I wonder about it sometimes. Interestingly, I posted a question about this in DougL's well and I think he gave me a politician's answer.

I think you nailed half the answer yourself:

But it's the following point that cinches it:

Yes, there's always a fresh handful of players who are voraciously devouring every scrap of poker information they can find, truly absorbing it and applying it in their games. This is a small minority of the player pool and it always will be. Some people never put forth the effort at all (this is probably a majority of players overall). Others do a little reading, become self-proclaimed experts, and are never willing to take a hint from anyone else ever again. And there's some who try to improve but either fail to understand the concepts or fail to apply them -- or they misapply them -- when they play. There's a very real learning curve and the majority of players never reach the top.

A related point is that part of poker is adjusting. I'm too young and haven't been playing long enough to be an expert on it but from what I've read, the game has changed a lot and several times over in the past 50 years. Keeping pace with the changes, adjusting to changing table norms, learning the game(s) of the day and adapting to new tendencies is all a part of playing profitable poker long term. It's not about mastering a system and not necessarily about developing expertise in a single game, although it can sometimes seem that way in a vacuum. It's a mentality that is developed over time and possibly never perfected.

It's interesting to me that people who have moved to other games are often more secretive about their strategies than Hold 'Em players. I suspect that these are people who were able to beat HE games during the boom but failed to adjust as the pool of loose-passives began to dwindle. They found some of the really bad players they were good at beating up on had moved to the other games and they followed them there. So, for example, if you go to the PLO8 forum, you will see a much greater reluctance to share strategy openly than you do here in MSL. I know one time I saw a post where a guy was talking about writing a PLO8 book and about ten people replied at once saying, "Please don't." Personally, I'm not afraid of other players getting better. As we've already discussed, most of them never will.

I'd be more afraid of becoming an expert. You hear guys like Doyle Brunson and Daniel Negreanu say they learn something new about the game every day. That's the attitude I aspire to.

First, ty for the post. Wasn't sure how likely you were to do this based on your response in the "How do you get better" thread, but was certainly hoping for something like this.

I have to get to work (and work blocks 2p2 and a million other sites, unfortunately) but I'll take some time to try to tear apart the SSHE tight games chart later tonight. I agree with mup that this would be a good one to work with since most people posting here have the book and because more than a few bad tags at the micro fr games are playing from this chart with very little deviation.

IIRC I was running at about 20/17 during Friday night's 5c game so maybe the secret to lagtag play is to drink a lot and 3b w T5o. Or maybe that's just the secret being a bad lag.

first of all, cong Doul
second, 22/17 is too tight still imo

i'd really like to saying something meaningful that Doug is hard to compete with.
edit: i wrote more than i thought....this seems to be a special skill i have. rambling.

BUt starting with starting hand guidelines. Honestly, im well beyond startin hand charts and if i tried to put the training wheels back on it wouldnt work because there would be too many 'it depends' scenarios and what ifs and i'd get all in a muddle.

So in lieu of that, heres what i gots:
1. in early position....play ABC according to SSHE standard in an exploitative manner as best we can given the position (ie adjusting to suit the table and playing "AJo" and "88" utg in a 'it depends' way and not necessarily playing every suited Ace if its likely we will be seeing a raised pot...ie based on the situation)
2. in Medium - Late position....start opening up like WITHG preaches whilst being aware of what we play when its already raised before we act (ie pread/stats/yadayada)
3. In late position position....do what WITHG says, be aggresive in good spots, use position, play based on reads (eg any action for 66 might be correct and do ready stuff like steal light against nits etc etc)

this might already be taking hero some of the way towards 22/17.

oh and going forward Im assuming (if you send it already then i apologise...i may have missed it when i read your OP earlier today) Im working on the assumption that 22/17 is NOT going to work well if hero isnt paying attention at the table. This is important, I just dont think you can do it when MMTing...if i did 22/17 24 tabling 1/2 i'd spew bigtime.

I like what you are looking to do in this thread Doug and i know you say it in the OP but playing 22/17 is very likely to get some people in some very tough spots and lead to spewville. Where im going with this is that not everyone, despite best intentions, will be able to play 22/17 well imo...but thats fine.....everyone who is reasonable, dilligent and who pays attention at the table should definitely be able to at least get part way there without being being a total spewmonkey

This... It's a lot harder than I thought it would be given all the various scenarios.

I started twice to try and come up with something, but gave up both times. I haven't looked at the tight chart from SSHE, but that's probably a decent enough starting point (or Tim's chart since it's easily available).

Edit: Also - Doug: I'm interested to know if you've tried this style above .50/1 and if so, what adjustments did you make, how successful did you find it, etc.? Perhaps that's going to be a later part of the series.

LOL, I am down to 21.68 but I only raise 9%. Sample at $.50-1.00 is only 9k hands and am just slightly over breakeven at the moment.

I think we should start with the SSHE chart(link to it anyone?) since many of us are familiar with it. Of course, I no longer have my copy of the book since it was falling apart and I had gotten out of poker for a few years.

One thing I experimented with(and had success with) was OR 66+ from any position at tighter tables. But I don't think we should start to expand our range from the early positions, I think we should expand from the last three positions to start with including what we three bet with. The next step would be to widen our open raise range in mp1-3. Working on iso-raising(iso 3bet vs nits?) as well.

In hijack+ I'm looking at open raising 22+,A4s+,K9s+,QTs+,JTs,ATo+,KTo+,QTo+. This gives us about 19% pfr in these spots. I think we want to add some hands in as we get to the button - 22+,A2s+,K8s+,Q9s+,J9s+,T9s,98s,87s,A5o+,K9o+,QTo+ ,JTo. Of course some of that is going to depend on how the blinds play.

I think we need to look at opening our cold call and our 3bet range. I'll think about that later, or if someone else wants to get a start on it.

i dont want to be a killjoy but it needs to be said that due to copyright issues 2+2 do not post links to a SSHE chart. so yeah, dont be posting any such links or copies of said chart. thanks.

doug congrats on 5k!!!
a question about the 22/17 number. i assume that is filtered for a certain number of players? how many?

i'm pretty mixed about it. on the one hand i think that reading & contributing to this thread will help me with my thought process and probably improve my game. i also think that some of the stuff discussed here will actually make the games more profitable when it is missapplied by people without solid post flop skills

on the other hand, i think about how hard i had to work to figure out the whole LAGTAG thing. i watched a lot of videos, spent time stalk-sweating winning LAGTAGs, paid for coaching, and probably lost some money trying out different opening ranges. it's frustrating to think that now that information will be given away. TBH i'm not even that upset that people who are posting and trying to get better are getting the info, but it makes me sick that we're spoonfeeding lurkers

Let me throw out a few random answers. I won't quote but I think they'll hit some high points.

re: getting stuff back - of late, I've been getting a lot less out of the forums. Most of the questions I have about hands aren't in areas that a one question post can cover. BBB's latest posts are really good, and the capped pot one was good food for thought. Coaching has been a help to me because it has made me think through some spots more carefully. Posting hands has provided me less benefit, recently.

re: is this only for .5/1? No, I play these stats at 5/T.

----

How about this. The whole hand chart is daunting. Let's only talk about opening ranges. Now, let's pick a spot in MP, 3 players have folded to you. What hands do you play now? I know this is a silly assumption, but let's say everyone behind you is normal.

JTs+ QTs+, KJo+, A9s+, ATo+, 66+, how does that sound?

If by normal you mean a weekday 1/2 villain who doesn't cold call light...

If we are shooting for a 17 pfr overall, we probably want to be raising right around 16% of our hands here. We are going to be opening our range up in late position but those hands are weighted more in our pfr stat since we are in those positions more often.

I'll estimate a range of 22+,A8s+,KTs+,QTs+,JTs,ATo+,KTo+. We might want to exchange 22/33/44 hands with better showdown value like K9s, QJo, QTo, A7s.

The 18/10 player in me opens the following:

99+, ATo+, A9s+, KQo+, KJs+, QJs

The more recent 20/14 in me opens:

77+, A9o+, A8s+, KJo+, K9s+, QTs+, JTs (sometimes A7s, K8s, QJo - 50%?)

Too tight, IMO, but I think you forgot Kxs hands(KTs+?) Some of this depends on your perception of what a "normal" player is.

The difficulty here is that we will often find ourselves OOP with hands at the lower end of our range. But that comes back to not trying to avoid tough spots.

Yeah, I think I did forget that, I'm always confused with the + stuff cause I never remember what it means.