I just ran PokerStove on big pocket pairs vs 7 players that are playing 85% of hands. AA has 37.3% equity, KK 30.6%, QQ 25.4%, JJ 21.4%, TT 18.7%, 99 17.2%, 88 15.6%, 77 14.4%, 66 13.245%, 55 12.4%, 44 13.0%.

And the suite connectors? JTs is 17.5%, T9s is 15.9%

Why is everyone down on big PP in these games? Yes they will not win as often as in a tighter game, but they are going to win more often than suited connectors.

The only advantage small PP and suited connectors have is it is easier to lay them down on the flop because it is obvious they missed, whereas AA or KK are probably going to showdown, which can cost you a lot.

Thanks for the math to back up my earilier point. At the end of the day I think this illustrates that even better players get frustrated by the variance of being expeccted to win only once out of evey ~3.5 times (and that's expectation, not running bad) they get dealt KK even if they're getting 7:1 on their money.

the argument is not that big PP are bad but that just exclusively playing these and no other hands is not by itself a profitable strategy.

I don't think that I could have written this better. Seriously, if I think back on the crazy 8-16 sessions I have played at CP, I remember huge pots that I dragged with unimproved AA. Sure, your variance is going to be higher and you will get snapped off more with 5-6 opponents than with 2, but AA and KK are still going to be your top moneymakers in these games.

That is pretty obvious and true of most any game there is.

Yuck. Basic assessment - you made some marginal to poor adjustments and got lucky.

Big pocket pairs are premium and win more than their fair share even against huge fields. The increase in suckouts might make this seem not to be so but the math doesn't lie.

Small pocket suited connectors are NOT worth playing up front if it is likely to get capped. You cannot overcome your positional disadvantage and high initial investment to consistently turn a profit, although it's easy to become results-skewed by winning with one or two of these.

p4594spa seemed to be saying the big PP were not much better than small PP in this game, and that suited connectors went up in value. I was just pointing out that big PP should be a lot better than suited connectors. I'm not arguing that suited connectors are not playable or that you should not play them, but I would still rather have AA than JTs.

The bolded section is patently untrue. You could play only big PP hands (I assume AKs goes in here), and by itself, it would be a profitable strategy. The 1/3 time that you win with your AA or KK (maybe adding QQ, JJ) more than pays the blinds you paid waiting. A 7 way capped pot to the river is a mountain of chips.

There may be more profitable strategies than nitting it up, but becoming a rock isn't losing. It seems losing because the variance is big, and if you pay blinds for two hours, play three big losing hands, and look at your stack, you'll be way down. The night that you get AA in back to back orbits and have it hold up will pay for a number of the other ones.

If you only played AA-QQ, you'd get to play one hand in 57. If those hands win 1/3 of the time (losing capped all the way), you play 3 hands in 171 (having paid ~13BB in the blinds). In the three hands you play, you invest 36 BB to see the river. The 7-way pot you scoop is 84BB. You net 35BB of profit. This is over about 5+ hours of play, as these games seem slow. Your EV in this simple model is +7BB/hour; not unprofitable at all. However, you win one hand in 5 hours, so it seems like torture; a slightly bad night (0/3) and you're down 49BB.

Doug

Let me clarify. I did not say that I didn't play Big PP aggressively and try to make a lot of money on them. I am only saying that because so many people are in they got cracked a LOT so that it felt like playing small PP. The variance on them was absolutely huge. This is incomparsion to a tight table where only a few people see the flop. On a tight table, the big PP rarely get cracked. So it is a trade off. Tight tables, the pairs when way more often, but win a lot less. Extremely loose tables, they win a lot less often, but win a lot more when they do win.

As to the suited connectors, my real point was that on a tight table the mid suited connectors really on play well when there are at least 5 plays in and so you typically call with them in late positions. In this really loose table, I could limp in early position, confident that I would get a big multi-way table.