I haven't seen much discussion about villain profiling at 1/2 or 2/5 live. I've tried to do some searching, but haven't come up with much. I see a lot of descriptions like nit, tag, rec. fish, ABC so on and so forth and would like to know the main characteristics of each style of play. I'm wondering if this would be a good topic for COTM. I didn't know where to post this question, so mods please move to appropriate forum. Thanks.

Write it up and send it to one of the mods for a review. We'll then give it a slot to be posted.

Lol. As a total noob (about 25hrs at llnl) I am wholely unqualified to make such a post. I was wondering if somebody might be interested in doing this. I have read some of the other threads on profiling and still find them too vague. If anyone is willing to do this, I could answer any questions that would help the author make the thread more informative. Please pm me if this doesn't make sense. Thanks

I'm surprised there isn't a COTM about mental game/tilt management.

Profiling would be a great COTM. The best one I've seen for live is here, but it's rather old and exaggerated for effect. I might be able to write the OP for this topic, but I'm pretty busy over the next month, so if there's someone else interested, i'm def not laying claim.

OK, our last pre-planned COTM is up now. Anyone want to write one for February? Any topic requests you'd like someone else to write up?

Have we had one on playing AK? Seems like every other post is "I've got these sharp teeth and these big scary claws, and there's a little bunny over there in the corner trembling. What do I do?"

Playing AK does not seem like a COTM all by it self.
Many people who have trouble playing AK really just have trouble with relative hand strength and ranging people.

Both of which have been a COTM already I believe.

I think playing AK is a worthwhile discussion. There is a COTW in the micro FR forum. AbqDave, write it up.

question: is there a possibility that there could be a sticky for past COTM? ie, a thread that only has links to all of them. if thats a stupid idea, then disregard it. thanks

Check out the first post ITT. A link to it is in the "Best of LLSNL" sticky.

how about player profiling. like how a rec fish plays compared to a nit or abc or maniac. Or what general characteristics or playing style makes a player a "rec fish" or nit etc. and maybe a little about how to play most profitably against.

I think profiling, or just the way people collect reads in general, is actually one of the more prevalent leaks among users in this forum. You're focusing on stuff that for the most part doesn't matter and then adjusting incorrectly on top of it. Everyone can identify a "maniac" but very few people know how to optimally adjust, or even fully understand how a "maniac" actually plays.

There is a lot of variation within those styles. I made a 5k post like 18 months ago that discussed profiling to some degree, and how understanding a player's motivation for playing can tell you a lot about them.

Re: AK. I don't mind co-authoring -- I enjoy writing and it would be a good learning experience -- but would need some executive help. (Has IRTM done a COTM yet? I'd carry water for ya any day, brother.)

Re: player profiling, where I actually have ideas. I've been working for a couple years with my friend Bill the Analyst, who is published in the filed of neuropsychoanalysis, on a scheme for player profiling. He refuses to learn how to play poker, which is just as well, he would be awful. But after extensive discussion regarding why people play poker, and how that seems to correlate with how they act, he suggested you might could explain a lot of variance by rating players in two dimensions: whether they have a high degree of aggression or not, and how directly or passively they express that aggression. He drew a grid on a piece of scrap paper: high aggression/direct, high aggression/indirect, etc.

The scheme has some face validity, and Bill says there may be some depth to the scheme, meaning it's meaningfully correlated with the villain's psychology. I think it's actionable. So:

Low aggression/passive: typical 1/2 calling station
High/direct: maniac
High/indirect: this player type definitely exists but we don't have a name for him. But its important to think about, especially in light of all the buzz recently about "check/raising is the new cbet." C/R is a passive aggressive play that will appeal to this personality type. (Bill has a chapter in his first book about this personality type. )
Low/direct. This has always been the hangup, at one point Bill even suggested that somebody like that wouldn't want to play poker. But this might just describe a solid TAG. I really liked the discussion in Schoonmaker's book about the importance (and rarity) of controlled aggression in poker. Bill, who was a halfway decent football player back in the day*, suggested that poker might be like football, where the key to success is ball control. Gotta have balls, and gotta be able to control them.

This is the sort of topic that would be most appropriate for the psychology forum of course, food for thought anyways

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*No, he's not SupBro, and that's why he shouldn't learn to play poker, because I fear he will become SupBro

Isn't there a link to this exact thing already in CoTM? I think the flag has already been planted in the profiling moon.

Yeah I did a thing on player profiling but it wasn't about player types per se. Whether there's anything to add to the nit/station/lag scheme is open to question. Helmuth had his mouse/elephant/eagle thing, which is ok I guess, came across a tad cheesy

You could do profiling and I'll do anti-profiling

I feel like this thread already has a great AK post from Sol Reader in the best of thread. I like the idea of how to play exploitive strategies based on player profiles, motivations, etc. I was also thinking maybe someone could do something about not playing scared, being unafraid of variance, and playing lag. Feel like half the threads in here include spots where people are afraid to take the most profitable lines preflop and post due to fear of variance.

Scared money was one of the first COTMs we ever had.

As for playing LAG, it would be far more useful to have a COTM on the fundamentals of why nits win, than it would be to have a COTM on how to play LAG.

I think both playing AK and player profiling is very good options for COTM. Both topics are highly relevant when we think of todays games, and could possibly very well generate some good discussions.

Agree with Venice that playing AK is worth a discussion,even if the topic to someone maybe seems discussed through. Especially if we want to not only scratch the surface here, but go more deeply.

-How to play AK against different player types, how stacksizes matters alot, wich kind of table dynamics favours playing AK hard and fast, wich kind of table dynamics we maybe should slow down and so on. In wich kind of contexts should we be extra concerned about AKs reverse implied odds? In wich kind of contexts are we comfortable stacking off with AK preflop? I could go on forever.

The problem with that though is you could pick just about any hand and have the same discussion. Really it would be a COTM on how to play period. AK isn't some magic hand you play differently from every other hand, it just happens to be one of those premiums that usually doesn't flop well. Ill do a COTM on how to play JJ and 78s if that's the way were going.

Thumbs down on AK COTM. Just my two cents though.

^Yep. Cool thing about this forum is we avoid discussion about fancy plays and optimal lines, and emphasize thinking.

Some people would enjoy reading an article about AK, likewise one about JJ. If at the end of the day, that person said "Hey wait a minute... it was basically the same article both times," then we have really taught that person something of value.

We've had some really cool threads on AK, remember one about whether to call an all in shove preflop that I thought was interesting. It really boiled down to reads and ranges but I still liked it. You never know what will make that little cartoon light bulb pop up over somebody's head.

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Hmmm.... what about strategic thinking? Playing for pots vs playing for money vs playing for stacks. I think it's a tad difficult to focus on making money, that's kind of the 20,000 foot view and it doesn't inform our tactical decisions very well. Playing for pots is a strategic framework that typically leads people to make bad tactical decisions. The question is, whether playing for stacks leads people to make good tactical decisions.

I just posted a thread about River decisions in multiway pots with paired boards. It might be wise for me to figure out what COTM means before I make a suggustion though.

Another suggestion: "How to teach someone to play poker." Your girlfriend wants to learn how to play, what game do you choose, how do you get her started. (I always had this fantasy of training up and staking an all-female poker team. Dunno if there's any money in it, but dang, how cool would that be?)