This thread tilts me so much.

Sabr basically trying to spoon-feed sound poker fundamentals and players clinching their fists and stomping their feet and shouting "you don't understand" as their reactions.

Frankly, sabr should stop and just teach a couple players while demanding part of their action in return.

+1. Amongst the best that have been written on this forum in my opinion what SABR is delivering across this thread.

The TL;DR of this argument is always playstyle. Players who rely on playing narrow/strong ranges for large amounts of money in a 2-3-way flop so that they can either vbet 2/3p, bluff at one street with 2/3p, or give up on bad boards are going to always want to raise the maximum amount they can get away with and narrow their range accordingly. It's an effective win strategy at the vast majority of full-spread LLSNL tables with minimum skill and variance.

Players who want to maximize EV are perfectly comfortable opening smaller amounts and letting terrible players tag along with terrible ranges just donating EV to everyone at the table with their offsuit connected garbage and no postflop plan. It allows players to play the widest range possible to maximize playable opportunities, it juices EV, and it allows Hero to maximize on postflop edge the times that you manage to get to the flop in an unprotected pot. Short-term variance is much higher (as in, you go longer stretches without winning a pot and book more losing sessions when you just whiff flops all day, but it's not gonna send you on any more 5+BI downswings or anything), and it puts you in far more headache spots if you're a player who relies on fat value spots and straight-forward single-barrel bluffing opportunities.

This is why I don't bother commenting on open sizes in HJ- of full-spread LLSNL games, unless their raise size has precluded them from playing the hand profitably. If you have a playstyle that only profits from the former style of play, then great, fine, more power to you. You can beat 1/3NL- and non-reg-heavy 2/5NL games for a healthy clip, and there are even juicy 5/T games you'll have no problem against with this strategy, though you won't be maximizing at any of those stakes either.

FWIW, I don't rarely open UTG in a 2/5NL game for $15. Even at 5/T, it's not unheard of for me to open EP for 4bbs, particularly if there aren't red chips in play. It's only the like 5x CO opens and 7x isos of a single limper, etc that creates vast divergences in playstyle.

I think making huge isos of loose-passive limpers is a great place to start. If you're isoing a linear range for value, you want them to make bad -EV calls with janky hands. EV is a closed system in cash games, and the EV they're donating is largely going to go to the good player with the strongest and least capped range IP.

You're also forcing yourself to narrow your range when you open larger, for several reasons: 1) you're narrowing their range giving you fewer hands that are outperforming their range, 2) you're reducing effective stack size postflop, giving you less playability with otherwise profitable hands that leverage your position and skill advantage, and 3) you're giving yourself a more preclusive tax when players behind you wake up with a hand.

Finally, the passivity of the table also allows you to limp more speculative hands, especially as you get closer to the button, giving even less incentive to polarize your isoing range/

What isoing two limpers for 8bbs does accomplish is make you win more pots, keep you in more straightforward spots, and allow you to play the narrowest range possible, all of which are good for variance and makes your profit less reliant on skill. I'm not saying this patronizing btw; those are both real benefits, they're just not optimal and I post under the assumption that we're giving advice for optimal lines.

As someone with decent familiarity with the 1/3NL games in my area (both second-hand, and assuming the game hasn't monumentally been revolutionized the last few years, first-hand), I have quibbles with your assumptions about those games. Or at least with the reliability and how quickly you can verify those assumptions, which tends to make opportunities for simultaneously exploiting 8 different players exceptional rather than standard. But I don't think it's a huge deal, because I think this will only affect a squabbling disagreement over whether we can open 22 in EP for 5bbs or whatever, which (as SABR has alluded to) isn't a high-leverage enough discussion to really matter that much.

And IMHO, it's too low-leverage to be worth screwing around with your game in a way that gives you un-useful long-term experience, but whatever.

If we're talking in the most general way possible, I don't really think there's any condition where opening the BU for more than 3bbs is useful. And I say this as someone who has plenty of experience (recent or otherwise) with playing against blind permutations all over the map, from whale to nit, and there's just really not much exception to this statement. When the players are tight, blind stealing is worth too much to narrow your opening range/tax yourself when they wake up with a hand; when the players are aggressive, you don't want to hemorrhage chips to open/folds or open/cbet/folds; when the players are loose-passive, the spot is just too juicy for you to want to narrow your range of playable hands.

Opening size from the CO can depend on the BU, so whatever.

I already covered isoing sizes above, though obviously there are so many permutations of factors it's hard to satisfactorily generalize.

I thought the meme was "they always put you on AK." Go through the history of LLSNL threads and see how often people post hands where Hero is lost with AK. Ctrl+F the phrase "face up / face-up / faceup" in these threads. A totally clueless whale who hasn't the foggiest idea what a 20-something is opening preflop/cbetting the flop with is the exception, not the rule, even at 1/2NL. There seems to be a general understanding that something's wrong, but everyone's so averse to discussing things on a range basis that the solutions are left out of reach.

It's rare that you're at a table where your range is completely irrelevant to all 8 players. There are exceptions, obviously, which is the problem with arguing these things in the absence of an actual situation because we're both inevitably both right and wrong from some perspective or another.

Fish definitely call down lighter on 7-high flops than they do on K-high ones, and they definitely bluff more on 883r type flops than they do on other boards. I've joked for years that I'd rather play your typical live reg as PFR on a 883r board than a fish.

This is often what happens in these arguments about playing exploitatively. It's not sufficient to say, "They're bad, so play Level 1 poker." Yes, the opponents are bad, but you're not making good assumptions about how they are bad and how to properly exploit it.

Good stuff tenhigh. Just wanted to shortly chime in on the "put me on AK" or people get lost with AK mantra that you mentioned as an example in your last post.

Imo many people gets lost with these hands because they simply go too big with it preflop narrowing their own range already from there+ they often give away what they have with a line that they probably only take with whiffed AK most of the time wich is: Raise huge preflop (7x,8x or even 10-12x), then auto Cbet and then check it down if they get called. On the other hand if they have a big overpair or a set, they will continue betting on the turn/river every single time. So the results is that even fishy opponents can accidently narrow your range of hands, just by instinct and having played alot of hours at the table.

Obviously the solution is to raise to a lower amount with your whole opening range (as both you and SABR points out), wich will give you wider range preflop= harder for villain to read your exact hand and less visibility for your opponent. Also you need to have more hands in your "AK line" wich is C-bet flop and then check turn so that such line cant be correlated to huge amount of AK combos, and/or you need to double barrell more with AK as you would do with a big overpair or other valuehands.

I touched uppon this in MikeStarrs play a hand QQ thread recently also when some posters advocated an overbetshove allin on the flop: that choosing absurd betsizes that narrows your possible range in ridicilous fashion (and sometimes flat out tells your opponent what you have) is a dangerous game.

Just want to throw in some theory regarding min bets.

A min bet is best regarded as a “check plus one”.

If I am in position, and I would choose to checkback a flop for whatever reason, then if an oop player minbets, I simply call. This reveals nothing about my hand and I have full range, which includes the nuts.

If I would place a bet IP if oop checks, then I do so likewise versus a minbet, same sizing as ever.

This often leads villains to make very expensive mistakes wrt thinking I’m capped.

-Rob

if someone wanted to give me a cliff notes of this thread, i would be

People debating the merits between making massive preflop raises to capitalize on fishy opponents complete disregard for pot odds versus those who suggest sticking to smaller preflop raises so that you can get opponents to make more mistakes postflop.

Personally I've never seen any truly successful players make a habit out of 8BB+ open sizing, even though it seems logical if someone is willing to put that much in with a hand like 94s or whatever. What I do see is a lot of fish making insanely bad calls postflop, herego I think it stands to reason that you get them to make more mistakes postflop than preflop.

I did once run a little shortlived experiment I dubbed "2 street poker" whereby I'd ensure all the money went in by the turn regardless of pot size. The idea was simple; whats the #1 hand a fish calls with? A draw. So go ahead and bet 50BB on the flop even if the pot is 6BB then 50BB on the turn to ensure they get it in chasing that flush draw, because most fish dont pay off rivers unless they hit, but they cant live with themselves knowing how they might have hit that flush on the river if they called, so take advantage of their extreme "results orientedness".

In theory it worked, my opponents really would call a $200 flop bet into a $40 pot with QTss on a A55ss flop. I'd triple and quadruple up pretty quickly doing this but then lose it all back equally quickly when they'd spike the flop and I had no real way of knowing with these insane overbets I was making. I was basically always pot committed with every value hand no matter how light and was playing for stacks with hands as weak as 99, AJo etc when it made top pair. I've never gone wrong making it 4BB+1 at any stakes live.

Different games call for different optimal raise sizes.

But games are filled with different player types. If you go raising 10BB pre you're going to attract a lot of unwanted attention when a tight player enters the pot or just 3bets you off your hand. If your range is so tight that you can defend against this type of player then you wont get much action anyway because you'll be raising 1 hand per hour. Even if you do get action on the 1 hand you play there's a good chance your opponents or even you may completely miss the flop and not be playable anyway. With smaller raises you can value bet thinly vs fish and/or exploit nitty players at the same time.

Dont underestimate to importance of balance even in loose games. I've felted countless players with suited gappers who relent and say "of course he has a flush" when I turn over my hand, and I really only play about 24% of hands.

i basically use gut feeling to resolve this question. i mean here's the deal: there's a huge number of competing factors that affect whatever theoretically "optimal" open size is in any given situation. it changes constantly. in addition to the obvious factors, you have table dynamics, image considerations, hand strength telegraphing considerations, anything interesting you see to your left in your peripheral vision, even the stack sizes of limpers and other players at the table. the truth is it's basically impossible to compute the optimal raise size correctly on the spot.

that said, we can certainly get close but i'm not going to sit there calculating it for 10 seconds before acting every time i raise. i apply gut feeling aka. educated guestimation, and usually that results in me raising an amount that i think will get me 1-3 callers. post flop playability is a big factor. if we're raising amounts that get many callers consistently, what we're effectively doing is creating bomb pots. do we make money long term by having a bomb pot every time we have a raising hand? yes. are we going to have an easy time making good decisions post flop and extracting maximum value? probably not. is variance going to be super above baseline? ya. the more you make the game like bingo, the less your skill advantage as a thinking player applies.

this approach has seen me raise anywhere from 3.5bb to 17 or 18bb as my standard open with premiums, depending on the game conditions, in all situations believing my opens to be as close to optimally sized as is realistic.

Ive played plenty of 1/2 and 1/3 at Borgata, Md Live, and most notably (and with my total crusher status) at MGM National Harbor, which is a 1/3/$500 max buyin.

Talking specifically about the button: At 1/3/500, i go maybe 12 if folded to me, 15 with 1 limper, otherwise 20-25 pre from the button dependng on many factors, and I would say that limped or folded to me, i probably raised this amount 70% of the time? of course very table dependent. Even one aware opponent would cause me to play much more normal poker. The 30% of folds isnt the bottom 30% of my range its the 30% worst situations, typically when the one dude who doesnt suck postflop limped, or when im playing some normal 25-35% range because an aware opponent is in the blinds. but I would say if all the limpers/blinds were bad, I would raise pre from the button literally 100%, bet flop 95% ignoring when they give off one of their comically obvious tells.

3 bets are KK+ so ~55:1 odds I dont get C bet = -$0.50 EV of getting 3 bet. Although Id even say thats probably inaccurate, because id say maybe 1 in 3 times, they just double my bet to $40 or $50 or whatever, and I call with low cards. The funniest is KK, cuz if an A comes and they freeze up and then check, you know its KK and you just fire till they fold.

consider:

V1, he is an ABC badreg, Ive seen him raise with 88 and/or AJ (if he does one he prolly does both) I see him limp plenty and fold his limps plenty. he limps for $3, I make it $22. Whats his range? its the top of his capped range. Its literally just trouble hands, low PPs, and some rare SCs. youre looking at hands along the lines of KJ, AT A9 A8 KT QT QJ JT 66 55 44. For the most part their range hits mostly medium made hands, which he will overplay, so basically I bet the flop, he plays fit or fold, and if he hit his pair, if I have air, I bet scare cards and take it away anyway.

V2, worst player at the table, he raises a lot, limps a lot, almost never folds. Guess what, after I blow everyone else out of the hand with my huge raise, im playing a lot with this clown, and im blowing him off his no pairs otf, and then getting 2 or 3 streets from as weak as middle pair when I hit much of anything. Best part is he has nothing but junk in his insanely capped range, so my 100% range is actually likely AHEAD of his.

V3, old man who raises some. He is the absolute best limper, he calls my big raise with 0% of his limping range, and jokes “no sir, that was a $3 hand, not a penny more!” its literally a $3 donation every time he gets in the pot. This dude pays the rake for me.

V4, guy who is actually good (by 1/3 standards), raises tight, limps reasonably tight, may well have noticed you raising the button so often and like limped his aces or some crap, yeah just fold if this guy limps in, or raise small and play normalsauce poker. Only takes one guy to ruin the fun,

So basically all day I play rake free poker in position to either a total clown or a guy who plays face up poker and has a comically narrow capped range. You get to pick your opponent! Dont do it against good people! that one guy who can exploit it already folded!

Beyond that, as far as my previously mentioned obvious tells, tons of 1/3 players give away the worst “looking at chips when they hit” tells and timing tells ever. They play KJ and the flop hits their king, and they dont know what they are supposed to do, they are daydreaming about the waitress and look down and are like oh **** thats my card, look over at their chips, all of a sudden express interest in the poker game they have up to that point been entirely uninterested in, and then look over at me, and are like “oh yeah that guy raised, (and, i mean maybe because I am so over the top with my ranges and betting, the guy will even manage to think “he bets every damn time”), i better check. And of course I check back, save myself a C bet, maybe give myself a draw.

Someone is just gonna have to meet up with me and see it in action haha.

I moved up to 2/5 (and now some 5/10) 6-9 months ago or so, and I dont do this crap at those stakes except for the occasional time it comes up. Like, of course i fold my button plenty, and I probably 4x or 5x mostly, some 3x, but when the occasional opportunity arises when the blinds are passive and multiple fish limped in, Ill pop it for maybe 6x-8x with a 100% range.

Jonathan Little held an online seminar on how to exploit limpers at the $1/$2 where he proceeds to teach that 3x opens and 2.5x opens were optimal, instead of the usual 5x-6x you see in $1/$2 live cash. He was getting a lot of flack and resistance among his students for it. He'd say things like "I'm shocked at how much resistance is taking place over this." And that none of the high stakes players open more than 3x.

Then I argued with a $2/$5 live stakes crusher (15bb/hr) on Reddit over it who insists that a 3x open instead of 4x-6x open is leaking money, even though Jonathan claims its leaking money the other way. He said that the only reason higher stakes players don't open raise more than 3x is because opening 4x-6x is exploitable with all of the 3 bet balancing that takes place at higher stakes. He has me convinced.

Then I pay $65 for all the hand packs on the InstaPoker mobile app (where Jonathan Little coaches through hand packs too) and one of Matt Berkey's hand packs insists that opening 7x with no more than 1 limper and 6x utg (with AKo) on a number of occasions is the correct way to play.

So who's right? Is anyone even wrong?

I usually open raise $6-$12, mostly $8.

So as one example from Matt Berkey's test questions:

8 handed folds around to hijack($276) who limps $2. We are cutoff($185) with KJs.

Dealer($322)
SB($635)
BB($138)

Pot is $5. We are given 4 options...

1. Raise to $14
2. Raise to $7
3. Call
4. Fold

For optimal plays you receive 3 coins, for fair plays and good alternatives you receive 2 coins, small leaks 1 coin.

I picked raise to $7. I get 0 coins...so I have a choice. Either 1. I can think who does this guy think he is or 2. I have to continue to question what's actually optimal and what isn't. Which brings me to you guys.

Jonathan Little obviously hasn't played much 1/2 live. He's playing a strategy that is far too GTO because he's worried about being exploited by the top 5% of the pool, when he should instead focus on a strategy that exploits the bottom 95% of the pool, even if it costs him a bit of money against the top 5%.

That makes sense. But just to cover all bases of my thoughts on this. What if while yes we extract more value preflop by exploiting these bad players who like to call bigger opens like 6x with wider ranges, but suffer in a bigger way after the flop by using this strategy? One of the biggest downsides I can think of is losing much of the ability to control the size of the pot during the hand. Losing fold equity because the pot is now bloated. Its a higher price to float and cbet, etc.?

These kind of advice, just shows how badly tuned in well known pros is at LLSNL games and the spesific dynamics you often find in these games. 1/2,1/3 and 2/5 for the most part. Well known top pros such as Doug Polk, have been caught spewing hard in Vegas 5/10 games even- because of trouble with adjusting to the unbalanced live regs who is always weighted towards value, and nearly everyone is underbluffing compared to what Polk is used to.

Yeah, sure no higher stakes players is opening 5x or 6x-because these games have totally different playerpool than LLSNL games, with a whole other ballpark of table dynamics. For example you rarely gets the whole table calling a 3x open in high stakes games, as you will do if you open to $5 or $6 in a 1/2 game. Nobody is arguing on that statement about high stakes players opening smaller, its totally understandable considering the dynamic of alot more 3 betting pre for example.Teaching to open 2,5x in live 1/2 games is so bad i dont even know where to start really.

And this is why you should never buy a "coaching package" from anyone, even if they are "famous." If Mr. Berkey had posted this hand in LLSNL, he would have been asked, "any reads?" Just a dumb question to ask without context. I know why he did it (context would have required extra work), but it doesn't excuse putting out a shoddy product.

A GTO strategy against opponents who are playing good games also would push towards something around a 3X open. Actual live low stakes play generally isn't close.

Because opponents are commonly loose/passive bad opening ranges are weighted towards value and favor bigger sizes. 1/2 games vary so widely and are so far off GTO that the idea there is *A* optimal size is bogus itself. I've been at games where I could open to $20 and still get called by people with $80 stacks and games where I could raise limpers to $5 and still get folds.

I think a lot of this comes from online play. Online there are better players at lower stakes playing multiple tables in a very mechanical style preflop. They are using HUDS that track sizing and ranges and can compute the right number of raises to exploit you. This pushes things much closer to GTO preflop then you see in actual live play.

This is exactly why Ive said a number of times I dont read poker books. They are written by people who are out of touch with reality of low-mid stakes games being played right now.

Id much rather have a long talk and pick the brain of a guy crushing the games that I play in and who has a different style than I do so I can figure out what hes doing that I can add to my game.

For sure, totally agree.

I'll go with "none of the above".

Of the choices he gave, #1 is best but I raise to $15 so the dealer doesnt have to make change for anyone who calls. More hands per hour= more profit.

Reads are important in poker, but this hand doesnt need a preflop read. Im raising to $15 no matter what.

the size of the rake compared to the blinds has an effect on the optimal pf sizing. if you are paying 2bb for every hand it makes sense to go with a higher sizing of 5x

the essence of gto is that it should not matter what your opponents are doing because they will leave themselves vulnerable to exploitation when they deviate, and low stakes players will deviate more than high stakes, so in reality, sticking to a solid sizing should actually work better at low stakes

if you are raising, say a more correct 4-5x at 1/2 than all the other players it should be a lot easier for you to win

interesting that 6 years later people are still talking about sizing as if it's something they can choose on their own based on their style as if it doesn't have a root mathematical basis...we didn't choose a value for the number pi did we?

The thing about GTO play is that it isn't designed to maximize our profits, it's about minimizing the way hero can be exploited. If everybody is playing something something close to GTO then GTO will be the most profitable way to play because the GTO player makes no mistakes but will take advantage of some mistakes made by opponents.

If opponents are not playing anything close to GTO then there are other strategies that can exploit them far better. To give a concrete example take tic-tac-toe. There is a pretty simple GTO strategy that insures neither player ever wins. However, if you know your opponent is actually a total fish that likes top right and will always select the top right square that hasn't been selected yet you can devise a strategy that will always win. If you select the top left square and work down you always win no matter if you go first or second because your opponent will waste a turn.

Poker is vastly more complicated and this perennial argument really is about just how far it's best to wander off GTO to maximize profits. Because opponents are using various different strategies there isn't a single perfect answer. But at low stakes it's no place close to GTO.

If you ask 100 random poker players what GTO is, at least 80 will say a car.