I have read about games like this, in which people routinely open for 10 or 12 big blinds and get multiple callers. It is said to be a common feature of live 1/2, so hopefully a lot of you have experience with these games.

Personally, in the times I have played 1/2 at casinos or in home games, I did not encounter this level of pre-flop raising. And I still have not, personally. But my buddy who lives across the country told me about the game he regularly plays at a local strip club, and that is exactly what he described.

Max buyin is $300, but effective stacks range from there down to $100. Typically it's a full ten seat table.

My friend likes to see flops and sort of bob and weave from there. He says he's doing fine playing this way, but it's hard for me to understand how you can go and see flops with speculative hands when your SPR is constantly so low. Having multiway pots helps, I guess, but it still seems like the implied odds are cut way down, and variance jacked way up.

I wondered about playing really nitty and pushing premium hands to the limit, but he said "these players are maniacs, but they're not idiots". He says it might work at first, but pretty soon people will peg you for a rock and everyone will fold on the rare occasion that you enter the pot.

My thoughts in response to this were, first of all, if there's already 20 or 30 big blinds in the pot by the time action comes to you, it's not so bad if everyone folds and you take down a decent medium size pot with no risk (albeit a lot of tedium). But secondly, if it becomes clear that no one will give you action, why not start adding in some smaller pairs, some suited Broadway cards, maybe even medium suited connectors to your opening range? At least until you get caught when someone sees your T9s at showdown, at which point you can tighten back up.

But as I say, I've never played a game like this, so this is all theoretical. It does remind me of a low M situation in tournament, except that you aren't going to get blinded out.

Thoughts?

There are poker tables in strip clubs?

I've been doing it all wrong for years...

If pots are multiway 40bb+ with like 90bb behind max, you need to show up with the best hand. You are looking for TPGK, TPTK, overpairs. Select preflop accordingly e.g 99+, AQ+, KQ.

Dump other hands preflop unless you get a good price on pockets and a great price on other hands.

You basically want to GII pre while short. This is a table I would probably limp/re-raise liberally (something I extremely rarely do) at with these conditions from EP and just jam overtop from LP. As WereBeer stated, select preflop accordingly.

And your buddy is a fish who thinks he's winning either because either a) he is because he's running hit or b) is delusional like most players and vastly over estimates his abilities and winnings

Yeah, I tend to think it is (a) because he is not nearly rich enough to sustain much in the way of losses, and he does not keep a bankroll. But of course I can't insult him by saying he is playing bad and getting lucky. Even when I try to gently give him advice, he is stubborn and defensive.

ETA: Not that it matters a huge amount, but I just want to clarify: people buy in for from 50 to 150 BBs, and of course some people run up bigger stacks after a while, especially with all the action.

It does have some similarities but it isn't exactly the same. Because blinds are small nobody is getting blinded out. As your friend noticed if you get a reputation is being nitty people just won't play with you when you raise, if you start raising too often people will trap with big pairs. Still, with big raises and low stacks playing tight is right. Your looking for hands that will flop hands your willing to move all in with, with the occasional speculative hand thrown in from late position when the situation is good. If the raises are really big and stacks really short there may be no good situations at all even for set mining.

One thing to keep in mind for most of these games is that there are often wildly divergent stack sizes. That creates complex situations where you might call with speculative hands that are an easy fold against the short stacks or when the deep stack forces you to play more carefully. If have $400, you raise to $15 with JJ and get two callers, one with $50 and one with $400 you have a problem with an over pair on the flop. Your happy to get it in against the $50 but not against the $400 stack. The deep stack will end up giving some cover to the short stack. Related problem happen when you flop a draw with another deep stack in the hand and a short stack betting. You end up calling with draws hoping the deep stack will lose some money if you hit, money that ends up getting donated to the short stack when you miss.

+1 to this, anyone who likes to see a lot of multiway flops for like 20% of their stack size and then 'bob and weave' is a fish.

If it were one of those online games where they scramble the table every hand anonymously, and the typical action was still as described, I would totally do what you're saying. But I am willing to believe that someone could quickly get a reputation as a rock. Therefore, if villains start instafolding to our shoves so they can just get on to the next series of ten or twelve hands we fold pre, where they can play their usual donkey game without interference, shouldn't we start opening up our range to take advantage of the fold equity from our nitty table image? Then tighten up again if we get caught with something questionable AIPF?

ETA: With that wider range I'm advocating, I would limp from EP and then shove with the whole range, unless the shove was not enough to push everyone out by the time it got back to me, and I was stuck with something on the lower end of my range. Limping and then folding occasionally would also mix up my image and help keep people from being afraid to raise a pot that I had limped into from EP.

I agree completely with all of this. But doesn't that then point to playing relatively short as the optimal situation in this game, so effective stack size is consistent? I know playing short is generally disdained in these parts, but i'm a big believer in trying to avoid awkward SPRs. I would call myself pretty good at playing a truly deep stack where only a tiny percentage gets in pre-flop, but if it's sort of that middle zone with wildly varying effective stacks, I'd rather just play shortish, even though it's obviously really tedious.

Look, either we're playing a bunch of fish or we're not. The game as described is a fish game full of fish who might verbalise the fact that the table rock is playing a hand and then they will call anyway because they can crack the rock's bullets with 87ss. I simply don't believe that these guys go 4 ways to every flop for 10% -> 20% of their stacks but also automatically all fold as soon as someone playing correctly tries to get into a pot with them.

Grunch.

Wow. It took me several tries to read OP as anything other than

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I think this is discussed in Theory of Poker (the wild game, not the location). In any case, there is no "see a flop and go" from there if SPRs are that low.

I think I'd start by determining how many hands you have to play in order to not get the field tightening up too much. I'll guess one in six, but your guess is probably better than mine.

Flopzilla lets you choose hands by HU all-in equity. The top 16% of hands are:
55+
A8o+, A5+
KTo+, K9s+
QJs

That's about 1/6 of all hands.

Ideally, we'd like to l/rr but that'll get transparent pretty quick. It would be interesting if people started playing really tight after our limp. Irony indeed.

Once people do start adusting, I think we have to either limp/call or even limp/fold sometimes. Yes, that would be throwing away a BB every so often in order to keep the golden geese laying. I'm not a fan either, but I think the ability to l/rr is so profitable it's worth some investment.

If l/rr ever got everyone to fold, I'd l/rr with a polarized range. If we always see a flop, obviously only with the top end. I'd l/c with the others. And maybe throw in a BB donation every once in while when it seemed like it would get maximum advertising value.


I have no idea how I'd maintain enough focus to actually act in turn, count the pot, or any other, you know, poker playing. Also, I suspect my overall EV would be strongly negative, no matter how juicy the game.

Case2, great post, thank you (and LOL at the first part). What do you have in mind for that polarized range?

I hear you on how boring it would be. But it's either play as you describe, or find a different game, right? My friend has no car, and this place is in his neighborhood. Plus, no rake (just dealer tipping, and the occasional lap dance, apparently).

The bottom ~6ish% would be KTo - KQo, A7s - A5s, A8o-A9o, and 55.

Top 6ish% would be 77+, AQo+, ATs+

If we're not auto-jamming every flop, it might be better to choose hands that are easier to determine ahead/behind on the flop. For instance, 22 might be better than A8o to limp. With 22, we have an easy decision to jam or fold OTF, while A8o might well be more of a guess. But that's just speculation on my part.

So you're talking about potentially jamming the flop rather than pre? Or then "if we're not auto-jamming every flop" then we're making decisions on the flop? I thought this was just what most everyone had agreed was a mistake on my friend's part?

My friend really is a very smart guy who has a lot of experience playing poker. But his bias is toward qualitative rather than quantitative approaches to problems. He dismisses my argument as "reductionist". It reminds me, really, of the advent of sabermetrics in baseball (as made famous in the movie Moneyball), and the debate this engendered between these "quant" analysts and the old school guys who made decisions by "feel". The quants won that argument, although in football it is still a much more open question.

But what occurs to me is that so long as no one playing this strip club game is taking a "reductionist" approach, it may very well be true that my friend is relatively consistently winning. He's playing it wrong, but probably less wrong than the other players. And with no rake, it's a zero sum game, so "less wrong" means winning. I submitted to him that if, say, three of us "reductionists" came in and played regularly, we'd deviate the profits our way, and he'd go from winning to losing, albeit perhaps losing more slowly than the other regulars that predated us.

But then that made me wonder if the other players would continue to play the same in such a case. If a third of the table is essentially disrupting the table culture this much, mightn't they stop playing, or at least stop making these huge raises and multiway flat calls?

In any case, it does seem like it would be safe for one player of ten to be a "reductionist". The others might still get annoyed (this is always what happened to me at live tournaments in my town, where I'd use correct Red Zone strategy when everyone's M was <5 and everyone else was taking flops and decrying my "terrible" play, explaining away my consistent cashes as my being a "luckbox") but they wouldn't be completely disrupted.

Wait, wait, wait. You're telling me there's a poker game in a strip club and THERE'S NO F*****G RAKE?!

Straight up, you're just messing with us now, right? Lemme guess, this place is right next to the place that sells the best burritos on Earth for, like, $2? And around the corner is that place that sells gives out free loaner Porsches?

Ahem, anyway. Moving on.

When I talk about making decisions on the flop, it's because we haven't been able to get it all in pre. Either we chose to limp/c this time or we limped and somehow it didn't get raised, or we open raised ourselves and no one was kind enough to 3b for us.

I think the feedback for your friend was that he should be trying as much as possible to a) play really tight and b) gii pre. This strategy has the side benefit that it doesn't require a whole lot of attention be paid to how V's are playing. It's not that we can avoid all decisions post, just that we're mostly trying to gii pre and our decision OTF should mostly be jam or give up. We're not trying to see a (relatively) cheap flop and outplay V's post.

I think it's prolly best to just throw cover out the window and l/rr with only super premium hands until it's clear that people are adjusting. Since your friend won't play very often at all, V's may simply not think too much about it. If they do, add in some lesser hands until a reasonable balance is achieved: sometimes V's fold, sometimes they call.

Choosing stronger hands preflop helps combat a low spr. Also, in a game as described, I'd imagine people would start to get 200-300+bb deep very quickly, changing the pace of the game. You can now play T9s in LP for $20-30 raises if we're $400-600 eff a bit easier.

Never seen quite the games you speak of, at least in the past 3~ years. Although, it is common in 1/2 to raise to 10-15 and get 4+ callers.

Even if the short stacks are easier targets, they have less money to win. You have to stack a $50 stack 8 times to make the same money as stacking somebody with $400 once. Unless the skill differential is huge in favor of the deep stacks it is more profitable to target the deep stacks rather then the short stacks.

More importantly, if you are playing well you won't have one of the short stacks for long. You can buy in for 50BB but once you win a couple of all-in hands you will be one of the bigger stacks. Trying to cash out and buy back in short again and again in live games just won't work.

The proper adjustment to wild tables is generally to tighten up and attack with premium hands. However, if the table is 8-10 guys who play together all the time and give each other action, being the only "rock" at the table isn't necessarily good. If people give you such a label and just decide to leave or exclude you (which might be allowed seeing this is at a strip club), then suddenly you can't win any money. Hell, you might just get kicked out of the club. I think it's best to go into a game like this "looking to have fun" so don't pull a hoodie over your head or wear headphones. But you can still loosen up a little and still be a big winner at the game, just really depends on how they play post flop. A weak top pair hand still makes money if middle pair is willing to tag along.

My friend just texted me to say that Huck Seed is at this table right now as I type this. I have never known him to be a liar but this is obviously quite a claim. I guess I can just barely believe it not only because my friend has never been caught telling wild tales, but also because as some people have noted it is kind of an interesting situation to have a poker table in a strip club.

So if anyone knows Seed or is even acquainted with him well enough to text or email him, please ask him about it. I would love to know what he thinks of this game, although I've got to think people are playing different with a celeb pro at the table.

Update: now my friend says his buddy just felted Seed by calling a shove with a straight draw and sucking out. LOL

Surprisingly, I don't automatically think this is a BS story. Seed always struck me as the type of person that would spend his personal time at these types of establishments. An OG wigger from way back in the 90's.

He also said someone else had to tell him who it was, which gives it more of a ring of truth.

ETA: For Seed's sake, let's hope he was just playing the game for a laugh, because if he's playing 1/2 for the money, he has fallen on hard times.