I think we have a prop bet.

This is a great post about live vs online

If an young aggro asian asks you how much you have left after you lead river, because he desperately wants to bluff you, even though he's representing ****-all and you are going to beat him into the pot, what false tells should I give off and/or things should I say or do, in order to induce him to spaz raise? (I tried to size to induce a river spaz, 325 into 525 with 750 behind on a river in which a flush draw missed.... maybe it was too big.)

I'm not going to comment on the strategy except to say that life is great when I can making a living off the self-appointed SDC's at the live tables alone.. without even taking in money from donks or online profits...

In the end poker is all about getting it in when you have equity/ev/odds/best hand/whatever you want to call it and making sure opponent has been manipulated into putting the most chips possible into the pot when they're behind, there are many different styles to get there whether it is to play tight, loose, aggro, maybe even passive at times if others will do the betting for you. There is no one style that crushes all types of games and any discussion that involves players who are preaching a gospel type style, you know that these players are exploitable as hell.. ;-)

Last night for eg. this SDC trashtalker who was aggro and put the table on tilt went up 800bbs crushing the table, but at the end of the night he left with a nice profit of 300bb while he doubled me up 4 times but nobody ever took notice of me because I was neither tight nor loose. And I was doing the basic things online like squeezing, 3betting, 2barrels, etc but just not often enough to attract attention, while not tight enough for people to run bluffs at me. I gladly let this SUPER DONK CRUSHER take all the attention stacking dudes that he put on tilt because I knew sitting 2 behind him his chips will flow to me and by the end of the night I'd be the biggest winner. I even started folding some hands that have a lot of equity when I was up against shortstack fish because I wanted to save my stack to get the MAXIMUM POSSIBLE from Mr Super Donk Crusher...

SDCs are great to have at the table.... they will give you more chips than anyone else will if you know what to do... and let them brag about their monster $140/hr winrate... I'm not even someone people would think of as a big winner if you were to poll people around the room but I just quietly chug along with probably a higher winrate than most most of them.... usually thanks to the confident SDCs.. One time I even had a SDC tell me that I should "go to TWO PLUS TWO and learn how to play poker" after I trashtalked him back, to which I replied "what's that.. some video gaming site or something? I know how to play facebook poker is that hard..." and he laughed and called me a donkey.

5 minutes later I was having trouble stacking the mountain of 300bbs worth of chips from him...

if there any good players at your table you'll get eaten alive playing 50% of hands. the reason guys play so many hands when they play live has nothing to do with strategy, its because they're bored and they want to have fun/gamble/**** around. that's why live games are so soft and any breakever-winning online midstakes player will demolish midstakes live games playing TAG. i mean some guys do well playing a ton of hands but thats because everyone else is terrible, its far from the best strategy

playing 15% of hands live is incredibly boring, it's like 7-8 hands an hour. nobody wants to do that even though its optimal. live players aren't trying to eek out every last cent of profit like we do online, they check down, dont vbet thin, chop blinds. its a different mentality.

Playing 15% definitely ISN'T optimal full ring. I'd say somewhere between 20-25% is typically best (erring on the lower side).

wouldn't be the same for both live & online tho.

Of course not. Live games typically play more passively (although I'm really sure this is true for full ring games, geez those games are nitty online), and not to mentioned filled with 5-6 short stackers.

i think 30 vpip is reasonable live in a game where limping is frequent.

am i off base here?

nope, could be even higher if stacks are deep and deepstacked fish has/have entered the pot and you're in CO or BTN.. I'm almost playing 100% of the hands in this situation if theres no raise. or if fish has entered pot and you're 2 off button both 150bbs+ deep just make a smallish iso raise and you're HU or 3way with position vs fish postflop.

This is one of the best posts i've seen on live play. It must be read and reread.

Thanks!

It's good to know people are still reading this.

And if there are more DCAs and DCIs out there (Donkey Crushing Adjustments and Donkey Crushing Ideas), please share!

Another thing that a true 2p2er could do: Make hand "quizzes" a la Harrington on Hold'em, that demonstrate the differences between live and online poker.

3bet raise with QTs. They don't want to play huge pots with their starting hands, and in live play your limp/3bet line is more representative of AA and respected. 75% of the time they fold. Ofc, this best if effective stacks are deep.

A more interesting subject that I dont think has been tackled has been cleaning house at 10/20 - 25/50 NL live. I think a lot of online players want to approach 10/20 - 25/50 live as though its a midstakes online full ring game - but its not. Its got the looseness of 1/2 - 5/10 NL live but the post-flop play is a lot better.

Another difference is live 3-betting. A lot of 3-betting live is ridicolous squeeze plays and limp reraising. I see this a lot at 5/10 and 10/20 and almost never at 1/2 - 2/5 (where no one even thinks your allowed to reraise preflop!). At 20/40 and 25/50 people seem to have much more accurate pre-flop aggression, very similar to online.

I also see a lot more decent LAG bullys that attempt to buy every pot. At 1/2 - 2/5 they are awful usually. At 10/20 - 25/50 they can hand read and are actually tough to play against.

Another differences is the depth of stacks. Everyone is deep 10/20+ so theres a lot more 200+ bb deep poker. Some online players dont play deep and they get uncomfortable in live deep spots.

I think a TAG and LAG style can both win, though I dont think anyone can get away playing too tight and straight nut-peddling is no longer a viable strategy at 10/20+.

Any of you guys play high stakes live have thoughts? I currently play 10/20 NL live exclusively (with decent results) but whenever I try to move up to 20/40 NL I struggle. Small sample size, so perhaps bad luck perhaps im not playing optimally, but it definitely isnt like playing online full ring (which is way way tighter).

bump for more discussion
theres two sides of this - OPs "super loose and making a lot more than 10BB/h" and the other, which is "optimal to play TAG, making 10BB/h"

fwiw i live in vancouver too, just starting to play live. the past 3 times ive played, ive played super loose, similar to what OP described and find it very profitable to bluff/value bet thinly/steal pots. hear whispers like "wow this guy raises/plays every hand".. obv use it to my advantage, targeting specific players.

[ ] sample size obv, but i'd like to hear more on the TAG vs SDC style (adapting to your table too of course)

You are so right about DE 9. It's almost a macho thing at the table, like they think "I started the raising, so I can't just give up now." I struggle with how to effectively exploit this. There was an excellent thread in HSNL a while back about 3 betting preflop with AJs, where the argument for was basically for value and the argument against was this is a great hand to see in position against multiple players. There was no consensus at the end of the thread.

One of the things to do is almost never slowplay your big pairs. If they are almost always calling your 3 bets, then you should be 3 betting with practically all your big pairs. I disagree about 76s, and think that this is a perfect hand to reraise with. Yes you are likely getting called, but if they whiff the flop you can still take it down with a c-bet, and you won't get into too much trouble if they play back at you. The hands I struggle with are hands like AQ, AJs, 10's J's, because these opponents only 4 bet AA and KK, so when they call your 3 bet, they can easily have AK, QQ, JJ which crush this range. I still don't know the right way to balance these hands in my 3-betting range, and would love some more discussion on this topic.

If you aren't playing exploitable poker at the live tables, you are doing it wrong. I think I would be the easiest player to play against if they would actually think for a second about how I play. fortunately, they don't. Sklansky talks about this in hisNL book, that somewhere out there in math land, there is a perfect unexploitable strategy, but those guys wouldn't do nearly as well as the successful live players. It's all about trading mistakes. You should make small ones, they should make big ones.

That was not a SDC.

i crush live.

i'm not reading all the posts but there was a debate somewhere about being able to vpip like >60 or something profitable. I'm not sure I've ever vpip'd <80 live. In a limped pot I'll play ATC - 82o Q7o whatever - HJ+. I think maybe the difference is that here the live games tend to play much deeeeeeper than in the states. I think I'd never played 1/2 or 2/5 in the states where you could buy in for >100bb, but here there are places where you can buy in 300bb at ~1/2 and it's common for mid-stakes games to have no maximum buy-in, not joking.

I play in a 5/5 no limit game in Astoria NY almost every night where the action is almost non stop and after an hour or two the chip stacks get deep. Does anyone have any stats on a hourly rate a good player can expect to make in an action driven game like this?

I do pretty well at live 2-4. I have noticed the players have changed a lot. Most are regulars but bad. Before noone used to fold bottom pair, then everyone tightened up and was bragging how they folded AK to a reraise preflop.
Some players became pretty good, too. Now i think tehyre starting to converge towards a balanced strategy but they are still leaning towards either being too calling station or too nitty.

Just identify what each player is like and play accordingly.

Yes live is very different than online, "fishy" lines work live. You can check call, check raise your sets all day and build big pots with them against 90% of the players.

Also, i usually assume a player never bluffs unless i see him do it the first time, and id say about 60% of players dont bluff.

If the game has new nonreg fish tighten up and play ABC imo. Youll level yourself making plays while ABC wins just as much. With the regs obvously you have to vary your play and keep them guessing. The first idea they have of you is probably the one thatll stick. You can play ABC poker for your first 3 sessions then 3bet 86 for the next month but theyll still think of you as that nit.

Why is it more profitable to slowplay sets/monsters live, if people arent folding and are calling you down with TPGK, and also arent valuebetting thinly? Why would you risk them checking back?

I think if you are asking this question, especially with regards to 1/2, you are already starting to overthink your opposition. At that level the obvious is generally the answer.

over all great post.

Great Thread! I play some 3-5 NLH fullring games that are very soft here in WA. Table buyin is $200 min-$500 max, but most of the people playing these games have a lot of money to burn, so effective stack sizes are often between 100-300 bb. It's rare that there is less than a combined amount of 3k on the table.
WA law also says that no bet can be more than $500. But this doesnt stop a lot of pots from being 1-2K, and occasionally more.
I wouldnt even bother to play 1-2, seems like a waste of time. Not only do the larger amounts of money usually keep the super maniacs away, but when you win money its more than twice as much!
The first time I ever played the game, I could not believe how dramatically different it was from Internet poker. A $25 raise commonly attracts 3-5 callers, and on occasion the entire table will call such a raise. Its also not uncommon to see a full table of limpers. Playing internet strategy will probably not make much money in a game like this, bets and raises can often mean something totally different.

I would say most of the players are Weak Tight, with the occasional calling station or maniac thrown in. It's also pretty rare that I've seen another good player at the tables here, which is an added bonus. I'm learning quickly on how to play these people, but this is also encouraging me to really begin to study poker in a much more serious way, in order to ensure my future success.

In the last 2 weeks, I have made about $2700 in 16 hours of playing.
This is roughly $169 an hour, or roughly 34bb per hour.
I'm pretty sure that this is consistently doable.
Most of the players are fairly straightforward, unimaginative, unobservant, and rich.
No one ever seems to notice when another player has tightened up or is a calling station or is very straightforward, very unobservant in general, and they seem to be there usually for entertainment and bragging rights.
Luck hasnt been much of a factor, either, I have won many pots by pressuirng my opponents weakness in a particular hand.
If you are used to playing for micro stakes online, I would advise playing live carefully at first, it takes some getting used to, when people can bet several hundred dollars at you and still have a thousand behind them, and when their actions mean something totally different than you may be used to online.

Probably what has helped my a lot recently was the idea that in these type of games a lot of pots are completly up for grabs no matter what cards you hold, it's simply a matter of playing your opponents. Make sure you mix up your bet sizes a lot, its amazing how many times people are suspicious of the occasional small bets pre and post flop, they all seem to think you must be slowplaying the nuts lol!. Once you build your table image up a bit it's usually smooth sailing for the rest of the session.