Oh jeeezus, here we go. I'm just talking about poker, pushing against the indoctrinated brunson-isms that so many people seem to have. That makes people uncomfortable. And rather than engage on-topic, they wanna label me as some kind of 'abuser' so they can put me in a box and ignore everything I say. They did it to Bill O'Reilly. The did it to Jesus. And now they're doing it to me.

I never criticized the way you played the hand. My point was that the hand played itself and you still saw fit to pat yourself on the back for making a great "adjustment". If that pumps you up, that's cool. I'm not angry about it. Just please warn me before another comment like that. I can only roll my eyes so hard.

From your seat, I don't think this hand demonstrates any pros/cons of being multi-way. I guess maybe you could say you got a slight benefit from the fact that one more person in the pot means one more chance for someone to make a worse two pair. meh.

It's not a great example of anything, unless we're talking about playing the hand from the V's perspective. And we seem to agree that it's bad. So the V has illustrated why playing passively multi-way is bad.

Thesis proven?

You're misquoting me there. I don't believe I've ever advocating sizing for one caller. Personally, I think 3-way pots are optimal, but I digress. I realize it's unrealistic to find a magic number that always gets the optimal number of opponents. But you can try!!

I'll bet anything you would have raised larger had you been able to do that hand over. That's kind of my point. It wasn't great that the hand went 5 ways, but you made the best of it. And if you were in that spot again, you'd try something else to get less than 5 ways.

Here's a good rule of thumb...Raise 10x minus 1BB for every hour before midnight.

I think we agree here. Not sure how we jumped onto the topic of limping. But since we're here, I think I've already conceded that a limped pot might be another exception to my thesis. Though I'm trying to avoid that discussion a little bit because I think there are alot of other things that can be talked about (like adjusting hand selection). And that's a rabbit hole that I think belongs in it's own thread. I'll just say that yeah, you can probably play almost any two cards profitably from almost any position when you're getting triple digit implied odds. There is a limit to this, but it's probably not going to come up in a game with a capped buy-in.

You really must be slacking in the mod-duties if you think I haven't spent the better part of this week providing substantive calculations, on this very subject, ad nauseum.

Besides....that upswing article summed it up so well....Your equity drops faster than your pot odds increase. That's so brilliant and so obviously true, I don't know what math you'd need to see.

Serious question, OP. Are you always this abrasive in your interactions with people? If everyone is labeling you as "some kind of 'abuser,'" which do you think is more likely, that everyone is deluded and you're not doing anything to elicit such responses, or that you are being patronizing and annoying in your posting style?

And for the record, it's not my job to read every post on this forum. We have a report feature for a reason.

Somehow people only see it as "abrasive" when it brings new information that challenges their previous understanding of things.

Why would someone report math?

"...They did it to Bill O'Reilly. The did it to Jesus. And now they're doing it to me..."

/thread

This thread has long sense run off the rails. Pity. There's some really useful content here to learn more about SSNLHE if you can ignore the cruft.

But I just want to remark how funny it is that RagingOwl is accusing someone else of cherry picking a hand that's not representative of the general range. Indeed, flopping top two with Q9s is not a representative case at all, but you probably shouldn't cherry pick, challenge someone else to come up with an example, and then act unhappy that they cherry picked. Pot, kettle, etc.

All hands begin multiway. Pre flop is fundamentally the same as any other betting round. There is a pot (the blinds and antes) and players waiting to act who are still in the hand.

All profitability stems from the decisions you make in the environment as a whole. To say that multiway pots hamper our skill edge is non sense because we are ALWAYS PLAYING MULTIWAY so our skill edge lies within this arena.

Let’s assume a 9 handed table and we are waiting to act UTG. Most stronger players will be playing a very tight range heavily weighted towards the best possible starting hands. Why is this? Because there are 8 other players who have not yet acted behind us and we cannot profitably play a wide range. Our decision to choose to construct our range like this is a byproduct of the hand itself being extremely multiway. Other, less skilled players who do not construct their ranges properly in this spot will tend to lose money to the rest of us who do construct our ranges properly, thus creating an edge for us that should see us make profit somewhere down the line.

This type of logic does not all of a sudden change once we get to the flop. No matter if we see flops turn or rivers 4 way 7 way or heads up, in position out of position the fundamental concepts of poker still apply. We strive to construct our ranges, and play ALL situations better than our opponents. If we play these spots better than our opposition, we will win money.

Now, are there hands and situations where we benefit from going multiway? Yes. Think about hands that will very often make near nut type hands and win us the pot very frequently if we hit (Nut flush draws, pocket pairs) We want lots of callers to give us sweet pot odds.

Spots where we might not like going multiway? Maybe our weaker raises that were intended to isolate a single limper but instead we pick up additional callers.

However, all we can strive to do as players is to react to what is happening and do our best to make profitable decisions. We can’t always play a 9 way pot with a nut flush draw and we can’t always get our AK heads up vs a whale.

Now I think I have answered OPs question on wether or not we would ever want to play in a multiway pot or not. The answer is sometimes we would prefer it and sometimes we might not prefer it.

HOWEVER, I think that multiway pots are great for strong winning players and it is because (as some have already suggested) frequent (postflop) multiway pots signal EXTREMELY weak games. It’s almost nonsense for someone to say they prefer to play in games that don’t go multiway because going multiway kills their edge. Really? So we want games where people are playing nearly perfect ranges, 3betting relentlessly and forcing heads up pots a lot? Sounds a lot like the online 6max games to me... What’s a decent winrate in the 200nl zoom pools these days anyway?

All sarcasm aside, we as (potentially) profitable poker players should be loving games where there are players willing to make horrendous pre flop errors against us on the regular. If you feel like you struggle in multiway pots and there is no edge for you, it’s simply because you struggle in that GAME in general and you should work harder to increase your edge on the player pool.

You guys have probably seen a fair amount of 2+2ers who were able to crush these types of low stakes live games for ridiculous win rates. Do you think all of that massive winrate came from only the heads up spots they played? Probably not.

Wat? My point pretty obviously here is that reading everything is not part of my mod-duties, and therefore not having read your other posts is not slacking therein, as no one reported them, hopefully because there was nothing wrong with them.

You seemingly deliberately misconstrue to attack strawmen, and yet you think that your posting is fine and "people only see it as "abrasive" when it brings new information that challenges their previous understanding of things." Perhaps you need to be a bit more introspective.

And of course my Q9s example was cherry picked. It was an example of exactly what you asked for an example of, a speculative hand that nonetheless had a range advantage and therefore leveraged the same into profit in a multi-way pot.

Stop moving the goal posts and refusing to listen. Your thesis is in no way new, and while often correct is not universal.

TTHRIC.