I have an RTS (real time strategy) background and still try to transistion to poker. In RTS we have strategys called cheese, that are strategys relied on attacking an unaware opponent, which is not aware on your strat and take him by surprise.

The objective of the cheeser is to act fast and still hold up the deception until its too late to for your villian to counter

For example a cheese strategy would building an army in the back of your opponents base, than attack from the front and the back at the same time.

however i cant find good cheeses in poker nowadays. In 2007 when i began with poker i could raise 80% of my hands and win. People didnt know how to counter. Now i am a losing player at my limtis.

I tried to play solid, but thats not the way i am made for. i cant play solid. I spazz out way too much. Pls dont try to help me in that way i just cant play solid for more than 20 hands. I am looking for an new way to cheese like i did in 2007 when i could bet/bet/bet and noone knew how to counter.

I know i cant win with pure/poor aggression anymore. The thing im hopeing for are betszises. i hope i could gain an edge on unaware opponents with varying my betszises all the time, but i dont have a good concept how to do it.

can anybody help me?

cheesing is so lame, i wouldnt even call it a strategy.
people who like to expand and put some THOUGHT in their game/unit composition execute a strategy, but 6pooling before the opponent scouts is just BS and people trying to troll others.

i dont think there is any sort of cheese in poker - u better learn the game or keep on "spazzing".
if u enjoy randomly clicking buttons and not making too big of a mistake shoving any two cards u should really look into tournaments such as superturbo sitngoes.


p.s: BANELINGS BANELINGS BANELINGS OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH

i wouldnt say cheese is just lame.

just look at the terran mega rax. it is very difficult to hold off and it is not that easy to scout^^.

it is even used in tournaments.

cheesong is more than a nooby strat. in fact i believe if you get into your opponents head cheesing is the best way to play. playing solid is the best way to play without any reads ^^.

No, you're just going to have to learn how to play a macro game.

You need to determine a balance between how much you invest in your spazz attacks, and how much it earns you via people playing back at you due to your maniac image.

You can definitely play any two cards and be profitable. But there needs to be rhyme and reason to the when and why, and there has to be a clearly defined goal behind it.

Cheesing in Starcraft has a goal, an intent, and an exit strategy. You can't just "spazz".

I'm not the expert to tell you what the formula for this is, but it needs to balance what you're investing in establishing this image, versus what you are expecting to make out of it.

The problem with this in poker is that what works on one opponent might not work (at all) on another opponent. Also, clever opponents will quickly catch up to what your are doing and exploit your unbalanced strategy.

If you look for simple, aggressive strategies that are actually profitable, you could try short-stacking, I suppose.

OP so you were born to spazz and now you're looking to introduce method to the madness?

sorry, gotta start out by learning how to play solid first

there is no easy way to make money in poker with some magical betsize nobody knows how to encounter..
even if you do come up with something like that in this day and age, it can't work for long until people figure it out (unless you're talking micros, but at micros solid play wins the money anyways)

besides, if you come up with something like that, you can only use it when the situation is right; you still have to play solid in all the standard spots so if you can't keep it together there you just gonna spew away chips in those spots anyway

this sir is not true. maybe some very very good pro can play ATC profitable against a very weak player , but most times the profits will be very very small.


other than that , op is what I would call gamblers anonimous material.

really op , either educate yourself to be patient and realize strategy games are for children , poker is for grown ups , or even better , quit poker.

if you keep un spewing you will lose $ and get all frustrated. think of yourself in a few years how you will look back and regret the decisions you are taking today.

in 2007 when you began poker you could not raise 80% hands and win , you never could win at poker , you just like to remember it that you did

IMO the equivalent of cheesing is playing super nitty mechanical on like 15 tables. I'm saying that because you never learn the intricacies of SC cheesing and you never learn poker playing 13/10.

Playing LAGgy is more like constantly using various opening gambits. It's unorthodox and sometimes far from optimal, but you put your opponents in spots they can't handle as well as you can and you edge them out this way.

As for you, OP, tighten up. I currently play 33/25 in NL and 55/37 in PLO and I think that's pretty much the upper limits of what I can play profitably in each game with my current understanding of the games. Some geniuses might play 45% hands in NL and like 65-70% hands in PLO, but that's outlandish.

I should be more specific. I didn't mean you can consistently play ATC and be profitable, but more that you can do it more than one would consider optimal as long as you balance that with tight aggressive play as well.

PS. Strategy games are not for children. Strategy games are for anyone who likes to think tactically. That said, I think the OP needs to consider that in poker, just like in Starcraft, if your opponent is more well armed than you are, retreat is often the best option.

i thought a bit about this and came to the conclusion that cheesing would mean playing ridicioulusly imbalanced ranges and hope villian doesnt notice.

For example you 3-bet a lot of crappy suited hands but just call with say AQ. If your opponent actually knew how imbalanced your range was he could exploit it. but as he doesnt know thie he might make mistakes as long as the hands dont go to showdown.

As soon as this happens you need to addapt immidiatly.

1) You'll have a hard time adapting "when they realise what you're doing" because you're not playing against just one guy.
2) You can't play profitably 80% of your hands, unless the other players are absolutely horrible postflop (or both post and preflop ).

Just curious about how many hands are you talking about in 2007, when you were beating the games?
Variance is huge in poker, you can have a losing style and be a winner over 50000 hands, or vice versa.

cannon rushing cheese is fun against a diamond level player in sc2

in omaha it was possible to play almost any hand especially in position. people would play who didnt understand the rules others wouldnt put in a dime without the absolute nuts and play straightforward everytime.

In holdem in 2007 you could 3-bet/c-bet like a maniac without getting raised ever. Perhaps not 80%, but having a vpip of 50 at NL100 could still win.

I didnt track but i defnitly played more than 50000 hands

Back to the topic: That there are 6 players at the table makes the situation more difficult but you still could make exploitable plays and adapt as long as you adapt to each player individually.

FWIW, "cheese" has a longer history than just RTS games. It was, AFAIK, originally used by strategy boardgamers to describe abusive systems that relied on exploitation of the rules to concoct formulaic strategies or tactics that required little active thought on the part of the person using them. This was considered particularly heinous when it went against what people felt was the "spirit" of the game. The term was later used in much the same sense during the collectible card game fad, and for many of the same reasons, and it is still used in RTS, FPS, TBS, MMORPG, etc.

Anyways... the reason that you likely won't find any "cheesy" strategies in poker is because so many of them have already been discovered. The game is played so ruthlessly that any "cheesy" strategies are found and quickly adapted or adopted into the larger context of the game. The closest thing to a formulaic cheesy strategy would be, as someone else mentioned, shortstacking, but that requires playing a large volume for it to be really effective.

In a sense, "cheese" in poker is just adopting the strategies and tactics that are known to be effective, and executing them consistently. It just happens that this is very difficult to do, because good players are familiar with most of these strategies. Same reason that a Scholar's mate will never work on a decent chess player, and a Dark Templar/transport drop will never work on a good Starcraft player.

Now, there will be some strategies that will feel like they're "cheesy" when you use them on a player that isn't familiar with them, or doesn't know how to adapt to them. But in order to find out what those strategies are going to be, you'll need to learn about the fundamentals of the game, and watch your opponents habits closely, at a level beyond just reading VPR/PFR.

Hi, I'm also a huge RTS gamer and know what you're saying, however I'm also an avid poker player that cannot see the correlation.

Your example of cheesing is only going to deal with a single (or maybe two) opponents, or working in small teams etc. Poker is a linear turn based game with multip[le opponents, where the actions of one opponent affect the next movement i.e. rather than RTS, it's turn based, like chess.

Going all out attack in chess may take a few pieces, but you will only end up losing them and eventually get checkmated.

Poker has such complex formulae for determining what will and will not make your opponents fold, there is no cut and dry method where one glove fits all. There are times where you may be able to adopt a maniac strategy where I have seen it work and executed it myself, a typical example being 4 handed on a final table. From here, an 80% reshove or allin rate as chip leader was highly successful only because of the situation: my opponents all had the same stacks and were waiting for soemone else to bust first to move up the money, and I could afford to double anyone up twice if I got it in bad.

If you are a good RTS player I would suggest you use the skills from that gaming style and adopt it to poker: reading the board, discovering areas of weakness in your opponents, fearless aggression at the right time, learning about dynamic changes using what you have to combat them.

Good luck.

so basically u don't know how to play poker and u want some genius method that doesn't exist which you'd just have to apply as it is to win moneyz? lol, dude, seriously..

lol a french guy is loling at me. the country that has proven to be so utterly bad in all kind of games. that has to be the rock bottom.

which stakes are we talking, OP?

umm yeah you should get infracted for comments like these

Let's keep speculation about each other's skill out of the forums entirely shall we? But specifically, it is in extremely bad taste to construct insults out of nationality etc. Please don't do that.

This. There are no easy wins in poker unless your opponent goes AFK in a HU match or something. There's no rock-paper-scissors element like in RTS's where a certain strategy needs a specific counter. There's not enough different choices in poker for cheese to be an option. There is no replacement for solid play.

I was a big RTS player before poker, I cheesed a lot and liked to surprise my opponents by doing unorthodox things. I was the highest rated non-Korean on ICCup at one point using only proxy gates. In poker I had to get used to not doing anything 'fun' or clever or different at all. I sit down and play ABC poker every time, and when I deviate from that I tend to lose. ABC poker is the equivalent of a macro game in an RTS.

Maybe there are more options and more room for nonstandard plays at higher levels of poker, can't say, seems so from watching Dwan.

i love cheese strats and am master of them. try to playing 5 hands only at each table, play crazy weird, by the time your opponents catch on you are somewhere else.


that being said, in poker, in starcraft, in life, playing solid is the way to go. just focus on strength, not tricks, not cutesy moves, just being better and stronger than anyone else, so strong that even if they know exactly what you are doing (map hack) it doesn't matter cause u can just crush them with superior macro and micro

haha yeah probably, but bottom line is i'm beating 50NL, moving up to 100NL, whereas you try to develop scammy methods to beat what, 5NL? I'd really offer you HU4rollz if i could, thing is we don't have access to .com websites. You may come to Pokerstars.fr though, if u want a match?


Dunno where the hate comes from, but basically every exploitable playstile may work well until opponents adjust, so just get to think for 3 seconds and come up with an idea. There's no such thing as a viable "cheese" in poker, unless you want to exploit 20NL regs tendencies over the 5 first hands of a HU match, else everyone would be using it, ducy?

just play heads up, open the BTN, 3bet the BB and leave, should yield profit, have fun making 5$/h with this method though.