This is going to be a bit long so bear with me.

Fairly typically 4 hour session yesterday. The game in the after work Monday night crowd is pretty much all regs. I'd say about 7 reg or semi-reg players, maybe 2 recs - 1 pretty fishy.

On the night I never get AA, KK, AK, JJ, TT. Never flop a set with a small pair. Play 3 big-ish hands.

Hand 1
Hero $15 with 89 in CO, B calls, BB calls
Flop 885 Hero $25, call, call
Turn 4 Hero $100, fold, all-in for $10
River 9 MHIG

Hand 2
V $15 from CO, Hero calls QQ in SB (this V had been particularly active from LP)
Flop 9TJ Hero check, V $25, Hero call
Turn 4 Hero check V $50, Hero shoves, V calls < $100
River 8 and MHIG vs KK

Hand 3
Multi-way limped, Hero limps 89 in HJ
Flop 439
Shorty UTG shoves for $68, Hero calls
Turn 6 River 6 and V wins with 33 boated up

Aside from those I win a little and lose a little. Probably slightly more card dead than I should be and at a slightly bad spot given that V from hand 2 is 2 to my right and opening a lot when I'd have late position steals. I end the night up $36 which I suppose isn't really a terrible result for 4 hours of 1/2.

My question is though in this game where does the money come from? It's reg infested and the regs are all playing a somewhat similar style. They're beatable but not for tons - they typically limp too much but they're not stations who'll pay off like crazy, they don't bluff enough and under bet when they have value hands so it's somewhat easy to get more value with my good hands than they'll get with theirs. The fish are few and often spew quickly so you have to get lucky to get some of that.

I think my game in generally:
- make fewer mistakes particularly in limping too much and in paying off too much
- get more value from my value hands by fast playing and sizing bigger

But I wonder if that's good enough or if I need to be doing something more different to really win in this game. Is this session a win because I come out slightly ahead with no real big hands or a loss because despite winning 2 or 3 large pots (and 1 on a suckout) I take only a small win?

TLDR: how do you make money in reg infested games besides hoping for big hands or stacking the rare fish?

Reg infested doesn't mean everyone is good. Often times regs will not adapt or adjust properly. There is no clear cut answer anyone can give you. You need to pay attention to what each reg is doing and plan accordingly. If everyone is playing very tight then open up your game a bit in good spots. In order to identify those good spots you need to be in tune with the game flow and have a good understanding of what everyone is trying to accomplish.

regs aren't necessarily winners. I'd be surprised if even half the regs in my casino or even on this forum were net winners overall.

There's a lot of ego at work in this game.

If you have an equal skill level to all these other regs, you arent going to make money. You're all going to lose to the rake. The standard ABC TAG bet/fold strategy wont work

Cue MikeStarr, the Anti Standard TAG...... You have to outplay them. Every reg, even the good ones, has weaknesses. Bluff more than normal against the ones who fold too much and make thin value bets against the ones who call a bit too much.

Show up with hands they wont put you on by playing hands the way they wont expect. Flat call a raise with AA in some spots.
Raise limpers with 65s.
Raise KK and then check the flop with an overpair (not always obviously)

Ect.

agreed just outplay your opponents at every opportunity and exploit their weaknesses ruthlessly

Find a better game.

Between rake, toke, drinks, and jack-pot drops, $200 an hour is leaving the table. If there is $2,000 on the table, that means that every hour 10% of the money is 'disappearing' from the game. Without fish, whales, degens, and other types of terrible players, the game is basically unbeatable. So yeah, you gotta find a better game.

Hand 1:

I would probably have bet less on the turn

Hand 2:

Well Played

Hand 3:

Gross but ok against a range of overpairs/sets/NFD/better 9x hands

_________________

I think you are focusing on the wrong hands. These are all hands where you have the goods/almost the goods and got stacks in. How are you making money when you don't have relatively strong hands? How are you exploiting your opponents?

OP - I don't know what you're really expecting here. You made 4.5 BBs/hour at a table without any obvious spots. If you play 4 hours at a dream table and make $30/hour, you're going to average out to 10BBs/hour, which is a great win rate.

I suspect an over-sized percentage of yours (and most player's) win rates comes from a small-ish percentage of lousy players, and if you're not sitting with them at any given time it's hard to crush.

It's also the case that if you're playing with tightish regs, you're going to have to think harder about what mistakes they're making and how to exploit them. Maybe you're going to have to win a lot of little pots, while minimizing your losses when they have the goods. Maybe you're going to need to make big bluffs, threaten their stacks and take them out of their comfort zones. Maybe you need to play around with strange bet-sizing (very small or very big) to confuse them. However, generally if people are nitty and reggish, they can't be losing that much money, so it's going to be hard to do great at the table. If that's not acceptable to you, you need to table-change, and if no better table is available, change games, stakes or leave.

Most regs are playing a strategy that lets the deck determine their fate. They aren't minimizing their losses when the deck goes cold for them. They say, "I know I'm beat, but I have to call." If they could just find more folds they could probably be winning regs. You can't expect to win in every four hour session. I think the money comes from losing less by folding more than standard regs. So, you have to have more patience.

I also play in a very reg infested game. It's getting more difficult to beat, that's for sure, but it is still beatable. I think our money mostly comes from the following:

- we're far more patient and disciplined than the other regs; been card dead for 3 hours, finally see AQ in LP and are ready to raise it, when all of a sudden the tight guy to our right opens? we're able to snap fold, our opponents aren't
- our opponents call off far too much of their stack preflop to big raises with speculative hands
- our opponents play far too many hands OOP
- our opponents play far too splashy with short stacks
- our opponents don't factor in their opponent into consideration nearly as much as we do
- all of these things, as well as the other things you mentioned about losing value on their good hands / not bluffing in the right spots / etc., add up over time and make us the winner and them the loser
- the one thing I think we really underestimate is how much waiting for the single big pot against that one bad player really adds to our bottom line; if the only thing we ever did every 4 hours was stack one bad player for 80bbs, we'd destroy this game (and most of our opponents don't have the patience for that)

ETA: But, as others have said, if we have just a very small advantage over all the opponents sitting at the table all the time, then the game is unbeatable due to rake. In H1, the BB called a $15 raise + call OOP in a 3way pot with what looks like a $50 stack; I'm trying to think of a hand I would play like this, and for why I would be sitting at a 1/3 NL table with a $50 stack, and I can't really think of any, so it definitely looks like we have a huge skill advantage over that guy.

GimoG

Yeah I'm not really expecting something better than my result with this table and this set of hands. I tend to think that I win by:
- losing less than average when I'm beat/coolered
- winning a little when I have average hands/situations
- winning considerably more than average when I have well above average hands/situations

It still feel though that "the deck determines my fate" to a large degree. The hands where I win medium to largish pots are typically over pairs and sets. If I don't ever get an over pair or set in a session there's little chance I'm going to walk away with a significant win. Perhaps that's just the nature of the game. Just felt like opening the discussion into whether or not there's a different approach we should be considering.

Mostly I feel like I play largely the same game as a lot of the regs just with a couple tweaks. Call less, bet size better, pay off less, win more without showdown.

Poker is relatively new to where I live. It's gone from 3.5 hours away to 1.5 hours away to 1 hour to 45 minutes over a couple years. As each new market opened you'd get a lot of new players just giving away money and a simple ABC strategy would win. Now we've had local casino poker for 3 years and the regs while not particularly good are not terribly bad either and it has me wondering if different strategies and adjustments can win more.

Don't undervalue the strategy you are using now if it is winning; this is a decent accomplishment in a raked game, imo. Could there be a better more profitable way? Perhaps.

Gwesometimesexpectoomuch,imoG

How your running on on cards does matter. It doesn't have a major bearing on any single hand but the average over a session does. Some sessions you will get good cards and good flops, other sessions it's bad cards and whiffed flops one after another. There is nothing you can do about that and you will get your fair share of both eventually.

Playing against a pool of regulars does change thing though. You will have to change your play is the player pool you have to work against changes. As the random fish coming in to check out the new place leave or run out of money the average quality of your opponents does go up slightly and the typical mistakes they make change.

Playing the same group of regulars much of your profit will now come from building a profile of specific opponents and what flaws they make. Some of your opponents will be too loose, other too tight, some call too often, other fold more then they should. Building a profile of their bluffing is key, some almost never bluff, others bluff way too often. When they bluff is also very specific and situational. Almost all will make flop c-bets but some are never bluff 3 betting preflop or bluff raising post flop. The ABC tight game that works well against random weak fish is still profitable but it's too predictable.

+1
I play with a lot of regs and it's always funny watching their faces at showdown when I show AA and I DIDN'T open to $20PF and then shove on the flop. Playing not scared with big hands and mixing it up with suited connectors and whatnot will confuse them to no end

This is called "reciprocity", it's a term Tommy Angelo coined a bunch of years back

Explain please. Not sure what you mean.

From worse players. They generally call when they should fold, check when they should bet and call when they should raise. Sometimes they gii good and get sucked out on but this averages for majority of players equally. For reg on reg games or games of similar number of mistakes, its generally the reg that reviews his opponents hands as well as his own, when he gets home for example rather then turning on the TV. Or the reg that "works" harder.

Find games where players make more mistakes and/or reduce your own.

http://www.tommyangelo.com/reciprocality/

In a poker world of standard black and whiteness, this makes me smile very wide.

Isolate and play multiway strategically. Example: don't three-bet or iso-raise with Ax suited. Pot control is crucial. Both in terms of keeping it small when you're not there and building it when you are.

FPS

Where does the money come from?


Hours.

Playing lots of hours.

Lol, this game is amazing. Play like 40/30 and print money.

When I read the title I was thinking I'd say retirees, wealthy businessmen, and degenerate gamblers. After reading OP's op, I say steal, steal, steal? I'm a noob tho so I might be wrong.

The ironic thing about my casino is: the 1/2 tables player very similar to the way you've described (weakish regs that aren't awful or spewy), but the 2/5 tables are incredibly loose and gambly. So my advice is to observe the higher tables (1/3 and 2/5) and see if there is much action going on there. If the whales at your casino are playing 2/5 instead of 1/2, then maybe consider taking a shot.