Hello, everyone. Very old poster who's been away from poker for several years, and is now focusing on NLHE (used to primarily play limit). I'm playing 1/2 at a local cardroom and doing ok so far. I'm re-reading Harrington on cash games and one of his suggestions is to use a random number generator to mix up your play, perhaps the second hand on your wrist watch. So, such that in a pre-flop situation you think you might over-limp after three callers with 56s in most cases, you might raise in a very small percentage of the time just to mix things up. So use a random number generator to help you decide. I've been catching up on a lot of posts on this thread and haven't seen this concept discussed. Is it outdated? Unnecessary at low limits? Thoughts appreciated. I plan to start commenting on hand threads so please take everything i say with a big grain of salt.

Certainly unnecessary at 1/2 but easier to implement using the suits of your cards.

I think preflop, it should all be a matter of feel/dynamics - like have you been raising/3betting a lot, do you think villains are getting ready to play back at you, etc... However, for these spots, you could walk into a game and just go by the rank of your suits (clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades) - or reverse that. That at least gets you to 25% granularity in your randomness.

Postflop, you can usually decide by figuring out (1) where you are in your range, and (2) blockers. You could be a little creative with blocker effects - like instead of spades blocking a flush draw, maybe you decide to use all black cards for the frequency you’re after.

So you don’t really need something like a watch to provide (much) randomness to you. If you do decide that you’re in a spot where you should sometimes do one thing, and other times do another thing, then just mentally flip a coin - just kinda keep track of it to make sure you’re not always taking the aggressive/high variance line, and you’re not always taking the passive/scared money line. But also let your intuition guide you. In a live game people give away a lot.

Going down that path is just making the game harder than it needs to be. Any effort you spend in that direction would be much better spent on improving your understanding of the game or studying a particular opponent.

Yeah, thinking is always a good idea but I think you're over complicating the game probably nearly any level. Feel the game flow and your opponents and exploit the hell out of it. Lighten up when they push back. Don't need an algorithm or a random number generator. Find V's leaks, exploit without shame.

Just what live poker needs, a bunch of guys staring at a random number generator on their IPad Pros.

A complete waste of time and mental energy/focus, IMO.

Randomizing is something you do to keep Vs from having strong reads on you. That means you do it when you play in a small pool against Vs who pay a lot of attention. If that describes your 1/2 game, you are in the wrong game.

One of the similarities between HOC and PNLHE is they realize the type of difficult situations you can get yourself into postflop. PNLHE addresses this by approaching preflop as a means to setting up a good postflop spot. HOC ignores this altogether (not realizing that preflop and postflop are intrinsically linked) and instead approaches preflop as a distinct street whose goal is to disguise our hand (by randomization). I think disguising our hand is less important than setting up good postflop spots, so I'm not a fan of its randomization method for this reason.

GimoG

randomizing can be -ev when your opponents always make the same dumb mistakes over and over again rather than tayloring your play to punish their mistakes.

I go back to the rock paper scissors example. If you can be completely random your opponent can never get the edge on you. However if your opponent always throws rock, you may want to skip the randomization and always throw paper.

This is 100% unnecessary at low limits and will likely hurt your winrate long term. Save these skills for the high stakes.

One of my issues with HOC is that it interweaved some very basic concepts with some highly advanced play without explaining which was which. Randomizing play was Harrington's attempt at what would be today be called "balancing" or "GTO." Keep in mind that his experience was playing at the Mayfair Club and going up against a steady diet of Howard Lederer and Eric Seidel (among others) in the 1990s. Any player playing straight forward was going to get slaughtered eventually in those games.

Fortunately, it is not necessary in the LLSNL world. Your villains aren't observing months of your play and figuring out what your bets and sizes mean. LLSNL players have many other leaks that are costing them more than being readable. They should be working on those leaks.

Harrington does have a chapter on playing against weak players and he does say deception is less important in those games. He also says that much of the cautious advice he gives throughout the book is meant to be used in games with competent players. In other words, he doesn’t believe in being that defensive and deceptive in a 1-2 NL game.

Does Harrington talk about using the random number generator in his chapter on playing against weak players? I just looked at my copy and didn’t see anything in there about that.

If you look at example hands from earlier chapters in the book, they are almost all examples of hands at medium stakes games, not the lowest stakes like 1-2 NL.

With regards to this, I would question whether the 1/2 NL games that Harrington was referring to ~15 years ago (at the start of the real NL boom) are remotely as weak as the 1/2 NL games nowadays.

Gtheyaren't,imoG

Best bet is to reread The Cincinnati Kid. The advancements in strategy have been pretty minimal since then.

Against better players I think about what they think about my range but I don't randomize it.

Against most players I'm looking to exploit them. Remember though, you can't exploit someone without being exploitable yourself.

Meh I think it stopped after SW Erdnase's book X-pirt at teh card table

The books came out in 2009 so it’s a little more recent than that, but I did have a similar thought because you’re right it has been a while. He does describe the types of weak games he is talking about so if a reader plays in a different type of game, then there should be a different approach. But I do think some of the advice in that chapter is still relevant today.

Of course, players should see how the table is playing. If a 2-5 game plays more like a 1-2 then I wouldn’t worry much about deception there either.

In any case, I still don’t think a huge percentage of 1-2 NL players are good enough for players to think they need to use the cautious advice he gives earlier. I think it would be silly for someone to say “These 1-2 NL players are pretty observant and are competent players, and they will crush me if I’m too predictable so I need to put a lot of emphasis on being deceptive and being careful.”

Unfortunately, he got to that point after people have slogged through the entire first book and 9 parts of the second book. Before then, there were virtually no examples live play, let alone 1/2 play. He states in Vol 1, page 136 (1st printing) I've never asked MM, but I suspect that the original draft didn't include the weak player section. It was tacked on the end when someone mentioned that you don't need to do this in weak games.

As I say, it's my guess that the incredibly weak games described in the back of the second volume don't exist anymore (for the most part, at least, as obviously you'll still encounter players / tables that fit this mold, but I think its the exception rather than the norm), so not that big of a deal.

GcluelessHOCnoobG

GG, please stop projecting your casino's experience on the world. I play 1/2 every once in a while, and it is definitely still ridiculously weak in most environs. It's not as ridiculously spewy as 2007, but it's usually as weak as 2010. Sure, I've encountered counter examples, but they are few and far between.

After looking at my copy again, I think it actually covers a broader range of weak games than I initially thought. He mentions weak-tight players and even good players possibly being in a weak game. He also includes advice like “observe what your opponents are doing and then take advantage of their mistakes” which can obviously apply to a lot of games.

The book didn’t do nearly as much for me as I hoped it would around 6-9 years ago. That’s probably why.

Dude you can beat $25/$50 live and 1000nl online just by playing pure strategies - no mixing or randomising at all.

This is a completely unnecessary concept for anyone who's not a high stakes player to bother thinking about.

Randomization is pointless unless you're actually using an AI tbh.

His books are trash.

Even though I disagreed with the randomization technique he uses, and disagreed with some other stuff as well (like all other books I've read), there's still enough useful ideas that are very helpful, especially for losing players at LLSNL who are looking to go in the right direction.

GimoG