it's not just the good opponents that get sick of you opening every hand. trust me.

I guess it's more or less standard that BTN opens 60-85% and that BB defends 25-40%. If the BTN starts opening 100% and the BB does not adjust, 72o shows a profit (BTN can open it and take the blinds >60%; if BB calls or 3bets he does not put money in the pot unless he has the nuts). If the BB adjusts and 3bets and calls more to punish the BTN, it seems like opening 27o becomes a much more marginal or even -EV play.

People tend to forget, however, that BB's range will be weaker too. The result is that both players will have to fight for the pot with a weaker range; relative hand values are changing.

So wrt TC's post,

it also makes it much easier to play you OOP on the flop when they do just call you. if you know a guy is raising 90%+ of his hands, particularly if he is cbetting a very high number as well, you can be c/r flops profitably with air quite a bit, doing it with top/2nd pair for value, overs, any draw, etc., and it will make life really hard on you when you constantly are dealing with having hands that play horribly post flop.

this is only one way to look at it. Both players should be able to adjust because his opponent will never have anything. Also, if opponents will play back lighter at you, your nut hands will show more profit. Opening 100% could have a higher EV (for your whole range) than opening 70%, even if 72o is a losing hand to open in the first strategy.

dumb thread/question.

yes any 2 otb is profitable against some (terrible) opponents, but against most (even slightly competent) players it will not be. this can obviously be said for a ****load of poker concepts! c-betting 100%, playing 16 tables, 3betting any 2, 5 betting light, blah blah blah.

lol ya srsly this thread is so dumb...funny to see this ec

lol

i dont think dani would say i was right (and therefore he was wrong) but i did get him to say he'd open up even wider, so it was a small win, haha

you can fold AA too to get a "balanced" range, but why would you?

All opponents - good, bad, loose, tight, passive, aggressive, tilted, even-keeled whatever. it's just a built in technical advantage to play every button that just cannot be overwhelmed by any player type.

My overall HU stats are like 95/95 (+) otb thereabout, because there are times you SHOULD drop the bottom 20% of hands (when raising them for inherent value no longer shows profit) - this minor adjustment, when your opponent still reacts along the premise of you opening ATC but you're really just opening top 80% - is HUGE. and it's where good players get boned the most, I think.

yeah, against anyone you'd be able to get away with it. that said, no matter how well i play my button (AND I PLAY IT WELL BABY! ) cts will likely play his even better vs me and obviously/therefore he'll have an edge on me.

no, this doesn't make sense, if something works against player A it should work against player B, unless player B does something that allows a more optimal counter strategy - and my gut feeling is that this actually works better vs higher limit players because in general people understand they will NOT win money OOP HU, so even vs an expanded range they tend to give up (RIGHTLY SO) more often rather then the common reaction (which is wrong) of a. playing more hands oop and b. 3betting a larger range oop.

it's like this, durr; if someone got to play you HU, but they get the button everytime - but the stipulation is they must play ~95%-100% VPIP (doesn't mean call an all in, just either open limp or minraise or 3x or whatever) - do you think you can win? against bad players, sure. against someone solid? well, you're amazing, so maybe, but even then I dont think too many people think you'd win. (think of the recent prop that the live player wanted to make about giving up the button everytime)

Now, lets analyze a little deeper; since you know he's playing 100%, you can no longer give him the any two edge (this is a term I use in an article unpublished, but it's easy to grasp: Simply, someone doesn't defend the necessary amount to prevent you FROM raising ATC in a vacuum*) therefore your adjustments likely will box out 72o from showing profit in isolation, however if you're adjusting to box out 72o, T9o+ (or whatever) will show profit.. and overall you lose. note that at this point in a match is where i typically drop those 20% of hands or so, typically players arent good enough to pinpoint the %s of what is correct to defend against what is not even the correct range.

*if you're raising 3x, and this all hinges on your open, 2.5 to win 1.5 means if this works 60% of the time nothing else matters. what this means is if people dont vpip OOP 40%+, you should continue to exploit this. most people VPIP ~20 (very tight) to 40 (very loose) - personally im fairly loose but dont vpip more then 30 to 33% (I dont need to, bc my opponent isn't taking advantage of my "tightness"). Anycase, it's only when you prevent the unexploitable strategy does the any two edge no longer occur.

not quick or well enough though.

why the hate jay?

here's some more theory which is fun.

player a has 1bb stack and is the bb.

is player b correct in folding any two? (no)

at what stack depth does a sb fold become correct?

(Certainly someone would argue there reaches a stack depth where the positional advantage on later street make any two playable, right?)

so the answer - if so - is a C curve where at some point (SNG experts would know this best) your FE no longer trumps inherent hand value because the preflop weakness is too much to overcome, and at the point in which postflop is irrelevant. it's worth noting that there are many assumptions you'd need to make (restealing ranges, stacking ranges, etc.) that change DRASTICALLY

my gut tells me ~7bb to ~35bb.

can i prove this? yes, but it would take alot of work, which isn't really worth proving unless i got paid to prove it. :X

Exactly my toughts

I know maybe I focus too much on math and it's easy to just say "they will 3bet more", but can you guys give me an actual 3bet range and 3bet size that you will be using? The math in my OP assumes 20% 3bet and 30% call, which is a fairly wide range. I have played HU for a decent number of hands with people I know are certainly "better at poker" than I am and even though I raise 100% of my buttons, some people still fold >60%, and I think that raising 100% of the buttons has to be pretty obvious so it's not as if people wouldn't notice.

Fwiw, a range like: 77+, AT+, KJ+ is only 10% of your range. If you add a few suited hands and then a bunch of bluffs it is difficult to get to 20% without weakening your range significantly.

Obviously villain will be able to 3bet bluff a lot, because we will be folding a lot of our range. However, the telescoping nature of hand ranges due to bet size means that there is an upper bound on how often he can easily do it. Say villain 3bets to 10x (seems standard for many). He is risking 9 to win 4, meaning we need to fold >66% of the time. This means even if villain is 3betting as much as 40% of the time, we can simply call/4bet with the top 40% of our range and we've made it so that he is no longer +EV with ATC. That is, it is difficult for villain to 3bet a range that is tight enough that we can't simply continue with a wide range but which is also wide enough to take advantage of our opening 100% of our buttons. Moreover, the more villain 3bets, the more he either polarizes his range to include a lot of strong hands and a lot of air (makes it easier for us to play, particularly in position) or he is taking a lot of strong hands out of his calling range, making it much easier for us to win medium/small pots when he is just calling, because he ends up with so much air OOP. So even if villain 4bets 40% of his hands and calls maybe 25%, the same calculation as I did in my OP makes raising 27o has an immediate EV of -1.1BB and we end up with him calling 25% of the time and us having about 33% equity there in a situation where he has a very wide range with a lot of air and we have position. Overall, -.5BB, plus any metagame benefit (like, for instance, the fact that villain is 3betting 40% of his range OOP against us and sometimes we have AA instead of 27o).

the issue, obviously, isnt that most of the time they wont have a hand that they would usually call a raise with, however, the fact that by raising every button you create that specific table image and people will play back at you a lot more than usual. so then, when you raise with your 27o and they are 3betting you with j10, then youll understand why it becomes a problem.

No, I don't understand.

Taylor,

Obviously when I'm raising 100% of buttons I'm going to be checking behind on the flop very often. The whole point of the math I'm doing is to demonstrate that the fold equity preflop and the pot equity postflop are sufficient to make raising 27o +EV. This means I'm not relying on ever cbetting when I miss, only putting in money postflop when I do flop well (which is going to be +EV, because hey, I has a pair).

This is actually a benefit metagame wise because villain has to start leading a lot more of his hands for value/protection/bluffs purposes which only helps further define his range when he does check and "builds the pot" when we flop big and makes it more difficult for him to c/r thin for value. There's only so much strength villain can have in his hand range and when we are literally always in the pot, it's a lot harder for him to spread it out well.

Given that the button plays 100%, why not reraise 80%, or something similar, and never call*?

If you're going to play a decidedly stronger range than your opponent OOP it seems more than a little silly to ever give him a flop without putting in more money.

Your opponent would have to be pretty attentive to notice that quickly (like within 30 minutes).

Given that you've opened 100% of your buttons 50 hands (and therefore played for about an hour) it's around 20 times as likely that you're opening 100% of your hands as you opening 95%. But that assumes that both types of players are equally likely in the player pool, and that's not true. For instance, there's probably a lot more than 20 times as many players opening 95% than 100% on the button. And much more that opens 80%-90%.

Add to that most people just pay a lot less attention to early action and small pots and there's a pretty heavy bias not to notice 100% of hands played. Not to mention that most heads-up games last for considerably less than 1 hour.

So for the opponent to quickly notice you're playing every hand you'd have to showdown a lot of crap, and it's not really in the nature of crap hands to be shown down.

Hells no. That's just the boundary where we're certain that he can profit from 3-betting with any two no matter what. You'd have to fold a lot less than that for him to auto profit, due to him actually having good hands and occassionally hitting.

* Yes, not happening IRL, blah, blah.

So if you had to tell your opponent your opening-range and stick to that, you would open 100%, right? But because you don't have to tell him, you sometimes pretend to open 100% and in reality you open 80%; so he will work with the false assumption that you open 100%... But isn't it fairly obvious that you are <100% when you start folding your BTN suddenly? I mean, why not just stick to the 100% the whole match?