I’ve been playing in 1/2 that plays like a 1/2/5/10 since October 2020. I am making $101.94/hour over 61 hours at this particular room. The game only runs twice per week. I’ve cashed 8/11 sessions (72%). Average win per session is $569.82.

The player pool has 10-20 rotating ok/bad regs and probably 50 total players. For the most part villains are known villains to the hero.

At what point do I start adjusting my strategies? Obviously I don’t want to be result oriented here. My goal is to stay ahead of the population in this game when it comes to how I am thinking about poker. Villains are thinking about hands in absolute hand values not relative values or ranges. I also do not believe any of the villains to be GTO practitioners or users of solvers/poker software etc.

I really want to milk this game for as long as possible and as efficiently as possible.

I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on how to go about successfully adjusting my strategies over time in this game and some of the topics below:

If I’m thinking in ranges (merged, polarized) is it as effective if my opponents aren’t thinking in ranges and only thinking in absolute hand value/intuition?

Same goes for GTO, if my villains know nothing of GTO does wielding it against them give me an edge long run?

What are some of the signs that I should break from the game? Is there a point where I’ll start achieving diminishing returns from playing and winning too often? Is winning too often even a “thing”? I’m assuming yes here because player pool is so small.

A GTO based strategy alone will not be the most optimal way to play against these terrible players. Nothing wrong with studying GTO but you'll want to play exploitatively as well.

In terms of your strategy, there is no reason to make any big adjustments. Just continue to work on your game and think about spots and you will stay well ahead of the field.

Winning too often really isn't a thing as long as you are providing good customer service. If you are friendly and engage with your customers expect that they will be happy to play with you regardless of how good you are at poker.

In a game where you are showing up only 1-2 times a month and you are winning 10 BB/hr, you don't need to change anything significant, just work on cutting down your mistakes.

Welcome to the forum, OP. Check out the Concept of the Month threads, particularly the one on GTO where our resident math expert shows that you want to exploit as long as you are playing unbalanced Vs. Knowing what is GTO is great, as it lets you spot imbalance and gives you defensive strat to fall back in, but it is not "optimal" in the sense of always highest EV, it is "optimal" in the sense of inexploitable.

As for winning too much, it can happen. I have friends who have been uninvited from games for that. It's pretty rare if you are fun to have at the table, though. It's much more common if you are a hoody-wearing, silent robot.

Seconding (or thirding) having fun (assuming this is a private game). I have a private game that rotated to pokerrrr app due to a lot of our wives telling us to **** off playing in person, and same thing applies. We want people to dick around have fun, don't mind winning. Some guy in a hoodie and airpods when we get back to being in person is not the type of person that gets invited to our game.


As far as being exploitatively. I don't know how tight/loose aggressive/passive you play, but I wouldn't worry about it until you run into a player who is a thinking player, but also reads you like a book.

dude you're making $100/hr, even if this were a straight up 5/10 game you'd be crushing. Change nothing until you start making huge mistakes. As far as all this "winning too much" stuff goes, Tom Dwan plays almost exclusively in private games. Probably Doug Polk and Ivey and all those guys too. As long as people like you you'll always be invited. If you have a couple K to lose in these games then other players will always think they can win it.

Over 61 hrs.

^ well, yeah... but.. thats a week of rungood maybe? His WR will probably get cut in half if he's any good at all, which is still decent for 5/10

He made $6k+ I've made $2k in 2hrs of 1/2 before. His hourly is completely meaningless.

Just be friendly and fun,

Also if u have the option to throw on an additional straddle here and there or do some bomb pots or other neutral EV hi variance gambles I would take them always.

Don’t change anything until your opponents start adjusting. Often they never do. I played in a similar situation and it was two years before I had to even think about adjusting and that was only to specific opponents. And I was playing way more
often then you. If 99% of players never heard of GTO, they’d be better players. Just do what wins until it doesn’t.

My biggest advice is not to chase keeping your win rate up. 100/hr is a very good win rate over that 61 hour period and it 99.9% won’t continue like that over a long period of variance. However, you could still keep a solid 10-20-30 BB/hr win rate with a solid sound game. I’ve chased my win rate after a successful 15-20 hour stretch many times and it always hurts in the end. Just let the cards come to you

"I'm on a 6k heater everyone, please give me advice on how to beat the game I play and improve."

I dunno dude, keep trying to smash flops and hit stuff.

Small peeve, but that big an hourly is probably not completely meaningless. We're Bayesians. Bad players go on 600xBB (straddle) heaters over 60 hours. Good players go on 600x heaters. But good players have this happen in a greater proportion of their 60-hour segments, even though it's pretty rare for both.

Most likely we can't reject the null hypothesis "OP is a breakeven player" at p < .05. But most likely (just guessing without running the numbers) we can estimate it's 2/3 likely or more that OP is a legit winner in this game.

If an unknown raises preflop 8 times in two orbits, you can and should make a mutable inference that her PFR% is high, not that she got QQ+/AK eight times, even though the latter is possible.

I'm about to voice some terrible heresy and I'm sure people will immediately start gathering up the choicest stones for throwing.

GTO doesn't matter.
Poker software is marginally useful at best.

Thinking about "ranges" is only useful when you accumulate a large mental per-opponent data set. Based on the hours you've played and the rotational nature of the player pool, you're about 3% of the way there.

I realize that this urge to precisely quantify everything is a result of the incomplete information nature of the game and an attempt to refute that. But 1,000 hours of number crunching will be less useful than 10 hours of studying your opponents' mannerisms, habits, etc.

Also...in this environment (as opposed to, say, Vegas, where you've never seen your opponents before), you have a personality you need to cultivate. Everyone knows that a friendly, engaging person makes more money, all other things being equal, than an uncommunicative bridge troll scrunched up inside his hoodie with the earbuds. I think that building your relationships with your opponents is far, far, far, far, far more important than assimilating all the concepts of the latest Foolproof Beat the Crap Out Of Your Opponents System (hereafter referred to as FBCOOYOS).

A book from waaaay back, during the Gardena draw poker era, called "Play Poker, Quit Work, and Sleep Till Noon" has some really good advice about building up and exploiting a home game. Warning: it's terribly written and suggests many things that are plain and simple unethical, but I think you'd get a lot out of it nonetheless.

You all may now stone the heretic.

lmao ... this.