I agree with this to some extent. In my games villains don't like folding at all, ever. They like to limp into a lot of pots and see flops whenever they can. I counter this by opening a tonne of pots. Villains eventually start calling my raises with something only a little tighter than their limping ranges. Whilst 4-way pots can be a little tricky at times I get max value whenever I flop top pair or better and generally just check fold when I whiff the flop. Because i'm so active preflop and am happy to barrel top pairs and draws my ranges postflop are generally perceived as being a lot wider than they actually are.(villains at these stakes often think along the lines of "he raised with a Q and an 8 before that f%^&in idiot could have anything"

OP includes AK and AQ in his EP open raising range however (I doubt many people on here agree with me) but in LLNL hands like AJ, AT and even A9 can hold similar value on certain tables. Obviously AK and AQ make top pair more often than AT and occasionally someone will flat pre with AQ when we've opened AJ and we'll barrell into them twice or three times on a lot of Ace high boards but when you have a lot of villains calling pre with any ace and never folding top pair ever your going to get a lot of easy value.

Optimal play is going to be different for everyone as we're all better at exploiting different fish tendancies. (I'm not comfortable limping some of the hands that OP does as I dont think that im good enough at limped 6way pots to play them profitably, i'm not overly comfortable limping a lot of the time full stop). And a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable opening as many pots as I do, but just thought I'd throw out a different opinion on things

ohh and respect to OP. A winrate of 10bb an hour is boss

Hey! Thanks for putting the time and effort into a great post. I'll have to go through it a few more times to take it all in.

Read it all. Excellent info and I have to back you up against players that say you play too passive/tight on the turn.

In 1/2nl and 1/3nl, that check on the turn often makes you money on the river since outs are usually smaller with only 1 card to go and many people put you on a missed draw if you go bet, check, bet and call you down with middle pair or worse.

My strategy at low limit live involves disguising my hand as much as possible so I often check the turn as well since we are likely going stack for stack after a pot sized flop bet most times unless super deep.

Do you play Vegas?

GG. you somehow manage to channel Eliot Smith without making one want to slit wrists. Congrats!

Ya, I think this definitely falls under the "more than one way to skin a cat" category. You obviously sound a lot more aggro than I do, which will no doubt affect your table image, and thus will affect how you should play later streets (where you should be barrelling your mediocre hands for 3 streets instead of pot controlling / bluff catching like I would). Plus it sounds like you've identified parts of your game you find more tricky than others (such as limped pots vs 4way raised pots, whereas my comfort level is typically opposite of what yours is) and have tuned your game appropriately. My guess (?) is that you experience a lot higher variance than I do using this method, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

GgoodluckatthetablesG

I've never played a NL game in Vegas. I'd really like to try one out, say the Aria 1/3 NL, just to see how it compares overall to my game. I'm going to Vegas for business early next year but I'll have my wife with me, so I don't think I'll have any time for poker inbetween work/wife.

Lol! I definitely went thru a big Elliott Smith stage, and would say my all time favourite song ever is his cover of Big Star's "Thirteen". I was also just getting into home recording at the same time and learning by the seat of my pants, and I really liked how he double+ tracked his vocals, so I started doing the same thing, which really helps cuz I can't sing worth **** but it somehow improved them slightly (I cried the very first time I heard my vocals played back, it's so bad, same with my extremely limited musicianship, but there's nothing I can do about it, it is what it is). Takes forever to record the vocal parts now due to the constant cut/paste/syncing, but I enjoy the process.

I enjoy a lot of sad sack music, but usually with a lot more hint of optimism. Too bad Smith isn't around to make any more. Just got the latest Hayden album which I'm really digging. I think Teenage Fanclub is also working on a new album which I'm patiently waiting for.

GR.I.P.ElliottSmithG

This is the only thing I learned from this thread.

I listened to the SoundHound stuff while reading your entire nit-rant, and I had the same thought. A lot of Eliot Smith came through for me, with hints of Low here and there. You ever listen to Low, GG? Anyway, I was very impressed by the music. Don't sell yourself short!

What I really learned:

In the strategy threads I've posted in, I tend to find myself agreeing with you GG, even when you're the minority opinion in the group. It speaks to my passiveness at the table, which I usually consider to be a bad thing. Reading this thread made me realize that it might not be wrong to play within my comfort zone more often.

Aggression is a key component of poker, but when one applies too much pressure in the wrong places, that's an even bigger mistake than missed opportunities due to passivity.

I think each of us has a certain "home base" style that we all lean toward or default to in our average games. Adjustments are always necessary based on game dynamics, of course. Realizing what one's default zone or MO is, then tweaking it and learning when to avoid it can be a big realization.

Thanks for you contribution to the forums and checking in with us here at your milestone. Great work.

I've got a couple of songs of theirs downloaded but never really gotten around to really listening to their albums, although I probably should. I love their tune "Over The Ocean", beautiful stuff. Back in pre-married days when I was looking for something to do on a weekend I'd go into A&B Sound and pick out a CD or two I had never listened to and listen to it at the listening counter.

I've recorded upwards of 80 songs over the last decade or so, but the few I've posted are what I would consider my best and for some reason they are all the more scaled down / simpler ones; the "quality" (lol) drops off severely after that. Might just be a stage of life thing too as into more quieter / simpler / folkier stuff now.

Ya, I've always thought that aggression is often misapplied in these types of games (although there are obvious times where aggression is the best play), and I'm guessing that's even harder for on-liners (who play in totally different types of games?) to come around to accept. But each to his own. And there's definitely something to be said about playing within your comfort zone, especially if it's working for you.

enjoyed the read op, thanks for taking the time. really good solid stuff in here for the lower limits...reminds me a lot of some of caro's concepts...nice to see a decent winrate can exist with relatively low variance. and perhaps best off all, tilt factor/stress will be much lower than most other strategies

do you think you'll apply the same strategy to 2/5 if you do decide to move up?

Would really be opponent/table dependent. For the most part, from what I've seen when the 2/5 game rarely goes here, is that it seems to mostly be made up of better 1/3 regs fishing at a table built around a couple of wild loose gambooley spewy whales, so kinda a weird game mix (although that is based on very limited observation and perhaps not very accurate). Until I ever play it in, I really won't have any idea how well my method might do at that table.

Gneverpostsin2/5threadsG

Just a thought - Have you tried experimenting with increasing your raise sizes incrementally to see what it would do to your hourly? You strike me as a heavy value fiend and I would think you could get an extra $2-3/hr if you added as little as $5 to your bet sizes.

GG, does anyone in the room have a clue about your results - meaning do (they know/would guess) that you crush and you've pulled $30k out of there?

For the most part, I think my goal of preflop raising is to narrow the field and not necessarily to squeeze out an extra dollar or two of value. I think the value of narrowing the field will prove to be the profitable part of things, so I'm not as concerned as the particular raise size so long as it accomplishes my goal. And in some cases it ends up being moot anyways; I mean, if we're creating a small SPR pot where we're almost committing our opponent anyways, it didn't really matter that we raised $16 vs $18 preflop cuz it had the same end result (i.e. all the chips are eventually going in).

But yeah, I guess it does make sense to try and push the value as far as we can preflop, which will certainly help the bottom line in our raise / cbet it / take it down / buy a hotdog short hands. Last session I was sitting at the loosest 1/3 NL table I've ever sat at, and I honestly hadn't the slightest clue what a good preflop raise size was. On one hand, I opened to $45 after a couple of limpers in a non-straddled pot; yes, you read that right, I raised to 15bbs (although admittedly there were quite a few deeper stacks at the table). It took the pot down, so next time I raised to $40 after a couple of limpers; I got A3s (who was only playing with $190) to call me out of the blinds. Lol.

Having said all that, I've always been a fairly big believer that thanks to playing such a small sample size and the variance in this game, we won't be able to get a true understanding of the positive/negative effect a tweak has on our winrate over any shortish time span. So even if I did play around with various raise sizes, I'm sure it would take me another 3 years / 1000 hours before I truly began to understand what type of affect it had.

I think adding an extra dollar or two to your PF sizing where you can and an extra red bird to your flop bets would have great effect on your WR. Most hands are going to showdown anyway and I assume you're winning more pots uncontested OTT than you're losing.

Just a thought.

I think good decent smart non-clueless regs can tell who the other good decent smart non-clueless winning regs are, but of course no one probably has a clue as to what the actual individual winrates are. And even bad regs have an idea of who the good players are. Over the last year, I've had many comments reflecting the fact that most of the regs (both good and bad) clearly see me as a winning player ("every time I see you, you have a stack of greens in front of you", etc.). But they probably have no idea as to what extent.

I've thought about this a lot lately. I mean, I'm guessing (?) there's other regs there who are crushing, but then again I'm thinking there can't be all that many or else wouldn't the game die? It's not an endless pool of players, and I think my overall area is a bit too saturated with poker rooms to support too many fish if they are going busto at a decent rate. And every once and while a face will pop into my head of a terrible past regular who all of a sudden I realize I haven't seen in a months; did he finally go busto enough to give it up? There are so many faces that come to mind.

I think I'm actually going to resort to lying even more at the tables, such as commenting like "Ya, but all the chips in front of me are mine, I'm actually stuck $200 for the day, it's been a wild ride" or "Ya, but last week I lost $900" or whatever. Just to maybe try to get rid of the stink of winning player I obviously have all over me.

I shipped another biggish win my last time out ($810), which puts me just below the 30K mark in this game. To be honest, that number kinda boggles my mind; I can't believe there was that much money to take out of this game, I wonder how many others are doing that too, and how the game can survive if we continue to do so. But I've always been a "the sky is falling" kinda guy.

Gstinkofwinning,ohwait,that'sjustmyarmpitsG

I've not read all of this yet, but I intend to. I have almost completed 1000 hours(990) but I'm not winning as big. I'm playing a £1/£1GBP NLH game, basically a $1/$2 USD game if your not familiar with USD/GBP conversion rates. I'm beating it for 6BB/Hr. Bit harder to work out BB/100 but somewhere around 18BB/100 or slightly below I should imagine. Real shock to the system after being a 2/4 online 6m pro.

Looking forward to the read when I have time. GL

PartyScout

I'm guessing thats at the Vic? Played there when I was in England. That game was a lot tougher than my regular $2/$4 in Australia

Well done, imo. As you can see from my stats, my arbitrary first and second 200 hour stints were right around this bb/hr too, and who knows, in the long run there's a decent chance that's more accurately where my winrate probably is (?). I also have a feeling my 1/3 NL game sometimes might play a little bigger than most games since it is filled with so many ex 2/5 players (there's a straddle on a decent percentage of the time, there are sometimes decent stacks at the table, etc.), although honestly I don't have any game comparison to back that statement up with (other than seeing a lot of posts on this forum with similar games where people are like raising to lol $8 preflop and I'm wondering what universe they are playing in).

Awesome! Thanks for taking the time to write this; very inspirational.

GG Thanks for taking the time for this. It is fitting, given the thorough manner in which you normally reply that a milestone thread would read like the magna carta

Def can see the HOC influence. I am interested in your willingness to raise rather large. I genearally am raising between 12 and 15 in my 1/2 game. The thing that stood out to me is table selection. I probably would make my life easier if I did more. And your discipline is huge... LOL at the extent of your tilt being to limp call and chk fold the flop.

Also your table manner is great. As for life outside of poker I couldn't agree more. I actually was laid off a few months ago and decided to take a break and do poker mostly full time for a few months while contemplating a career change.... I have to say it's truly a grind. The casino's the regs, the miserable people and degens... I find it depressing after immersing myself in it. Looking forward to returning to a more recreational approach in terms of time spent in the casino.

Anyway thanks for your input in the forum and GL on your path to 2K

Lol! The sole reason for my in depth response for each street is that it's impossible to have a discussion / point out flaws in thinking / etc. with responses like "Call turn". We have to explain why we are in the "Call turn" camp so that others can come along, dissect our line of thought, and tell us why we are out to lunch.

My main goal in raising preflop is to thin the field to HU (or 3way at worst). At some of my tables, $15 has a good chance at getting this done. At others, anything less than $30 is going to fail. So whatever works.

Table selection for me is huge, if there's an option. Obviously I'm not switching every other orbit (cuz that will actually add up fairly decently in posting cost). But, yeah, if we're sitting at a tough table and there's a far easier table beside us, and it looks like the tough vs easy players are going to be around for a while, not getting a table change is clearly extremely stupid.

I think allowing myself a tilty preflop play (like a limp of a poorish hand up front, or calling a cheapish raise with a poor hand not exactly knowing how multiway the pot is going to be, etc.) is kinda like sneaking a single cookie or two when on a diet. It's definitely a mistake, but a very small one (at least if I play fairly well postflop), and hopefully it helps get the tiltyness out of our system for a cheap price before we make a huge error and down a whole box of ding dongs.

I bumped my "1000 hours of 2/4 limit" thread in the Small Stakes Forum (which I posted in 2007) and was shocked to find Jesse8888 as a poster in that thread. At the time, I think he was just some small stakes rec guy like me. Then he took a different path, quitting his lucrative but soul crushing day job to become a full time grinder. I still read his blog religiously (a mandatory read for anyone even considering going pro), and it's very interesting how lives can go. I took the solid-but-soul-crushing-job route (I never had any serious interest in doing any other route, I'm a fairly conservative guy) while keeping poker as merely a hobby. He did the other route, and I believe he's done quite well financially, although you wonder how he is doing mentally after reading the occasional blog post (sometimes he's up, sometimes he's down). I've always thought about what I would do if I lost this job tomorrow, and frankly, I might be tempted to take the exact same route as you (i.e. poker while figuring things out), but I really really hope it never comes to that. Good luck on finding normal employment and returning to poker for a fun hobby.

GdingdongG

good read

where do i find this game?

Like I would let anyone else know!

Gum...Saskatchewan...ya,that'sit!Saskatchewan...G

..wouldn't we all like to know...