I'm sure this is a topic that's been discussed but I also know poker evolves quickly so I really would like fresh input on this.

There seem to be two competing ideas when it comes to open ranges in live (low stakes) cash games;
one) Player will call way too many hands and play them poorly post flop = I should play more hands not fewer hands
however
two) Players will call too large of open raises and will not adjust properly to my opening a very tight range = should tighten up and use large open sizing

So, compared to playing something like nl50 FR online..
if we assume we are playing against mostly players who call too often and play poorly post flop mostly poorly in the "take hands too far and fail to raise often enough for value or as a bluff" camp. Would we be better off keeping our ranges about the same as we do online?
Increasing our VPIP because we can expect opponents to call with truly abysmal hands and play bad with them post flop
or
Decrease our VPIP and increase our bet sizing because, well, because we can get away with it?

Thoughts on this?

I play a lot of $2-$5 live and have a buddy who plays full time.
We have both noticed that the two biggest winners in our games have completely different strategies;
one player is the nit of all nits and even gets laughed at for it and takes a lot of flack for playing one hand every hour but he still gets action (somehow) when he opens for $30 UTG and wins big pots with his AA and AK when flop comes K32r and villains have KJs and such.

The other player was a fairly well known online player a few years back and he plays a very aggressive and pretty loose range of hands and focuses more on GTO than on just destroying fish with uber tight ranges and huge bet sizes.

Is one approach likely better than the other, assuming many fish will not adjust at all, or is it a matter of preference and a situation where both approaches might be about equal in EV?

My friend and I believe that the Looser more aggro player playing more of a balanced game is making slightly more money but suffering much bigger swings and the nit is making slightly less but with very little variance. Does that sound right?

What would your advice be in general?

Play fewer hands/tighter ranges and use big bet sizes?
Play more hands for value to get involved more and because we know fish will call even weaker hands than we would be opening at GTO? And maybe use a smaller bet sizes?

FWIW, this is the single biggest thought/question I have in regards to live poker. I lose sleep over it. It is really the only thing I care about anymore.

If you can play a tight range, open 5x, and get called in 1-2 spots, how does that compare to a loos(er) range, 3x, and called in 4-6 spots.

When I see folks discussing balanced 3b ranges, lol gto strategy, light 4betting, etc. I just think "what a waste of thought"

Player type 1 (lol tag, like, God this guy is tight) opens 5x as standard.

Player type 2 (opens 3x entire range, 3bets smaller, seems focused on high SPR above all else. Gets to river alot, bluffs on river more than any other street)

Similar to you, probably out of the top 10 winning players I've played with, 8 take type 1. But the 2 that take type 2, they are the top 2 best players I have ever seen, and a very wide margin separates them from 3rd place.

I've thought about it and I would pay $10- $20K to get coaching from the second player type. Possibly more. It's really just that important to me.

Bumping this one time for good measure. I personally believe this is the most important conversation that could be had on this forum.

Currently the first page of this forum is dominated by AA and sets. These are not where our focus should be.

The question remains. How do very loose very good lags do what they do in live poker?

Starting with, preflop sizing. Why do they 3x when it is guaranteed to get called by 16 players, and when 5x will still get called by 2-3 players?

I'm clearly in camp 1 of the two camps Ava mentions.

But I'm also very curious if camp 2 can crush, or whether it is a short term illusion. I've seen guys I've considered good difficult players play this way, and when they are sitting with 4x the stack of every one else at the table it certainly looks inviting. Course, they are sometimes in for 3x as much as everyone else, and I'm sure they have days where they don't make any of that back.

Really wish each player I played with had their bb/hr and hours played hovering over their head.

Ggrassisfairlygreenoverhere,andI'veconvincedmyself itisgreenenoughG

GG fwiw I've put in close to 600 hours with one of the 2 players I mentioned. Over that sample (which I know is still small), he destroyed. I thought he was cheating for the first few hundred hours.

Now I'm seeing it again in player #2, though he is much more passive pre, he is still very loose and very aggressive on turns/rivers. And same very small betsizing.

I want to be clear in the lag I'm trying to define. They are not ******ed aggressive. They actually don't 3b pre that much. They over limp alot and 3x open. They flat sets on wet boards. They bet $15 into $100 on AA9 5 ways. They do the weirdest **** ive ever seen and it seems bizarre to bad but it becomes very clear after a few sessions that these guys have figured it out.

I'm not talking about normal aggros that 3b KJO or A4s and have wild swings, I'm talking about really weird small ball aggressive.

They've honestly shared their honestly tracked winrates with you?

And, of course, 600 hours is what it is.

But, again, I'm not totally doubting either and I am also very curious. We've seen a handful of crushing winrates posted in the winrates thread, and I doubt they're playing by camp 1 rules.

Gtoolateforthisolddogthough,Ithink?G

Another thing I'll add: if someone is opening to a lol 3x in my 100bb max BI game (which is $9 in a 1/3 NL game), every single flop is going to go 6 ways (that's not an exaggeration, that's just a fact, be jelly if you want). That means, unless stacks are getting quite deep, that the SPR is ~5.5 on most flops. Dude really has to be a monster postflop player to move within that SPR profitably with as wide a range as he is playing, imo.

Gnowdoubtingalittlemore,butstacksizesarekeyG

Just one data point, but I've been playing on a weekly basis in an home/underground game for about 4 years now. Player pool at any given time is probably made up of 25-30 regs and a host of other more irregular players, though people have come and gone (mostly losers) over that time too of course. The host has become a pretty good friend of mine over the years, and I was curious so was asking him who he thought the winner were in the game.

We could identify maybe 5 or 6 winners in the game who'd played more than a year or so. Obviously small sample size applies, but the host cashes people in and out so has a good sense of it. Of those 5, most are tight or nits pre-flop. I'm probably the loosest of them, and am certainly not a LAG pre-flop, and when I raise pre usually raise big to thin the field. I may also just be running good, similar to other winners. There were 2 players I can identify as "good" LAGs, and host tells me their both losers, one because he just plays too many hands and has too many big losses, the other because he'll get drunk and have disastrous sessions.

Obviously game-dependent. My game would be good for a LAG because stacks are very deep, so there's room for post-flop play to make up for marginal pre-flop decisions. On the other hand, rake is high, which makes LAG play less beneficial, and there are some VERY sticky players (not sure if that's unusual). Different than playing a bunch of OMCs in an afternoon game.

I don't mean to smugly oversimplify a response to a question begging for debate, but I just can't get past the short answer, that you likely already know, which is that a good live lag (a definition likely used far too loosely) is just more skilled at this game of skill than a good live tag (a definition also used far too loosely).

I suppose the slightly more complex answer lies in individual aptitude/learning capacity and some other factors like temperament. To put it yet another way, it's about talent. A truly good lag will more often engage in, quickly identify, and know how to maneuver around and through closer spots, more often, and efficiently enough to make it work for them on the whole.

Pretty sure somewhere out there or maybe in here I read the 9-ball : poker analogy. It isn't a perfect analogy by any means but might help me connect the dots a little more clearly - Just becasue you can visualize a runout (a difficult to acquire skill in the first place) it doesn't mean you can execute it with any regularity, if even at all. You could go as far to say that even if you had a master relaying how to play each shot, the feel required to do so may lie just beyond your ability to ever do so.

I'm not aiming to paint the rare good lag as a superhero, but making it work (over a far simpler, logic based, equity friendly tag strat to which any good lag can revert) is quite extraordinary.

I think for accuracy's sake, everyone instead of saying TAG or LAG would give an estimated VPIP/PFR percentage for the category of player they mean.

FWIW, I think you can play wider live than online and be profitable, but you ll still going to be the tighter player at the table. At some point, live or online, too many hands are too many hands.