The way I currently, crudely view poker is that people bet according to the strength of their hand, and as players call or raise, ranges are continually narrowed. Medium-strength hands tend to call, and nutted hands tend to raise.

Because I play according to hand strength, I'm not involved a lot, and other players notice.

The biggest winner in my 1/2/3 games, as far as I can tell, is this very old guy who rarely raises pre-flop. He plays a lot of hands in various positions, and sometimes he'll limp-call decent raises with hands like Q8s. Unlike some younger laggy players he's doesn't try to buy that many pots, although I have seen him make moves and suspect he makes some that I haven't seen shown down.

Is his success just a product of game conditions? Do other players just play so poorly after the flop, allowing him play like this?

What do the veterans think?

I have used this sort of style and did well at 1/2 when conditions are right. When in position I see a lot of flops with unsuited connectors, suited one gappers and even some worse when I can see the flop very cheaply. Mix in a few from OOP to mix things up. But it doesn't work under all conditions and it doesn't work at all at 2/5.

To work you need the table to be reasonably deep (100BB+ on average) and lean passive/stationary. The table has to be deep for there to be enough money in play to justify playing weaker hands. It needs to be more passive then aggressive because these sorts of hands can't take much preflop raising. And the most critical thing is that it is generally stationary so that despite having a very strong range and few bluffs people will still pay you off on bet/bet/shove lines.

Some old school guy, maybe Mike Caro, wrote an article called something like, "The Best Player I've Ever Seen."

It was about how people frequently told him a story just like yours. Some dude was playing in defiance of all convention and obliterating the game. The dude had to be some sort of poker genius or to have cracked some code that nobody else had been able to.

Then the dude goes broke and is never heard from again.

You can run good or bad for a very, very long time. There's always someone on a massive heater.

They might be crafty, and do a good job of making the most of their run good. But, no, limp calling Q8 suited is not a winning strategy.

You can get away with a lot of tomfoolery at this level when the other players are particularly bad, but eventually, it bites you in the ass because the rake is too high and you are playing hands that are going to get coolered a lot and all the other standard reasons.

The owner of this website has a similar story. They all have the same plot. Some new player comes in, plays unconventionally, and wins a bunch of money. People decide that he's figured out poker and start telling everyone to imitate him. Six months later, he's gone from the poker scene. What happens to them? In the owner's story, a year later he's surprised to see the former star at his table.

He's the waiter.

In any high variance, -EV approach, the paradox is that it appears the player is a winner every time you notice him. He'll have a huge stack at the table. He'll be in room for hours. However, all the times he loses 4 buy ins, he'll be in and out of the room in about an hour. You'll be lucky to see him.

Unless you've watched a player regularly for months, you'll have no clue whether he is a real winner or not.

There was a story I heard somewhere in the Live At The Bike universe. There was a guy who was beating the games for a full year and even seasoned pros were starting to wonder if he'd discovered something.

Then, blamo.

There was a guy in a room I frequented who was super LAG. He actually was a thinking player and he did a lot of clever things. So, when catching cards, he was a nightmare. He ran so good and was such a bully that some of the nitty regs would leave the table if he sat down.

But, I saw a hand where a braver nit stacked him by slow playing AA vs something like 74 off. All the money went in on the flop and I could actually see the thought bubble above the world crusher's head. In it was something like, "I flopped a pair, and combined with my fold equity..." And it was just like, no dude, you blasted off your stack with 74 off against AA.

One day he wasn't there anymore.

The old guy who limp-calls preflop with Q8s is most likely not a very big winner at the game, if he's even a winning player at all. He probably just ran hot across a small sample.

Just play a normal TAG strategy and you'll do fine at 1/2.

The only time when overlimping is profitable is if it's a soft passive table and you have:
A2s-A9s
76s-QJs
22-99

And even then, I'll usually just raise those hands if the table is even remotely tough.

Wrong thread.

Agree he's likely on a heater and actually a mediocre or losing player.

However, it is also possible he has some strength that allows him to profit despite his unorthodox preflop strategy. E.g he's been playing there for years and has a good memory so he knows all the regular players' styles and very rarely makes mistakes against them postflop.

I've had this a few times with old regs mocking me for taking an entirely standard line against another reg. Unbeknownst to me (because opponent is unknown to me) there is a very effective exploitative line I should be using. The old reg knows this, I didn't but I do now.

If his style is actually working in and of itself without him requiring some significant edge in postflop had reading skills it's for the reasons QuadJ outlines in post #2.

If you are in few pots and only ever betting for fat value and even the relatively unobservant players are noticing then you may be struggling to get as much action on your strong hands as you'd like.

To counter these perceptions play more hands in position.

To take advantage of these perceptions bluff more when you're in position.

To know how to safely open your ranges learn to read hands better and explore the idea of balanced ranges. Then you can more easily understand your own ranges and detect when opponents are unbalanced and therefore quickly see how to exploit them.

I play a super nit style, but sometimes as I see others cash out multiple racks playing a style opposite of mine (and similar to the one you describe) I wonder if there really is a better way.

But as others say, you've probably got way too small a sample size on this guy. These types of styles can easily run well over short samples and give the illusion they are crushing, but when the EV of the plays eventually start converging to their expected values the end result is vastly different. I'm also assuming you aren't always there every single time he plays a session from start to finish; you maybe didn't see his horrendous session the day before, or know that even though he's got $1K in front of him right now that he's actually stuck for the day.

Still, there are all sorts of profitable ways to play. You can win in lots of games having a 0% preflop raising range, so don't automatically assign "passive preflop" as necessarily "overall loser". But my guess is his games would have to be very good (very passive preflop, very payoffy postflop) in order to be profitably limp/calling a lotta stuff from a lotta positions.

Gdon'tbejelly,justplayyourgame,andlet'sseewherethe cardshavefallen5yearsfromnow,imoG

I've been observing him awhile though, and I am just in awe. 1) I think he has an incredible read over other players 2) I think the structure and player pool of this lowest stake might uniquely suit the way he is exploiting it

Let me give some abridged examples, I'll call him hero.

1) Raise, hero calls, short stack jams. Opener is forced to just call, hero thinks and calls.
Opener bets twice into the empty side pot. Hero calls twice. River is check, all-in. Hero wins a large side pot with AK high. They had the same hand.

2) Fishy aggro player c-bets twice, and is check-raised all-in by hero on the turn. At showdown, hero sheepishly opens pocket 66. Villain had 55 and hero wins!

3) Typical young guy raises limpers from the SB. Hero calls and it's heads-up. Flop is a low board. cbet-call. Turn check-bet. Your typical float, I guess. But he doesn't do it all the time like some "players" might, and if it actually gets to showdown, he seems to always have "something," like Q8s for a rivered 2 pair. He had top pair with 8 on the flop and turn.

The moves in 1) and 2) are not the norm. Most of the time he is getting value.

Which gets me thinking. These are not deep stacked games with competent players. It's the lowest stakes where value is probably the name of the game.

If it's about extracting value, are "sucker" hands like Q8s really that bad? Relatively, they have higher equity than pretty hands like 76s. Now of course against tight players with hands, it's not the same story. But most of the time against loose players, Q8s will have live decently high cards.

I want to state that he limp-folds plenty. As far as I know or can guess, the Q8s hand I saw shown down was not something he'd always do. It may have been a play in a specific situation.

The defining characteristics are that he sees a lot of (cheap) flops, and combines what I perceive as keen reads/play with getting value post-flop when bets are larger.

1) Is the betting re-opened on him preflop? If so, seems pretty horrible flatting again here (I often am the initial flatter with AK to setup this very flat/shove spot, which is super profitable with dead money and wide shortstack shoves). Also seems very dubious calling down in what is initially a $0 protected side pot UI.

2) Hard to tell with no board runout, but overall seems like he's turning a showdownable hand into a bluff and somehow getting worse to pay off.

3) Standard limp/calling down with mediocre TP, but thankfully ran into an aggro guy who can raise cheese out of the blinds.

I mean, overall with small sample sizes it's just really hard to tell. A lot of winning players do a lot of things "right", but also can do a lot of things "wrong" (my guess is that most of us winning players here, including me, are in this boat). If he ends up winning over a large sample he's likely doing more things right than wrong compared to his opponents, but you'll likely never have a big enough sample size with black & white results to know.

But mostly it's likely a short term illusion. My last few sessions out, the biggest stack at the table when I left was also far and away the worse player at the table.

GcluelessNLnoobG

most people here have no idea whatsoever about what long term means.

also, if that guy does not tilt at all, he might even get away with limp calling Q8s.

^ well in online poker I've had both wild upswings and miserable downswings that lasted around 100,000 hands. That would take 4,000 hours live at 25hands/hour.

So any of us could be on a heater or be running bad for two years live, if we're playing 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. Probably take more like 8 years for a lot of us recreational players...

That is just bad without a very specific read.

Hero tried to push a stationary leaning fish out of the pot and was lucky to get called with worse.

Preflop is too loose but post flop it's standard.

In the long run yes. With short stacks he can't make enough in the long run to compensate for his limp/fold hands and the hands he calls and folds the flop.

This sounds like somebody who is good at reading his opponents but playing too loose. He will look good when hit the flop better then average but he is leaking out his money in the long run. It's possible that everybody else is even worse his play could be profitable but better preflop hand selection could make it even more profitable.

You literally can't compare live an online...

Online at 50nl and 100nl 6-max I have a winrate of 3-6bb/100. We'll assume 5bb/100 and simulate 100,000 hands. It's 6-max so standard deviation is about 120 bb/100

Live at 1/2 I have a winrate of 10bb/hour. We'll assume 33 hands an hour and assume 30bb/100 (which is way underestimating the winrate). It's full ring so standard deviation is about 80bb/100

For online, after 100,000 hands, the 95% confidence interval is -2500bb, 12500 bb which is massive. There's literally a 20% chance you're still losing after 100k hands.

For live, after 10,000 hands (400 hours which is how much a normal recreational player plays in a year), the 95% confidence interval is 1400bb, 5000bb. A very good live player just is not losing after 10k hands in a year.

I agree variance is still large because of sample size and you can't estimate true winrate. However, your vastly increased winrate should make you a winning player and not have ridiculous downswings.

^ discretion that's all true - if you're talking about a live player who is ACTUALLY winning at 30bb/hour long-term.

I don't think that's a safe assumption for many of us on here in part because of the small sample sizes, in part because high rake% and high caps likely make some of our games hard to beat in the first place and partly because we're mostly still learning to be good winning players.

My long-term live winrate is always dropping even as I get vastly better at the game. That's because I had 700hrs of run-good at the start which gave me an unrealistically high winrate (15bb/hour) combined with the fact tillt is still an issue for me and my tilt only manifests during periods of run-bad.

Both those are probably true for many of us.

New players who run bad for the first 1,000 hours simply give up the game so those who continue playing are mostly those who got lucky at the start and they mistakenly assume their astronomical winrates are only sight overestimates rather than being so far out that they could actually be losing long-term.

Tilt is often associated with losing money so till you run bad you cannot estimate your true winrate(lossrate?) because you don't know how badly you're going to play when you're down 15 buy ins till it happens and you log the sessions.

One last point - most poker players are not reliable witnesses of their own winrates/lossrates. Because these stats are a matter of pride we all tend to lie to ourselves and to each other about them. Personally I'm quite happy to admit that I have no idea whether I'm actually winning or not in my 1/1 game. I'm currently up but I strongly suspect I'm break-even at best over the long-term and as far as I'm concerned that long-term is not orders of magnitude different to the online experience (at least my historical online experience from 2009-2014).

Oh, one more thing: the way live poker gets super deepstacked (1,500bb deep is a regular occurrence late at the weekend in my game) you can have a 15 buy-in "downswing" in a single hand if you **** up, get coolered or get bad-beat hard enough.

This is very wrong. Because live games are so showdown heavy and pots tend to be large, SDVs are WAY higher than online. 100BB/hour is pretty average, and the absolute lowest I've seen from a winning player is 53BB/hour. I've seen winning live players with SDVs in the 150BB/hour range.