Quote:
Originally Posted by Huff Jenkem
Mpethy, I respect your opinion because it is well thought out and well expressed. I will say, though, that it doesn’t ring true in my experience. Many, many 1/2 games run daily in Las Vegas where players are nearly oblivious to previous bet sizing and where balancing is completely unnecessary. And if you happen to find yourself in one of the rare games where players are paying attention and making good adjustments just move to another table.
I’d argue that anyone spending much time worrying about balancing at 1/2 in Las Vegas is focusing on a minor issue and ignoring a major one: your table selection is bad.
I don't want to overstate the degree of difficulty in 1/2 games in Vegas. They are pretty soft. However, I have not sat at a table this year at which I would characterize the majority of players as completely oblivious to variations in bet size.
I have hundreds of hours at the MGM and the v, and I have also played at aria, Wynn, trop, ph, and bellagio. The games are essentially the same all up and down the strip. The average open raise size has come down to 4 or 5 bb, raises bigger than that stick out like a sore thumb and are far more likely to fold around than a smaller size.
It is true that there are usually multiple weak players at the table, and that some of them are loose passive. But I would estimate that all up and down the strip now, the average 1/2 table composition contains at most three loose passive fish who you can routinely take to value town with top pair top kicker. I am 100% certain that at my tables this year, in all hands I have seen played, that top pair top kicker loses money in hands that are played for three streets of value.
To be candid, I think there is a lot of ego involved in this discussion. I don't say that lightly. I say that because in my coaching, I have coached a lot superb players who played mid to high stakes. By the time they got to me, they had mastered the fundamentals and most advanced concepts andvwere looking for comparatively small leaks. In nearly every instance, what I found in their databases was that their biggest remaining leak was underestimating the bad players at the table. They would say, "oh, this guy is a fish, he will call with third pair," or whatever, and then, strangely, the fish in their database actually only ever called with monsters. What I learned from studying the play of all those expert players was that their egos sometimes colored their perceptions of what the weaker players would do.
It is the dame sort of thinking I see in this thread. You think you can raise to $16 with AQ, flop an ace, and take some loose passive to valuetown who called you with A3 and will put his whole stack in. Anybody who thinks this sort of thing happens anywhere on the Vegas strip often enough to be considered anything other than a fluke us completely delusional.
It DOES HAPPEN. I'm not saying it doesn't. What I am saying is that if you come to the games I play in and play a strategy designed to exploit the occasional player whose stack you will get in that circumstance, you're going to be leaving a lot of money on the table.
Now, it could very well be that the games here in Vegas are tougher than elsewhere. You guys COULD be playing in games so soft that you are the only player at the table capable of figuring out that big raise equals big hand and small raise equals medium hand. Our games could be that different. I happen to think, though, that our disagreement is one of perception. That we are playing players of comparable skills and tendencies, and describing them differently.
This is no accident. I have way more respect for most fishy ayers than any other comparably experienced player who has not learned it while going through his database with me. The reason I have this respect for those players is because I have come to understand that most people we call fish are:
A. Smart people;
B. Very often smarter than us;
C. Who KNOW that they are making mistakes, and can usually tell you exactly what mistakes they are making;
D. Who purposely make those mistakes in small pots;
E. Because they have different goals than 2+2ers; and
F. Whose quality of play tends to vary directly in proportion to the size of the pot.
<shrug> I don't expect you guys to believe me, I guess (though I hoped) The only people I have ever been able to convince that their biggest leak is underestimating fish are the players I have been able to show it to in their database.