This may go against a lot of beliefs/advice on the uNL forum, but I believe the primary focus in No-Limit should be on winning your villain’s stack. Now a good small ball strategy is essential to be an overall winner, but the primary focus should be “How am I getting his/her stack over here.”

When we are progressing through the microstakes and reading all the great discussions, strategies, advice, etc. on 2p2, its very easy for the new player, and even the experience player to get lost.

You should be stealing from the CO with KTo.
That is a great place to squeeze.
You really need to cbet there most of the time.
Be aggressive in position.
Isolate the limpers.
Resteal from the blinds.
Etc.

All of this stuff is great and true, but its easy for the micro player to misapply this, go into auto pilot, get into marginal situations, and maybe start spewing. That is why I advocate that your overall focus should be on winning a villains stack. It will provide you focus and force you to plan your hands.

Lessons from the business world.
In b-schools, they state that a mission statement provides overall focus for the company. While its not a plan for every day operations, it does provide the overall organization with direction and helps define their everyday actions.

Starbucks mission statement is simple: “Dominate wherever coffee is sold.”

Now Starbucks mission statement is very simple, but it clearly states what they are focusing on. They are there to dominate the coffee business. So you won’t see Starbucks under the current CEO getting into finance or furniture making. A few analysts were surprise when Starbucks started to sell pre-package coffee in super markets because they felt it was a business change and would hurt their store sales, but it was right inline with their mission statement and they felt they had the tools and infrastructure to do it.

Of course this doesn’t mean that Starbucks turns down opportunities when they present themselves (the equivalent of small ball strategy in NL). They went into the music producing and distribution business because it was a low cost/high reward proposition that complement their overall mission statement. Once they started to sell CD’s in their stores, they became the number one (in terms of number of stores) in music retail. They were even able to get Paul McCartney to sign exclusive rights to sell his new CD under the Starbucks brand, because they were able to say “Paul, if we sell 1 (ONE) CD in each of stores in the first weekend alone, you will be the in the top 10 sells for the decade.”

What does selling CD’s and Coffee have to do with NL poker at the micro’s?

By itself nothing, but the power of a single overall focus can do wonders for a player WR and confidence. At a minimum you will have an overall plan for each hand you play. Best case you is that you execute your plan and either win lots of money or feel okay when you do stack off against the top of a villain’s range.

Stack-off Ranges:

When I am playing well (not always the case), I have a good idea what each villains stack off range is and have a mental sketch in my mind on how the money is going to get in the middle, before the cards are delt. If I know a fish will stack off with TPWK, then I know that not only is the top of my range very playable against them, but hands like sc’s have great IO against them.

Other players will be nits and will only stack-off with sets+. Against these guys I am not looking at stacking off TPGK.

For each player sitting at a table you should either have a good notes (taken from after session reviews or during live play), or have made good generalization of what there stack off ranges based on action and HUD reads. As soon as the cards are delt, and you get in a pot against these guys you should say something like “This guy stacks off chasing draws, I have an OP, I want to get it in, I can get the money in by the river by making 3 bets of 2/3 pot......”

Opportunities: Value-betting and stealing pots.

A lot of us have had a situation like this occur. We read 2p2, watch a video on Stox, or pick up a poker book and think:

“I don’t steal enough from the LP, I need to work on that in my next session”

So we go about abusing the BTN and CO for 9 orbits, getting the blinds at will to fold and winning some nice size pots with some cbets on the flop and then this happens.

We are sitting in the BTN with KT. The blinds have been tight and have only called us once, and then later folded our cbet. Good hand to raise with. You make 4bb as 2p2 advocates, SB folds, BB calls.

Flop comes K T 7. Great flop for us, we think we need to get some solid value out of this hand.

BB checks, pot is 9bb, we fire 6bb BB calls bringing the pot to 21bb. Turn is a 5d. putting KT75 on the board. Not a bad card for us, but not a great one as it now puts a backdoor straight and flush draw on the board. We need to take this down before the BB hits his draw.

BB bets 15bb…He must be protecting his AK/KQ/KJ hand or he could be semibluffing his draw, time to get the money in.. you raise to 45bb, he calls making the 111BB, and the effective stack size is 45bb left.

River is a 2h, complete brick, BB fires for 30bb…he must be vbetting his TPTK hand..you push the rest of your chip in the middle, he calls and flips over 77 for the set and rakes the pot. Stupid cooler.

What happen? Well we didn’t have an overall plan for the hand, instead we were focusing on winning small pots and then found ourselves lost with a pretty good hand in a big pot. Sure this could be a cooler, BB could easily have Kx in his hand and your table image was pretty loose running 27/18 with ATS of 65%. A lot of uNL players would have played AK, KQ against you. Poker sucks sometimes. You look at his stats, see he is a marginal loser over 10K hands but you don’t remember anything about him and have no notes, he must have gotten lucky and was able to turn a pretty good session into a losing one.

What you should have had was his Stack-off range. In those 10K hands you may have notice he had only a few times gotten 100bb into the middle with less than a set and those were AA/KK preflop pushes and AA/KK on 7xx rainbow boards, looking back at his line c/c, lead on a king high board that sure looks like a set, and you represented AK (which everyone puts in your range) and he wasn’t afraid. So by raising you isolated the very top of his range. If someone only stacks off with sets or better, we shouldn’t be stacking off against them lighter either. Now if the stack off range was “SOL with 2nd pair and playing draws hard” you can say it was cooler and feel confident you made the correct play.

The above player great player to abuse and steal relentless against, but we shouldn’t be playing big pots against them, or trying to get a lot of value out of our TPGK hands or even two pair hands. Basically plan to win their stack should be either to flop a set over set, or play SC’s and hit play for a straight or flush. But they provide a huge opportunity to win all those small to medium pots as they keep waiting for their set. So it may take 600 hands to cooler them, you can easily profit against them for 21ptbb/100 while you wait. If you don’t pay him off when he has a hand he will contribute to your bankroll very nicely.

Having a plan to win each villain’s stack allow you to recognize opportunities to steal pots from them, learn to maximize value from your good hands, go for thin value and learn places were pot control should be use. It will also make you less exploitable. Instead you will be focusing on an exploitative strategy and your stack off range will be hard to determine.

So focus on winning the big pots have a plan to keep you out of bad , and learn to exploit your villan’ stack-off ranges for both small pots and large. NL Poker is about winning money and not pots.

Best of luck and stay off of my blinds.

first


I used to have this outlook ("we're playing for stacks") when I first moved over from LHE, and I still do when I play live, but its disappeared from my thought process as of late.

The KT example is gold. Still a cooler imo, but read between the lines and there's a clear path to profit in there.

Great post. If the only take away for micro players would be to know what your villain will stack off with, it would save many BIs.

IMO, part of the planning starts with thinking about what kind of flop do you want to see with your hand where you want to stack off and which ones you don't. There's a lot of threads where someone raises, makes an auto-PSB cbet on the flop and is in trouble because 20% of their stack is in the pot and they are at the turn not knowing what to do.

3nd. ty Sammy

Nice post. I've thought about this sort of thing before, I think a discussion about SoR's is incomplete without talking about context. Let's say a player has a note on us that we stack off with TPGK. Unfortunately, he was too busy during the live hand (or didn't dig deeply enough into his database during a review of our hands) to include context: we were doing this versus a megafish.

We view this player as solid, with a nitty stackoff range of bottom set+ on good boards versus regs. He views us as sort of spewy since we'll stack off with TPGK. He gets TPTK versus our set and happily stacks off on the flop, and chalks up his play to a cooler since he has notes on us that we'll stack off with worse. Or, same dynamic but we have two pair and face heavy resistance from him and end up folding the best hand. In both cases what's missing is context.

I think it isn't enough to just know what someone stacks off with, but what they stack off with against players with similar stack-off requirements to our own.

Nice post.

Thanks Sam

Good stuff, thanks

Was thinking to post almost the same exact thing.


Nice post, thanks Sammy.

I disagree with a lot of it but I think this was a great post

tl;dr

just kidding, of course I'm going to read the **** out of this later.

edit: Great PB, Sammy. I like the implied line of priority: 1 Can I stack off profitably vs his stack off range? No? 2 Can I still get value from worse hands and not stack off? Yes? 3 Small pot poker.

Been evaluating my game the past few days and I am definitely spewing in small ball pots, especially OOP (mostly from the blinds). Cheers for the reminder thats it's stacks we want, great post Sammy ty

Will this advice also applicable to 5 to 7 players? How would you guys think?

Excellent post Sammy.

I think this is very important as well. Pure SoRs are going to always apply to the majority of players who are at one end of the spectrum or the other: nits and loose-passive fish and other types that just do not adjust at all. The closer to the middle of the spectrum we get - the TAG/sLAG ranges - the more varied the SoR will be based on who is in the hand.

I think it's very important when doing reviews to take note of who villain's opponent was in the hand as well and not just the perceived SoR.

The KT example is a tad conservative, but not far off. I purposely didn't give any stats, but if we knew his fold to steal%, 3bet against a steal, the holy trinity we can start to put together a better overall range for him. AK/KQ/KJ may not fit the preflop action at all, or it could make up most of his range.

What is important to note is what did hero represent. He pretty much repped AK, and a guy with a rarely narrow SoR did not slow down one bit. Given the board texture I doubt he has another two pair hand.

As far as the hidden line on how do we maximize value from that hand, I have a few ideas on what I would do and there are few different lines we can take. But I don't think betting 3 streets close to PSB is the way to go against this villain.