Hal's not a troll (he's an excellent poster when it comes to questions of probability), but I think he needlessly complicated things with his posts here.

I can relate to the lost post thing for sure. Sorry I am just getting back to this thread.

Yes and no? If we are playing 'readless' in a husng we may or may not have any metagame. We may have some laggy plays that are best against the specific metagme. I think as our metagame against a specific opponent builds up, we may develop specific tendencies based on how our specific plays may be interpreted.

Maybe a tight or a loose play, but we are still just trying to find the most profitable lines. Maybe even a bluff shows down or it doesn't, we still just need to pick the correct adjustments depending on what we think their reaction will be.


More related to the OP: yes combos are a very helpful thing to understand. Espesh in situations where ranges are tight and combinations that make specific plays are very specific. Playing against nits are a good example of this. JMO

How can we have metagame against a guy we have no reads on?

You dont... but you develop one. EG: Vs a good reg, I decide to flat his 3B IP as aposed to 4betting it - a decent reg will take note of that and you suddently weaken your 4betting range but strenghten your 3B flatting range.

However, at the micros, its rare. At zoom its even more rare (past HUD stats anyway).

Maybe meta game is the wrong word for the readless situation I am talking about. For example in the old days before moshman sng strategy, it was very uncommon for someone to isolate wide versus a limper for 10bb. It became very common for light ships after this book, so the donks stopped folding (because l/c is their bread and button play with A7o or w/e). After that, reg ships over 10bb for a while became very read specific because they could expect certain players to call light.

Donk bets, 3bets in specific situations have all changed in meaning over the last few years, so the exploitative strategies have changed too. There hasn't really been so much adjustment by the bad players (but certainly some) but these tendencies have effects on the competent players. There is more information in that maybe on reg runs these stats and another runs another, but when someone cbets xyz% it means something different on average than it meant a few years ago.

To some degree, we are all playing against population tendencies, espech in multihanded situations as our specific reads begin to deteriorate with the increased number of opponents we play.

Maybe Mersenneary at husng.com makes a video about the correct exploitative play against current standard stratagies, and now the new correct exploitative play that exploits the new strategy and so on. Yesterday very light utg 5bb ranges lead to light isolation as the reg on reg sng readless metagame changes every day.

Sure lots of times we are playing against someone we know has very specific tendencies, but lots of times we playing someone who's play this week varies from their play two months ago due to a number of factors. A general strategy is probably a more useful exercise the larger the player pool imo.

Also:

OP - Check this out. Ive not looked at it myself, but his (splitsuits) coaching content is top notch when it comes to conceptual training videos. Personally never seen anything set out as professional and as good as his vids. He also has his own store, so give splitsuit a google

http://www.thepokerbank.com/videos/splitsuit/combos/

Good response, regret$. I would class all that in "staying on top of population tendencies readless" and not really metagame, but you're certainly correct. Just a terminology thing I guess.