High hand promotions have been in Washington card rooms for about 4 years. IMHO, they have drastically destroyed the normal tight/aggressive strategy needed to beat these games. I play 4/8 LLH at Fortune Poker in Renton and the Muckleshoot Casino in Auburn.

The trend now is that nobody raises. If somebody raises, people call much more than they should - hoping to make a high hand. I have found it very hard to win using a tight aggressive strategy.

The result is that everybody is checking everything hoping to make a high hand and win the $250 that is given out every 15 minutes during the promotion.

My question to this forum is, "What is the correct strategy to beat these games?"

Your thoughts please.

This is never something to complain about. It is tantamount to saying "they don't respect my raises."

Bluff less, value bet more.

In other words, they aren't charging you as much as they should for your draws. Again, I don't understand the complaint.

The only thing complaint worthy is if they increased the rake to cover the cost of the promotion.

There is a $3 rake for promotions along with a $3 rake for the house.

10% up to a max of $3 for both rakes.

For pots greater than $30, $3 goes to the house; $3 goes to the jackpot rake; $1 dealer tip.

$7 total.

Wow, would I ever aggravate those ppl, what a thing to complain about. As for advice: You've got to work on your game. Sure, the rake makes winning at 4-8 tough but that's everywhere but a loose/passive style is the worst of them all and you should be beating them w/ a stick w/ your value hands.

sammy44 out of curiosity have you read small stakes hold'em by miller, sklansky and malmuth?

LHE posts with "rake trap"

Play the 8/16 at Fortune

This is a big rake. In my mind, $3 rake was back in the day Vegas good. $4 was pretty standard. $5 starting to be pretty big and really hard on smaller games.
It sounds like your opponents have adjusted to the HH by deciding to play terrible poker. That's good, if you know what to do. Without oppressive rake, you'd love this game more than words. It is amazing.
There isn't a magic recipe for beating LHE. This exact phrase concerns me. In this game, you should win a few huge pots -- if you win 15%-20% of the hands you play in 9 way pots, you profit. A lot. If the fact that they're playing worse makes you sad, your game could probably improve. Are you bluffing and semibluffing in spots where these guys are calling any amount for a chance at running quads to hit $5K? Are you flop betting AK unimproved into 8 people on a 778 board? Look for stuff you can do better.

The high hand also matters. If they only pay rare hands, say "we'll give the $ to anyone who hits a royal" then the variance means you can't count on getting much money any time soon, so it is a $3 loss from the pot. If they have some quads or better progressive, you might get your $3 contributions back often enough to make it more of a slightly deferred lottery. If you realize your equity in the amount of time you can reasonably play, it is annoying but closer to 0EV. It depends how much goes in bins that are super rare.


This rake is oppressive. It could be possible the game can't be beaten. If you can afford the 8/16...

This is exactly how it is at my casino.

The correct way to beat rake so high that the standard Sklansky theory can only get you to break even despite playing near perfectly should be obvious.

AA only holds up less than 3:7 against a family pot, but that should be precisely what you want despite what all the nits'll tell you.

Build bigger pots. Get more fish into your pots. If the pot exceeds your draw odds, bet. If the number of players in the hand exceeds your draw odds, raise. Unless you get resistance, bet blind into multiway with a made hand. Call all big pots with made hands down to the river. They start bluffing hard on the river. They wake up a little on the turn, but that's much less likely.

The downside to this is that the rake starts to destroy the table, but felting players over and over only to watch them buy back over and over on epic tilt is great.

If you're value calling, you may escape the heat, but a whole table on tilt will at least break and usually go from no one saying anything to each other to total drama.

I contest that the rake is "oppressive." Promotional money is returned, minus an administration fee (locally it's 25%, laws vary).

For small jackpots like HHJ, you can reach the long run pretty easily (over a few hundred hours). The big ones like BBJ are tougher to analyze because you can't reach the long run for BBJ so your actual results will never equal the EV.

So $3 rake + $3 HHJ is closer to $4 rake than $6 rake. $3 rake + $3 BBJ should probably be treated more like $6 rake than $4 rake. Both are significantly better than actual bona fide $6 rake.

I was just thinking about this recently and what one's strategy should be during high hand promotions at the 3/6 limit tables. I try to play during the high hand times because I know people will be there, and the table is more likely to be full. Else, you could get stuck at a 5-6 seat table, when you actually take into account people are constantly getting up and coming back 20 minutes later. This happens less often when there is a hh possibility for them, which means fuller tables.


When I started playing limit, I played pretty standard. Raising preflop with a solid hand, value betting flops, calling draws when the pot odds warrant it, etc. Theoretically, when you have the best hand preflop... you should see positive equity over time and the more you can get into the pot preflop, the better. However, there is one important factor that needs to be considered. When you raise preflop with the standard TAG opening range, the other players can all put you on something pretty specific. Even the bad players. They now have information that you don't have, and your raise means very little in terms of their decision, especially if they already limped. Players will play with any two cards that could win the high hand promotion, so if that 7 3 is suited, then it is being played, so you really have no clue what they hold.

Rather than give the other players free information, I have adopted a limping strategy for my preflop play and focused more on studying the postflop concepts in Small Stakes Limit Hold Em (Miller, etc). This strategy is technically incorrect, but as mentioned I don't want the other players, many who are regs, to have a good idea of what I have, and I think that the limping strategy takes away their advantage here. Now, I will 3 bet with a standard opening range at times, because players will respect two bets.

Using this strategy means that my post flop play needed to improve. I am still working on that, but there are good concepts in SSLH that help tremendously with post flop decision making. For example, I often find myself in a hand with 5-7 others. Doesn't matter if someone raised preflop or not. They all just call. If you make a value bet on the flop, lots of draws and medium and low pairs are going to call you. Sounds great for your pocket QQ, right? You are charging them, except their pot odds aren't that bad and then on the turn they are even better. All you have done is made their call on the turn less of a mistake. So the texture of the flop along with the number of players who see the flop becomes very important.

Another interesting situation that occurs is deciding what to do when you have a draw to the high hand. If it's a time when full houses are often good to win the HH promotion (i.e. not a full room), and you flop a set of kings for example, do you really want to chase everyone out for the $15 in the pot on the flop when you have 7 (then 10) outs to the hh? Yeah, you might be giving someone a free card, and that free card might beat you, but getting 7 or 10 outs to win $250-300 seems to trump someone hitting the flush or open end draws.

One more thing that I find interesting. AA seems less valuable at 3/6 limit then something like 1/2 NL. Sounds crazy, right, but hear me out. If you raise with your AA preflop, and you end up with 1 or 2 others in the pot, you are more likely to win the pot then are they, but the pot is usually going to be on the small side. However, if you find yourself in a hand with 6 callers to your AA raise, then there is a good chance that two of them have an Ax. Many 3/6 players have a limping/calling range of AK suited to A2 off suit. What that means for you is that in a large pot, your AA isn't likely to improve. You may win with the pair, but not the set. Now, compare this to holding KK or QQ. The same players who will call with any Ax will have a limping calling range of K 10+ or Q9+. So you aren't seeing those K4 hands to the flop like you do when they hold A4. That means when a bunch of players see the flop and you hold QQ, then there are more likely to be Qs out there to improve your hand. You are then slightly more likely to end up with a set of Qs, and have a greater chance of taking down a larger multi way pot.

Feel free to critique these thoughts. I would love to read what others think!

What do you mean by a "limping strategy?"

What I mean is that I only call preflop with hands I should normally raise with. For example, I have pocket KK on the button. There are 4 callers, I just call, the BB checks and 6 of us see the flop for 6 bets. The alternative is that 6 of us see the flop with 12 bets. They always call the raise once in and the BB will usually defend. I should be feeling good getting called by 5 others with KK, but I'm not sure it's worth giving them that info. If I bet on the flop, now they are each getting 13 to 1 pot odds compared to 7-1, so their calls with draws and going to be ok. Then on the turn they might be getting 9-1 odds to call. Compare that to not raising preflop and checking the flop. Then an open raise on the turn makes it 4-1 pot odds. It's a bigger mistake for someone to call with their draw in this spot.

I do this in 3/6 during hh promotion times only. Occasionally my casino offers 4/8 and then I will play standard because the table plays slightly differently.

adopting offbeat/sub-optimal strategies isn't the best way to beat loose, soft games. be careful not to let variance or results-oriented thinking affect your approach! lowering your variance does not mean increasing your winrate. if you are well-bankrolled, then push the small edges constantly and work on getting better at dealing with the swings.

remember that a key is to focus on winning money and not on winning pots, although it can be tempting to do the latter. twoplustwo has published several books that over-emphasize protection and under-emphasize value.

your loose, low-stakes opponents aren't the genius hand readers that you're making them out to be. they don't know what you have. even if they're at the normal level of "usually when that dude raises he has something okay or good" they aren't going to suddenly start outplaying you.

if you have the nittiest image ever, there are probably lots of neutral and +ev spots to raise and 3bet that you're currently passing up on, like jts after limpers, or raising a suited ace in late position after limpers, or 3betting a big hand out of the blinds multiway instead of just calling it.

high rake, the slow nature of live poker (and thus the long time needed to get to a reasonable sample size), and your brain doing what it does best (spotting patterns in random data and drawing conclusions, even when there are no patterns to be spotted and therefore the conclusions are false) are your biggest enemies in these games.

If a game plays like OP says it does w/ 6+ limpers pf then he should toss the TAG style and be adding in many more hands. I'd be limping along w/ small pairs from any position, small suited connectors and I'd entirely ignore what my image is. At low stakes the other players don't care if a raise UTG is a big pair every time and a limp is a small pair. IME, post flop play in games like that is more important than pf and OP comes off as frustrated that the run-down squad gets there more often than he cares for and forgets the huge pots he gets pushed when he's got the best hand at the end.

There's a reg in my 8-16 who makes the same complaint: 'I can't beat this game. I'd rather be up against one or two players' etc, etc. He doesn't get it. Give me a game where I can get 6:1 regularly and I'm in poker Heaven.

The proper adjustment is to raise more hands, not fewer. If you are raising only JJ+, AQ+, AJs+, then of course they're going to get a decent idea of your range when you raise.

In multiway pots there are a lot more value hands than just the premiums. Add in some 67s, lower pairs, suited Ax, etc. into your raising range, especially from late position.

Agree, the strategy in the first quote is not good. It kind of goes to the thinking of the Tight Old Man who doesn't raise AK, with a game theory explanation for why we have become tight/passive.


If the game is super loose and soft, information doesn't matter that much. You're just going to have to make big hands and win big pots with them. On the good side, once you're playing $150-$200 pots, the $6 rake matters less. The trick is to make sure that the most money goes in when you have the best of it. You get dealt KK, you have the best of it. Since the bad players will play for 1 or 2 bets, how about we play for 2?
I think you're ignoring the part where you are a money favorite when cbetting and you make money on those calls. Also, when you have KK on a T73 flop. "They never fold" means that A5, AT, QT, 55, and 32 are sharing a bunch of outs. Collectively, there are a lot of bad cards. However, your best hand and the best draw are chopping up the lion's share of the equity. You're printing money as the bets go in.



The guy with the nut low flush draw has almost zero equity. You find plenty of spots where people are drawing to the 2nd best A. That money is almost dead. Missing a profitable raise preflop and then missing a profitable flop bet to try to make someone make a small math mistake on the turn isn't profitable poker. It is mis-applying stuff from old poker books.

+1

If they know what you have when you raise, you're not raising often enough. The solution is raising more often, not never raising.

I'm going to take a stand here: IT'S 4-8!, 4-8 DAMMIT! THEY DON'T CARE IF YOU ONLY RAISE BIG HANDS PF AND LIMP THE REST!

JFC!

I've been 'accused' of only raising premium hands when I play that game and my response is? 'So what? You're going to call anyway because you can't help yourself.'

If you can get in cheap w/ speculative hands do that, don't raise them for balance, it's not necessary at a typical (and they are all the same) 4-8 game.

You're not raising more hands than JJ+ for balance, you're doing it because there are plenty of hands that are decent money favorites vs the hands that people who play 80/2 have limped. Raise all of those for profit. At the same time, you won't be the "nitty only raises aces" guy. That's a side effect. It is a fine/good one, but we're not raising QJs for balance. We're raising it because the 6 limpers in front of us have a bunch of random worse hands and we're printing $ when they call. We get about 1.5x of our fair share of equity in this limped pot. Making the pot bigger is good.

Then you must play in very different 4-8 games than I do. The ppl I play w/ are a combination of risk averse and of the belief that they don't want to 'lose their customers' w/ big hands and so they limp those as well. If someone can play pot builders well post flop then maybe raising the QJs is ok after limpers but much of the time we're up against better starting hands, and, besides, OP doesn't appear to be capable pulling it off nm handling the swings.

You can optimize your game playing poor poker to become the perfect 4/8 player or you can work on the skills that good players have. Gambling with an edge revolves around putting in more money when ahead and less (or none) when behind.

It's not quite that simple. I don't just look at the value of my hand v. other's hands. I think I've got a playing edge, definitely a self-control edge, and hand reading and people reading edges. If all you look at is your pf equity you're only seeing a small part of the picture. And the part of the picture I'm focused on is that a hand like QJs, eminently playable multi-way, is very often not the best hand pf. It can have an adequate pf equity multi-way but it's behind A-Face and large pairs and those are the hands 4-8 players limp in with regularly.

It's be better for OP to stop expecting his TAG style to work automatically and start taking advantage of the opportunity his opponents are giving him and add in more hands that play well multi-way. We can play 5-4s or 3-3 from any position if we're certain we get the right price.

A bit wordy, I see. The point is is that what we think is solid value based on other's pf play at 4-8 is not as great as what some ppl think it is. The 4-8 players don't always have bad hands. What they usually have is a bad understanding of how they should play to get max value. That gives us our opportunity.

I think it would be instructive for both Howard and Doug to list 3 hypothetical hands that the other would play differently.

Because nobody's talking about raising or folding 54s and 33 after multiple 80/2 limpers.

Consider a small pair like 3-3 in EP. If we're in a typical loose-passive 4-8 game that's getting 6 players pf for one bet regularly we can limp in w/ it UTG. I wouldn't do the same at 20-40 bec while they might not all be geniuses only the weakest doesn't know when to be aggressive. There's too much risk at 20-40 taken by limping 3-3 UTG bec we are much more likely to get raised and end up HU or 3-ways and usually OOP at that w/ our measly hand.

And that's the opportunity I mention. You can play the small pair up front at 4-8 in most games and you shouldn't at 20-40.