to Hollywood for a minute to convince everyone that I'm laying down the 3rd nuts because he can only ever have the nuts. That last part is true, but man why am I in that spot?

Hand 2: I decide to station the 90% strat philosopher with second pair because i know he likes to bluff. I was right. He was weak, but not as weak as me. Quite unnecessary.

So, what should have been a small winner ended up -1 BI. And my wheels keep spinning. I just need to cut out the stupid stuff and I'll be winning at a modest rate through this card dead streak.

I might get to go back out tonight. We'll see.



For now, I'll grind some more PLO and try to figure out if I should just avoid it forever.

I think PLO would be good for you because it's actually a lot easier to be disciplined in that game. You can't bluff and you can't be fancy. You either have very strong equity that you felt, or you fold. For me, it's also harder to tilt in PLO. This is because my single biggest leak is entitlement tilt. In NL when some spewtard does something stupid when I am the top of my range, I can get tilted when they get there.

However, in PLO, it's difficult to get in situations where you have a significant equity advantage. You are entitled to nothing. So when your bare top set loses to the wrap+bdfd it's really pretty standard and hard to tilt at. If you view PLO from this perspective, you will tilt much less.

I also want to further clarify something that I believe is widely misunderstood wrt PLO variance. You experience more variance in PLO, but this is countered with much larger pots that are created at a much higher frequency than in NL. As an example my 10 handed 1/3 game was basically everyone going all in every hand the other night. I lost 2 $300 stacks, then won a $2k pot. PLO is a game of swings, but it's a game of ALOT of swings. These guys are playing it as if it were a table game. They are pure gambling. By hand selecting preflop, you are already profiting. There is no NL game in the country that has the action of a below average small stakes PLO game. I would rather get in the 10 situations per session where we have 25% equity 9 ways in PLO then the 1 situation where we flop a set vs. an overpair in a NL session.

The donkr PLO articles online are all you need, and the best poker literature I have ever read. I held off on posting stuff like this for a long time bc I didn't want anyone capable of thought moving to PLO, but since I don't play as much these days I guess it's whatever.

Also, your counter to high vpip players is not the best. I know bc I used to do it. It is definitely profitable, but there is a better option. You don't want to open large to "punish" them, you want to open small (3x) so you can barrel more. If the whole table calls, great, we have good odds with better hand selection than the field. I could write an essay or two on this, but trust me, it's something I dedicated a lot of my study towards wrt live poker.

Glad to see you're getting some sessions in, I'm hoping to pick up more in the second half of this year.

Thanks for that Ava, that's some great info. I've found that my greatest pressure in PLO is hand selection. I have to learn what a trash hand looks like. I mean that more in an emotional sense. Playing a ton of hands online is helping. Think back to when you first started playing holdem. KJ looked like a great hand no matter what the situation. THe more experience you got, the more you realized that a lot of times, that's liek the worst hand you could have. Same for PLO. I might See AQ44 no suit and think, "I could make big pairs, a set, and the nut straight, but really it's a pretty terrible hand most of the time. Experience will help there. As far as being willing to push your equity, I agree. I think bank roll will take care of that as well as more experience. The online PLO2 plays similar to the more tame live games around. Nothing prepares you for the maniac shove fests other than being there.

I'm really interested in your strategy for wide open players. My intuition says isolate them with a slightly better range and take their money before anyone else can. If you don't want to discuss publicly that's cool.

I hope you get back on the felt. I've always enjoyed your perspectives. If you get up to our area, we can get some poeple together. You really do need to check out the charity scene. It's completely different rom the casinos. ON that note...


I went back to the charity games for a couple of very brief sessions this week. The first time was a moderate loser, but the game was very good. yesterday, I returned and crushed it for 3 hours. I got a couple of fat value spots and held up, a couple of times as a lock. There's just no comparison to the casino games as long as there are seats and chips available. It honestly doesn't even really matter that much which charity game you play. They're all significantly easier than the average casino game. Especially during the week.

I also have really started to plug some serious leaks. I think I'm really tunring the corner with some of my specific spew tendencies. It's amazing how much you can make when you eliminate the big unnecessary negative plays. I'm not completely there yet, but I definitely feel like I'm getting closer to my A game.

As I was headed to the game last night, I was lamenting losing a couple of buy ins over the last couple weeks, but I said to myself, "You're still only one good session away from 4K."

That session happened. After cashing out last night I had $4001 in my roll and I used the $1 to buy a candy bar today so I'm sitting on exactly 20 BI. Back to being officially rolled for $1/2. Now the goal is to get to $6k so I can start taking shots at bigger/PLO games and withdrawing here and there for trinkets. Let's all join hands and meditate on staving off any immediate downswings and run bad. Oooooohhhhmmmmmmmmm

Huge congrats on your milestone. It felt like it took forever for me to finally break my big roll goal ($10K), but once that psychological hurdle was past, things seemed much easier.

I hope you have a similar experience

Thanks man. One thing I've had to relearn during my break even stretch is the value of money. When you're winning pots left and right you can forget how costly mistakes can be. Either you're not getting punished for them or they're masked by the big pots you did win. When you're not running well, those plays are still there and they're the only thing you have to think about in between sessions. I came to the conclusion that I likely would have still been beating the game over this last 100 hrs (although not for a lot) had I simply not spewed multiple times per session. There was one particular session this past week where every single time I made a bad preflop play it cost me at least $50. So, I thought, "What if I just don't make any of those plays for an entire session?" It seems to be working. Poker is really tough in that way. There isn't immediate negative or positive feedback for corresponding good or bad actions. Especially in live poker, it can take years (or a lifetime) for results to catch up.

I've been thinking about this concept a lot lately. I have some other poker friends who have gone through extended periods of seemingly preposterous run bad. They're good players, however they constantly recount stories of tables where every other player is just throwing chips around to each other and when they finally get in there with the best of it, they lose. Everyone says that some people are lucky and some are not. We've programmed ourselves to discount this as simple variance. That's true. It is simple variance. What we fail to realize is that in live poker, variance one way or the other can literally last a lifetime. So, in a way you could really be a lucky or unlucky person. The thing is it's not some magic force. It's just variance. Variance that lasts longer than you can afford to wait.

I don't know if that helps or hurts someone on a losing streak or dealing with tilt. You can't say it's just fair, because it isn't fair. Just about every single one of us who's made it past the boom did so simply because we ran good at the start. I have several friends who are either better than me or have the potential to be better than me who have no interest in poker these days simply because they ran queens into aces a couple of times. I guess you just have to be thankful every time you win because the truth is you're not guaranteed anything. There's no such thing as running good or bad. You just run how you run. So, be grateful for when you make money for a hobby instead of paying money to do something else.


Fun hand of the day:

Preflop:

Table is full of loose passives and loose aggressive players. Everyone has at least 100bb with several over 200bb. I have 250bb effective with the main villain. He's a younger white guy who thinks very highly of his skills. He doesn't really have any idea what he's doing though based on table talk and the fact that he Vpip's about 75%. He plays his draws aggressively pretty much always.

3 limps to me on btn with AT and I make it $17 and get 4 calls (sigh).

Flop: T53 ($86)
Checks to me. Do you cbet? If so what do you do if anyone raises?

Well, variance can run in one direction for a lifetime, making a given person be perceived as lucky or unlucky. It is statistically very unlikely, though. Variance has no memory, and each opportunity for it to break positive or negative is an independent event.

The more likely event is mental. People get negative about how unlucky they are, they start to feel like "it doesn't matter what I do," so they start playing like crap, and then that bad play goes as one would expect and they "confirm" their bad luck.

Gotta cbet here, way too many cards that are bad for us ott. Play poker if someone raises? Assuming its the loose-agg guy by the way this hand was framed, but honestly not enough info.

We have Th so it's not possible for him to have tp+fd, so he'll have mostly naked fd, funky combo draws, occasional 2p and sets if he raises. Heavily weighted towards fd I'm imagining based on description

Heh, I resemble that remark.

I'm not sure I agree about there not being running good or bad. While it's true that there's nothing we can do about variance, and that we are just going to run however we happen to run ... sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. The saving grace is that if you're a good or decent player "running bad" looks a lot more like breakeven than actually losing anything, so as long as you enjoy any of the other aspects of playing you've still got a hobby.

Garick, I think it depends on the definition of "lifetime". 500 hours of things mostly going the wrong way can take a rec player a year to experience (or more), and that can easily break them to the point that they won't ever come back.

There are definitely mental aspects of 'running bad' that exacerbate the problem with bad play. Bad calls OTR, bad folds from scared money, missed value bets, etc. I won't claim to be perfect in that respect (who is?), but I can tell you that even after overcoming most of it (to the point it doesn't bother you any more) you can still go on these frustratingly BE stretches where you repeatedly play your balls off to win a pile of chips and then get rivered to go home even/broke.



Regarding PLO, Ava, do you mean opening smaller because you expect them to simply flat preflop often (as they're loose) and it doesn't really matter to them if it's $20 or $10? So by opening small we save ourselves money when we can't continue with the hand, while giving ourselves a lower SPR so that we can fire two+ streets post?


For the hand of the day ...

Think we should c-bet this. I don't know that it really hits a perceived $17 raising range (if any of our V's are even thinking about it), but it shouldn't really have hit any of them too hard either. So I'd want to bet about $40 here (maybe more), hoping to get one caller that we can get one more street of value out of. Not thrilled if we get 4 calls. Folding to a big x/r from most players, although maybe not the main V if he's the kind to pull that with a FD.

I don't want to give a free card as any H will kill the action and maybe our hand, and any face card will likely hit one of the 4 of them. Although at least we block the TP+FD combos.

Not many run-outs I want to get 250bb in with here though.

Garick:

Of course you're right. My point is just that some people will be on the good side of variance more often than others over the course of a lifetime and it's not guaranteed to even out. So, getting upset about running bad is pointless. There's no changing it. There's no predicting when or if it will end. It just is. I get irritated by run bad just like everyone else. For me entitlement tilt is way more prevalent and this line of thinking helps me overcome it. I am not owed anything by the poker gods. I could lose every flip for the rest of my life and the next one would still be 50/50. I guess it's another way of thinking about it so the mental side doesn't start snowballing the down slide. My recent stretch wasn't even all that much run bad. It was mostly card dead and flop dead. I should be able to survive those stretches. The problem is I'm so used to running good and winning that I push it and try to "make the game behave" the way I'm used to it behaving (bad players giving me money). Sometimes you just have to accept that tonight you're not getting the fish's money and concentrate on not giving away a bunch of your own trying to chase them down.

Hand:

I considered that I wouldn't like getting raised, but also saw that this was a value spot that I shouldn't pass up and decided I'd deal with it depending on how things went. I c bet $50. The main villain check raises to $150...

I mean, it depends on how "good" you think he is, how "good" HE thinks he is...like I said, we block all pair+fd combos so hes got a flush draw here most of the time, often some goofy combo draw, sometimes 2pair and sets, but a lot of the time in a 4 way pot he won't be checking those hands on a flush draw board where you're likely to check behind often when you whiff since it's 4 ways.

The flop c/r on a board like this is >>50% of the time a flush draw here, often nfd. We're $500 deep? Leaning towards calling the c/r and getting it in on safe turns (non heart). Kind of a crappy spot since there are a bunch of turns that make straights and if he's loose pre he has all open enders and gutters + fd (24, 46, 67, A2) in his range and we won't know which one hits him.

Feels pretty gross to fold here when the c/r is so rarely a value hand at this sizing imo

Ha. I think we adjust differently to those stretches then. I find myself more willing to fold a marginal speculative hand that I might otherwise have raised in LP. Or flat a raise with a "better" hand. Also a bit of a leak of course.


Now we're looking at $100 more to us, with $280 in the middle and about $330 left behind that? Gross.

Where was V in the action? I think it matters a little bit if he's checking first to act OTF, or 4th with only you left to bet. I expect a set or 2-pair will be more likely to check the more people are left to act behind assuming that someone else will bet it. So a x/r from later position might have more semi-bluffs as he should be betting those 'made' hands.

One option is to flat here, and GII on a non-heart turn. But I get the sick feeling that something like KJhh would call off on a K or J, so we've got a bunch more potentially dangerous cards too. Flatting leaves us in a weird spot OTT though. Do we call it off if he bets a non-heart? What if it's a Kd and he bets again? Do we check behind and let him get a free look at the river with a draw, or do we expect him to bet a draw again then.

Another option is to just blast away now. Make a draw pay to see it, avoid making a mistake folding when we're ahead and get bet into again OTT, and *maybe* get a hand that's currently ahead to fold (two pair? some weird JJ?). But then we're sticking $500 into a pot with TPTK and I don't like that as a general rule. If he's willing to call it off with a draw and we're rolled to take the swings ... OK I guess.


It feels really weak but I can see myself just thinking "****it" and folding this since I don't have a plan for the rest of the hand (maybe that'd be different with my own read on him).

Grunch.

TPTK. Bet/fold. Could possibly bet folding best hand, but c'est la vie. It happens. Fold, unless read says the raiser is overvaluing TPGK or TPWK.

Grunching flop.

This is really close. Is this V likely to fire on a heart turn if he had a set, or TPGK, or 6 4? I'm inclined to call with this V, and fold to a 2nd bullet on a heart turn, unless the answer to the question is yes? Then I might fold OTF as well.

The main plan is to call OTF and call again non-hearts. Face card turn cards are another problem, but this guy is VPIPing too much to really worry about him hitting an over-card OTT. Would prolly call turn on a non-heart face card.

I often find this type of thing to be the hardest part about ranging people. How good are they? For example, do they know that 4-way, we should usually not be cbetting air? Or do they just know cbetting is good, so they expect everyone to always do it?

Good point Angrist about V's position. If he's late, he would be less likely to check a made hand.

I suspect this opponent to be on the level of see flush draw check raise flush draw.

What about overplaying TPGK or TPWK? Usually that's real beginners and some OMC's. So prolly not this guy, but thought I'd check.

Wasn't referring to PLO, sorry if that was confusing. But yes, for NL, bolded is exactly correct, good synopsis.

I pot in PLO because mostly because the donkr PLO articles tell me to. But if I had to state a reason, I think it is because it is nearly impossible to continue postflop in low stakes PLO without large equity. So, we bet the maximum we can with high equity hands preflop (never a mistake), and then never continue post without major equity.

We are bloating pots preflop with hands that will flop better more often than our opponents, because we hand select and they don't. Because these pots go 5-10 ways, we cannot bluff post. But when we hit (which we will more often than villains, because we hand select) we will win a very large pot.

This is different from NL where you can still win the hand with QJs on T26r. In those spots, there is a real benefit from keeping the pot small preflop. It's hard to explain without posting another wall, but 3x (+1bb per limper) as a standard (even at low stakes) has really improved my game.


2 core concepts I want to reiterate for PLO.

1). You want hands that work together. So KJ98s is FAR superior than AK99ds. Pairs below QQ actually suck in PLO bc they block the "community strength" of 4 card rundowns. Any new hand you get dealt, ask "do these cards work together?".

2). You want overnut hands. So 6789 trumps 3456. A678s (suited ace) trumps K678s (suited king). A678s is near premium, K678s should be quickly folded.

1&2 go together. The hands that work together also overnut people, which is what we are trying to do. When we get in A678 on 345 vs bare 67xx, we are overnutting them. We are striving to mostly get in these overnut spots in live PLO bc we are seeing flops 5-10 ways with no fold equity.

ProPokerTools Omaha Hi Simulation

820 trials (Exhaustive)

board: 345

Hand	Pot equity	Wins	Ties
As6d7s8h	60.91%	179	641
6h7dKcQc	39.09%	0	641

Congrats on hitting a milestone spike. $4k is a very nice roll.

If you want me to stop rambling about PLO lmk.

Oops, I meant higher SPR, but the point was the same about manipulating the pot size.

So you take a variant of the "pump and jam" approach in PLO, where we pot pre, bomb it when we hit, and expect to get paid off (or at least, get the money in) enough to make up for the times we miss and fold.


I need PLO money

Quite the opposite Ava, I'm a PLO novice. I love it. I've heard the concepts you're speaking of on hand selection. I haven't mastered them though. That will take some more study and practice. I think live PLO will be a gold mine with enough volume though. It's still a poker frontier.

I'm 3 tabling PLO2 right now before sleep. I've been getting up at 5:30 all week. Tough to play live with that going on. NExt week should provide some opportunities however. It would be nice to go on a winning streak. We'll see.

So I forgot to results the hand.

I folded knowing that I'm often folding the best hand, but I think he bets most every turn card and I don't think I can continue a lot so it's kind of a shove fold spot imo. He showed QJh which is about what we all figured.

I will say that I didn't think through his range very well. Had I remembered that he could not have a combo draw and the NFD was available to him, I think I might have just jammed it right in his face. As is I'm ok with avoiding the variance of being a slight dog for $1100 at this stage of my rebuild. All part of removing the rust. What I'm most happy about is that I was emotionally willing to fold even if it wasn't the right choice. When my head isnt right folding isn't even an option because I don't do what I know I'm supposed to.