You said it yourself, villain should double barrel a lot, so we should wait til turn. It's pretty simple.

In general when our value range is super narrow and the board is fairly static we should delay a lot. Flop check call was very good imo.

You just love finding things to correlate to being disciplined and patient lol. The difference in EV of playing this hand vs folding it pre is around 0.01 bets. So if it's a mistake it's costing us some pocket change.

There are simply no world class players that exhibit the qualities you are so proud of. There are lots of medium stakes grinders who do. They have quite a low ceiling for what they can make at poker. Particularly now that internet poker isn't a gold mine where a 24 tabling nit can make hundreds per hour like they could at one point.

1. Does your 0.01 bets include RIO's when you make a small pair? They would seem significant out of position against a strong range.

2. If you play this hand in this situation, you are playing a pretty wide range it seems to me. That's likely going to create some pretty bluff-heavy check-raising ranges, which an opponent can exploit with a showdown-heavy range.

3. Is it possible that the Internet players whom you reference were actually in a better situation than the current generation of "world class live players" to make accurate EV calculations? They, after all, have two huge things in their favor-- the nature of Internet multitabling (seeing many more hands an hour) leads to fewer impatience/boredom-caused decisions to play marginal hands, and they have reliable databases as to what hands are profitable in what situations and what hands aren't.

1) yes, it's my estimate of the total EV of the hand. Sure making a pair is not an easy spot. I could just as easily say it's a great implied odds spot since when we make a straight or flush vs a strong range we will get paid off. It's pointless to cherry pick situations.

2) suited no gappers allow you to hit various board textures and it's only 4 combos of each. If I play four such hands too often here I am making the same mistake as a guy who defends Q8o when we think he should draw the line at Q9o , so I find it difficult to think that overdoing it with this exact sort of hand will be a general large leak in our preflop play.

3) no I don't think that. I think they made a calculation that by playing nitty and suboptimal preflop they could play more tables without losing focus or simply not being able to click fast enough and that allowed them to achieve a high hourly rate despite a flawed (too tight) strategy. I think this in part because nearly every supernova elite was breakeven or down money pre rakeback while people like me that played way fewer tables and probably had a lower hourly had a significantly higher winrate. Which turns out to be pretty important when forced to one table live poker.

My feeling is this: at small stakes winrates are basically correlated with preflop tightness. Most everyone makes mistakes postflop and the fish make egregious preflop errors so the low hanging fruit is to play better than them preflop and win money. To move beyond those stakes requires more skills though, and every extra hand you play, every gross dumb situation you find yourself in, every heads up wide range spot you experience, they all help you figure out what poker really is. And that's why the nosebleed games have basically no nits (nh david gray), because the guys that have survived the lag wars and learned how to play tough and fearsome move up and up and up. And yeah of course there is survivorship bias in that but that's true across the board in poker. Most nit grinders can eek out a living as long as they don't hit a particularly bad stretch, as long as their games stay super juicy, as long as they get hours of full ring Lhe with no break in the action, etc. But that's about the ceiling.

Yup. I like graphs but I don't know how to post one so I'll describe what I'm thinking: the horizontal axis would be preflop tight---------loose preflop play; the vertical axis would be the winrates. Assuming good postflop play, I think the resulting curve, or upside down V, would top out somewhere around 24-28% vpip for a full game. The left and right extremes would feature low winrates, while the center would feature the highest winrates.

So it's not as if you reach a certain perfect vpip% and the winrate plummets if you go any higher. Instead it's a slow drop in winrate as you move away from the center.

A little loose or a little tight isn't that bad, but very loose or very tight can be very bad to the point that winrates go negative.

Maybe someone smart will post a visual image of what I'm thinking.

Here's my try:

......................................^
.................................... /..\
..................................../.....\
.................................. /........\
................................../..........\
.=====================================0ev
............................... /...............\
.............................../.................\
............................../....................\
............................./......................\
0% vpip----------------------|--------------------------------------100% vpip
..................................26%imo

So realistically we can play anywhere in the top section of the upside down V and have a profitable strategy.

I think this is a fine bluff. It won't expect to win every time, but given that you are donking here with a lot of flushes, and occasionally 5 hi, there's nothing wrong with this play.

(of course, this is a fold pre from the blind though close, no idea how close)

Honestly, playing a lot of live poker, and everyone's on their gadgets the entire time, which is a leak imo. Sure, you get to turn your brain off between hands and have energy the next hand, but you're missing out on too much info.

This would only be true if poker had one street of action.

What happens in multiple dimensions is that cross-sections are V-shaped (actually U-shaped) but the peak of the V doesn't occur at the same spot. So someone who plays 18/13 preflop may win just as much as someone who plays 23/17, but 18/17 and 23/13 will be inferior. Now start to add in postflop aggression factors and what you're probably looking at is that optimum play is a 1-dimensional snake winding its way through a 15-dimensional space. There are successful nits and successful TAGs and successful LAGs, and probably more some than others but multiple strategies can be done.

Think of it like an SAT score in college admissions. It's important but ultimately one of many factors. What's true is that there's kind of a range you should be looking at - don't bother applying to Harvard with a 950 combined, you're almost certainly a loser if you're VPIPing 50% FR. But within a range, success is determined by many other factors. A 1450 may get rejected over a 1420, an 21/10 may win more than an 18/13.

Boiling down poker to one statistic (even VPIP/PFR as a combined stat) is way too simplistic and many stats are dependent on others. I used to point this out when evaluating online stats - a 40/5 player who aggresses 30% on the flop is aggressing a wider range than a 13/10 player who aggresses 80%.

It's in this vein that I most strongly disagree with lawdude's stance, that there's simply a line (typically with respect to preflop folding) and if you're on one side everything is fine and if you're on the other nothing is fine. People at higher stakes don't often make huge, glaring mistakes like coldcall J2o. They make you fight for it by making smaller mistakes like coldcalling JTo and then being moderately combative by having non-lopsided continuing ranges.

I agree with all that. I wasn't trying to compare different players, but one player's potential winrates given a high or low vpip.

If I had 99 w/ 9s, i would bluff xr river.

Targeting what? Just JJ?

Well I'd need a bet folding range and overpairs seem like a decent candidate. Might as well use the hand that can't call the river, but blocks my turn spew that got there.

Bluffing with the top of your folding range performs best vs non optimal strategies and is neutral ev vs optimal strategies.

Turn spew? 99 is a set, not an overpair.

Oops. I'm posting in the wrong thread.

Disregard previous posts guys

I think my position is more sophisticated than that.

If you created a poker playing robot with the following conditions, I would completely drop my skepticism about these sorts of strategies:

1. The robot is completely disciplined, never gets bored, and has no ego. It will never make a loose call because it doesn't want to fold, or because it feels itself superior enough to bear even an actually insurmountable mathematical edge against an inferior player. And it will know when to give up on pots where an opponent has it crushed and is not folding.

2. The robot plays in a game where the expected value of post-flop superiority significantly exceeds the negative expected value of mathematically unsound pre-flop play.

I just don't believe that 1 and 2 actually hold true for the vast majority of even skilled human beings in actual game conditions in limit hold 'em.

But I've said my piece. Others on the board disagree, and I certainly don't want to derail what are very good strategy discussions.

The river is pretty uninteresting. There's some opponents you have to bet against, others you can't bet against. That covers most opponents. As for the rest, betting can't be bad as long as you're not bluffing too many hands here.

This forum always places a lot of emphasis on choosing the best hands to bluff with, and that's a good thought exercise and potentially important against some experts, but at mid stakes and below there's almost always going to be other overriding factors (reads, image) that determine when to bluff with little to no showdown value in big pots.