[QUOTE=stran;30150120]
Quote:
Originally Posted by mpethybridge
I ran into a legendary micro full ring grinder at the V recently; BF forced him to transition to live play.
In our conversation, he referred to 1/2 as "bingo." the idea being that you win $$ when you make bingo, and lose when you don't.
Welcome to 1/2, OP. there are spots in 1/2 to make plays other than relentlessly betting your value hands, but, for the most part, it is just playing bingo.[/QUOTE]
This is absurd. mpethybridge has made some excellent posts on 2+2. hopefully this is just a silly quip.
I thank you for the kind words.
As I reported in my post, the "bingo" characterization was not mine; it came from a player/coach for whom I have enormous respect, and who is generally doing very well in his live play.
I am a little reluctant to defend his analogy, because I don't want to speak for him. But I will expand a little on my understanding of what he meant, and why I believe he spoke abfundamental truth about live low stakes.
Let me start by reiterating what I said:
there ate spots for making plays other than relentlessly betting your value hands, but, for the most part, it is just playing bingo.
Ok, so before I even stated the general rule, I noted the exception; there ARE spots for making plays. There are times and places for an occasional well-timed bluff, or an occasional float IP.
But, as I noted, live low stakes is essentially a game of
relentlessly betting your value hands.
Does anybody seriously question this statement? I don't see how anybody could possibly. It is a basic truth not just about live low stakes, but poker in general. Everything else we do in poker is designed to a greater or lesser extent to get us paid off when we do relentlessly bet our value hands. Everything else we do in poker is done for the purpose of balancing our value hands--making it less obvious when we do or do not have a value hand.
EVERYTHING serves this deceptive purpose.
Thus, as you move up through the stakes, you should always be questioning the extent to which you need to deceive your opponents by doing things other than only relentlessly betting your value hands.
It should be immediately obvious, then, that you only need to do things other than value bet to the extent that your opponents are thinking about your hand, and also how well they are thinking about what hand you have.
At live low stakes, people are not thinking a lot about your hand, and they are not doing so very well. Thus, there simply is not much reason for going out of your way to deceive them. As I noted at the outset, however, there ARE some places where it is appropriate to deceive them.
So when is that? When do we make a bluff? When don't we make a bluff?
In my opinion, you should primarily be bluffing at live low stakes for the purpose of converting a particular hand you are playing from a loss to a win. You ordinarily should not be bluffing to balance or merge your ranges (although there is an important exception to this rule--semi-bluffing).
In other words, I think it is incorrect to c-bet a flop you missed because "I would c-bet top pair, too." but c-betting that same missed flop because the caller(s) will fold if he didn't flop top pair+ is perfectly fine.
The characterization of live low limit, to me, means that our primary emphasis is overwhelmingly simply to get value from our big hands. Making plays to deceive the other players about the strength of your holding is largely (not entirely) unnecessary, and way more often than not, -EV.
The person I was speaking to intended, I think, tonsay all of this in an amusing way. I think he succeeded, but the important thing to me is that the extent to which the bingo characterization is seen as patronizing or condescending not obscure the fundamental truth behind what he said.