After reading your posts I've started to play uNL on stars 6max according to your advice. I dont use PT. After about 1k hands I am 6 BI down. I am playing 6 tables in the same time so I dont have a time to play a crapy hands but my premium hands are totally crashed by lower pair, sets etc.
Is it just variance or shouldnt I CB so often, play less agressive??
What's the point?? Previosly I was playing more hands and stacked people when I hit sth now they stacked me. Any advice??

6-max is more swingy than FR, and plus, 1k hands is a ridiculously small sample size.

Its hard to change the way you play overnight try dropping down a level or two so you can get a feel for a more aggressive playing style with out going broke.

Building the roll and learning

Haven't read the responses but nice post OP.

You can suffer a few fairly big leaks in your game but as long as you know to value bet light (btw guys- you don't always need to have the best hand to valuebet- your opponent just needs to call with a worse hand MORE OFTEN than he will with a worse one) for your bet to be +EV), you've got a free ride all the way to 200NL.

Im no specialist by any means. Everything you said I completely agree with as far as going deep in any structure tournament. I have played very few cash games at casinos or home games. I noticed the players at cash tables have a much more loose game then tournament players. I know im a dieing breed, but i prefer playing flops then stopping the action preflop by going all in or over raising the pot.

I would like to say thanks to OP. This has fixed a leak in my game.

I would also like to mention that it appears 1/2 of everyone on the interwebs has now read this thread as the 3betting % has increased by 1000% today for no apparent reason. Good thing they still don't know how/when to 3bet (OP please do NOT write a thread on this topic, kthanks, i like easy games), they are playing a million% better as you said but at least it's still crap that they're playing a million% better.

Edit: **** now I bumped this back up for everyone to see again.

Sorry to ask this again, but I don't get TWO and what relevance the stack size has. Why would you not call(fold?) with a small pocket pair and a smallish stack has limped behind? How does the fact that the limper has a smallish stack v. a deep stack affect your decision?

What does "tld;r"(or something like that) mean? What does "FOS" mean?

What kind of stats are you guys cranking out at uNL 6-max, 18/15/3 or something like that?

tl;dr = too long; didn't read
FOS = full of ****

Just a guess, but:

You aren't raising stuff like 89s and mid pockets if a smallish stack limps ahead of you because your implied odds are much lower, so it's to your advantage to take a cheap flop. Plus, short stacks have 2 moves: One, shove preflop. Two, shove postflop. You are forced to fold SCs and mid PPs if he shoves preflop.

tl;dr = too long; didn't read
FOS = full of ****

I've been talking about the real nano stakes here, where buyins are 200bb or 250bb -- .01/.02 and .05/.10 on stars.

This was from when I was starting out. I got destroyed for a while and ended up at these nanostakes to get my legs under me, then started moving up.

I know this is a small sample, but it's all I've got. Standard Dev. is 200 Big Bets/100 over these hands. I'm not up to speed on calculating confidence intervals for what the sustained winrates might be. I'm NOT posting this to prove any point, this could obviously show a lot of variance. Mostly I just think it's funny that I have 2000k hands, as someone suggested, close to the derided 25/11, 33/14 range.







I'm not sure I understand. My net from the blinds is green (same set of levels) -- does that somehow indicate poor blind play?


Stack size is paramount in no limit at all times. With a speculative hand, you are generally getting horrible pot odds preflop. A hand that figures to be best one time in 12, say, is getting 1.5 to 1 from a raise to 3bb. In order for that to be profitable, you have to win 8 times as much as your call, ON AVERAGE, when you hit.

If your opponent only has 30bb, and bets 4bb to you, the MOST you can win is 30bb. While that may sound like enough, you won't always get the whole stack. You might only get it half the time, say. The short stack caps the max payout, so the average payout is not enough to justify the call. (don't forget, you'll occasionally lose a big pot here, too)

If the shortstack does have enough to justify a call, he might not have enough for you to raise. If you don't figure you can get him to fold to your 3bet, you are destroying your own implied odds by raising.

Always be thinking about how much you can really expect to win by hitting your hand (it's often less than you think). Read some of the excellent threads about set mining for the good math.

here's one incredible post

and a more straightforward one about implied odds

and one more that is only partially relevant, but thoroughly awesome nonetheless

damn, I'm spinning greatest hits here:
Pokey advocates open-limping in his "optimal micros play" post

but I can't find the good implied odds of setmining thread. I'll keep searching.

Just wait till WGCrider sees this!

I'm glad you posted that, thank you.

I've got my nomex jockey shorts on already.

nice post op. I have a question though. I only skimmed through so not sure if this was asked yet, but what about small pocket pairs from utg or utg+1 like 22-55. is it ok to just limp with these hands or should you always be raising these. i tend to mix it up with limping or raising with these kinds of hands from ep but was wondering if I should just always raise with them?

sorry, that's nonsensical. If you have a hand that figures to be best one time in 8, you need to win 8x the cost, ldo. You're getting only 1.5 immediately, so need to recover at least 6.5 later when you hit. That's 19.5bb from an opponent that has 27 left. You'd have to stack them more than 2/3 of the time.

One of the ways raising helps you is by buying you better position. If players are more likely to fold after your raise, you could end up acting last after the flop, which is very good. Good setmining means taking pots on uncontested flops with a cbet even when you've missed. This really can turn setmining from marginally unprofitable (when the implied odds aren't quite there) to profitable.

The balance is if you can create a large pot by starting the limpfest. Pocket pairs play reasonably well out of position (you either hit your set or you didn't, no tough draws to deal with), and more players means more of a chance somebody will have hit top pair or a "sneaky" two pair and pay you off.

Those lowest pocket pairs (esp. 22 and 33) aren't worth nearly as much as bigger ones, as you'll occasionally lose to bigger sets, which is very expensive. Some of the profit from medium sets comes from lower sets, so you don't mind a smaller pot when you have that lower set.

pockey is wrong I am right and dont limp anything

ARPIL FOOLS, GUYS!!

Ahh. I see now. The limper's smallish stack may be offering you enough implied odds on a call to hit a set with a hand like 22, but the limper's stack may be too small to offer you those same implied odds on a raise. For instance, if the blinds are .50-1 and someone limps in middle position with a remaining stack of $19, and you have them covered, then the most you can win from that limper is his whole stack plus what's currently in the pot, which is $19 + $2.50 = $21.50. Since you are faced with calling $1, your max implied odds are $21.50:$1 or roughly 21:1.

On the other hand, if you raise to $4, then the most you can win from that limper is $19 more plus the $2.50 in the pot, which is $21.50. That gives you max implied odds of only $21.50:$4 or roughly 5:1.

Thanks for the links.

Great read (from work!). Can't wait to get home and play using a new style. Also don't have PT yet but plan on getting it soon. I do usually make sure my stats on FT have me seeing roughly 20-25% of flops, but they don't tell me what my PFR% is. I would venture to guess it's too low though!

How much of what you are adivising applies to micro-low stakes SNG? There comes a time with the increasing blinds where you cannot wait for the optimal hand. Even so, playing a less than optimal hand aggresively is risky at best due to the fact that at this limit raises are often not respected. Suck outs are very frequent.

At what stake do you think players start to respect good play?

Also can someone give an example of aggressive vs. reckless play?

Good question, and I have the same one. I did go home last night and play 3 SNGs using this method. I bombed the first because I made a stupid call of a player's all-in that I didn't believe. I won the third one. I'll take 1/3 any day, since it cost $6 in entry fees to win $9...yeah low stakes but BR limited right now, and at least it's a profit. That being said, I found I was only playing between 10-15% of hands, which seems VERY low. I folded to any opening raise unless I had AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AK, AQ or a PP. And if it was folded to me, I raised 3-4BB if I had one of these hands, otherwise I folded as well. I did very little blind-stealing, unless I had A9+ or a hand like J10s, and I don't think I defended my blinds at all. It worked, but it was boring and my percentage of hands played seems extremely low.

Usually I like to be around 20%. I didn't limp at all, and I didn't call any raises. I either folded or raised. And when I got heads up (I was about a 3:1 dog in chips), I either folded or went all-in, which worked since I got some good cards. I guess my main question is, using the mantra of "raise or fold", how do you make adjustments for SNGs, where playing this few of hands can't surely be a winning strategy over the long run (despite my results last night), since the blinds are likely to overtake you as they increase. It did make for easy play though....either fold or raise, cbet 2/3 pot if I raised, get heads up, go all in or fold....lather/rinse/repeat.

How far off base am I?

lol now I know why I run 11 ptBB/100 at NL25

sng's and tournaments are a completely different animal in SNG's. the first few levels you play like a cash game, but after that, it's all about position. if you're playing 15/12 with 5 left with 200/400 blinds you gonna get raped. you need to be very aggressive when a tournament gets down to the bubble, but the same concept still applies, DON'T COLD CALL

You said this...

...which incorrectly equates PFR with open-raising. That's what people have been trying to explain.