In a wilder game, a smart player would adjust by sacrificing small EV spots for the sake of ginormous EV.

That could mean limp/calling with small suited connectors with shallow stacks, playing OOP with vulnerable hands, not having a 3betting range in MP after a raise, etc...

One fact that people can never admit or realize is that mandatory straddle makes a game that's already bad, worse.

If the game's tight and people are already hesitant to put money in, how would it make the game better if they suddenly had to put in twice as much money?

Makes stealing blinds more profitable...

You get to identify weak spots and their tendencies, allowing you to tactfully steal blinds and setting up spots to take down pots post-flop.

I love games like that, because you are literally playing HU with specific targets every chance you get.

To each their own I guess. I dont like the MS but I can see how some people find it profitable.

One of the problems with those games- tight nitty games where the average pot is like 5 BBs, is you need something to loosen people up. Now, that can be alot of things- straddling or mandatory straddling can be one of those things.

It sort of forces people to play bigger pots, even if they dont want to. Mandatory straddle open up the chance of double straddling for players who wants that, wich for sure forces people to put in more money if they want to enter a pot. Also alot of players makes bigger mistakes naturally as the average pot gets bigger, especially the more inexperienced ones.

With bigger pots in the game, its only a matter of time before somebody gets stacked/coolered and have to reload. When you get this circle going the game is on the path to be going out of the muck. People get stacked, and after that somebody often gets tilted=stackoffthresholds gets lowered, alot of the times for the whole table. Having some players on tilt or being down some money is one of the keys to a very good game.

So yeah, in terms of getting a positive circle going when it comes to getting the game out of the muck i believe mandatory straddle has some serious reasoning to it.

Conclusion: Its +EV for a winning player in the game when some people get stuck money or getting some tilt going on the table. If straddling can help accomplish that mission its certainly worth it in my opinion.

The best thing i know when i am attending an homegame is when somebody gets stacked early on, and i see the straddling going crazy, some serious tilt brewing and people stacking off light. Then i know its gonna be a superior game for me.

By the family reunion tho?

Straddling also sometimes tilts the nits just because it's put on. They can get pissed and start shoving or spewing, other times they just leave and open a seat for a new player (that I'd probably rather have anyway). Also good for the game.

Im talking about Mississippi straddle OTB btw, not a mandatory straddle UTG. I think mandatory straddles are fine, and that they loosen up the game.

If I read the original statement correctly, the straddle is simply being done a lot by specific player(s) (i.e. it's not mandatory for everyone to do it).

Personally, I love it when other people straddle in my game because it makes the "shortstack" strategy I employ simpler to do (and even though I'm always sitting on a 100bb+ stack, it actually plays much more like a shortstack game due to large preflop raise sizes and often multiple callers).

GcluelessstraddlingnoobG

We know.

I've only been in one spot where straddling utg made sense. I had a gambly maniac to my right and he was very likely to make a stack committing raise preflop which j could then shove over.

Button straddles are different. In my experience straddling the button makes everyone play insanely preflop. They also never give me credit for raising my straddle and although stacks are shallower it's much easier to get all in with top pair and against these guys it's usually good.

Yeah i was kind of going off a tangent because it's a peeve of mine when people try to play bigger when the game is already nitty AF.

Although true to what RP said about being able to steal more $ in blinds.

Re what you said about short stacking strategy: yes that's nice and all when you have aa/kk/qq/ak pre, but what do you do with other parts of your range, like QJ/TT/99/etc? And how do you set mine when you are getting no odds/or someone behind you is ready to ship?

See what I mean - short stacking strategy inevitably shifts towards tightening up your range because you lose money too fast playing any other way.

Yes fish takes longer to figure that out, but you also lose way more chances to get into a pot with them because you are forced to play tighter.

Ya, but I find in straddled pots where I'm tightening up my range others are loosening theirs (more money in the pot to be won!), so I'm assuming my winnings with big starting hands (which are now easy to play thanks to being able to raise huge preflop) offsets any losses I'm doing by limp/folding speculative hands (or not being able to get into a pot for relatively cheap in the first place). Course I'm dealt a lot more speculative hands than monsters, so it's obviously not always ideal (sorta like a loose opener constantly juicing pots to our direct right preventing us from getting into the pot with speculative hands versus fish).

I guess a perfect world would be having the pot straddled when I have a big starting hand and having it non-straddled when I have a speculative one.

In the end, so long as I'm not forced to straddle, I just don't see how it can be a bad thing having extra dead money in the pot preflop. I'm certainly not protesting any straddle + blind raise pots, I'll leave that to the "that's not poker!" OMC types.

GnowifIcanonlysomehowmakethathappen...G

If the game is so bad that a BTN straddle makes it even worse.. here is the proper strat:

Bad game =/= -ev game / no game slection / gotta put in hours / might be temporary until action players arrive / etcetc

Hypothetically, let's say the game sucks and your expected winrate in that game is 3bbs/hr and is played at 2/5 so $15/hr. And, again hypothetically, the stakes are bumped to 10/20 with the same players and your winrate stays at 3bbs/hr. Now instead of $15/hr you're getting $60/hr which makes the game worth playing whereas it wasn't worth playing when the stakes were 2/5.

I agree with pretty much all of this

That's a frequently used reason, but really incorrect.

Your hypothetical 3bb/hr is based on certain stacks in play (eg, it's well-accepted that in general your win rate goes up, the deeper the fish's stack is ), but what you don't realize is, when you double the blinds, you don't double the stacks in play. Where is the extra money coming from?

Really simplified example: your win rate of 3bb/hour comes mostly from stacking a fish's 100bb stack. When you double the blinds, the fish now has a 50bb stack - which means it's impossible to maintain your 3bb/hour rate at a higher $ bb as you suggested.

Also, you are assuming everyone still plays the same when the blinds are $10 instead of $5, which is simply not true.

Now let's say everyone's stack also increases proportionally to the big blind, then of course you win way more. That never happens in a capped game though.

I always advocate playing deeper (not like 1000bbs, but more than 40bbs ) because a pro's biggest edge is that fish stacks off incorrectly way too often. You want to pay as less to get them to pay as much as possible.

Had a similar spot recently. Hero is UTG. UTG+1 took a bad beat the previous hand and decides to blind shove for 150BB. Hero puts in a last second straddle. Folded to hero who calls with QJo. V doubles up.

Huh? Why straddle? You get in the same effective position by just limping.

The correct question is "why weren't you to his immediate right?"

And straddle does not equal limp from EP. Assuming the table has at least 1 other competent player at the table, our limp is going to get raised a lot, which could fold out the mark and leave us OOP to defend

Also that limp looks really really suspicious if there's a couple thinkers at the table.

Over repping your limp range in that spot is a good thing.

FWIW, I play in a shallow game very regularly. Good players don't bother with this game, because they feel either their edge is in deeper games or they get owned for basically becoming a calling station.

Shallower stacks apparently are pretty detrimental for "good" players and that doesn't seem to be a bad thing if you know how to adjust.