I'm reading Harrington on Cash Games and he talks a lot about randomizing play. If you have X hand and the flop is Y and your position is Z, bet 70% of the time and check 30%. That sort of thing. I like it in theory but I feel like people would catch on to me looking at my watch before every action. That, and I'd be self conscious about doing it.

Does anyone here actually use this method when playing live? Is there any better or less conspicuous randomizer? Maybe the suit of the first two cards?

Depends on the game played I think. I think you can play perfectly exploitable play at lower stakes and no one will usually pick up. Bomb your big hands and sweeten the pot with drawing hands.

At higher limits I like the randomization as it keeps people guessing. However it's a tertiary consideration after stack sizes and position IMO.

I have read Harrington and found this chapter intriguing as well. I can say from my experience in the low level games using your watch to randomize play is unnecessary.

I believe Harrington states in the book that working on eliminating your own tells is a much more effective use of your time.

If anyone has read "The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King" which talks about the big 15,000/30,000 games played with Andy Beal and some of the Big Game regulars, i think one of the chapters discusses Beal utilizing a strategy similar to this, utilizing the second hand to randomize play.

The chance of sitting in a live 1/2 game and having someone at the table that you need to balance against is near zero, sitting at a 2/5 is also near zero, just not quite a near. IME its not a big concern until you reach the 5/10+ level.

I agree with this along with an additional caveat. Harrington's formative cash playing years was facing the same relatively small group of players night after night. Against a group that has seen you play thousands of hands live, randomizing becomes necessary to keep your range wide during a hand. For most of us at 1/2 and 2/5, we rarely see more than 1-2 players that we recognize, let alone have 50-100 hours of play with. I agree this really isn't necessary until you've graduated from this forum.

Fair enough - I was just curious if anyone actually did it outside the known handfull of big game pros.

I will be in a situation soon where I'll be seated with many of the same people every night so I thought I might try it out, at least at some rudimentary level.

I play 2/5 in the summers and every so often someone will sit in who tries to do something like this and it tilts me like crazy, especially when they do it before they decide to fold pf. Please don't do it, 99% of the time its completely unnecessary in ssnl live cash

IMO, the words "balancing your range" should never be considered in a live game 2/5 or below.

In the very rare instance that you face villains where you need to balance your range, find another table.

Balancing your range is not a relevant concept when playing live up till 25/50.

Then don't use the watch, just pick a number from 1-10 in your head, when it's your turn, count to that number. The fact that you will sometimes count a little faster/slower will help randomize things just that much more.

(Novice Question ) - How does this actually work?

Lets say you want to do action A in a particular situation about 25% of the time and action B 75% of the time. Instead of trying to keep track in your head approximately how many times you've done each action (which would be pretty much impossible), you instead look at the second hand on your watch to randomize your play. In this case, if the second hand is between 0 and 15 seconds (i.e. 25%) you choose action A, otherwise you chose action B, or something to that affect.

I'm also in the middle of reading HOC and was wondering if anyone actually used this method at live 1/2.

Interesting that some think that balancing our range isn't useful at this limit; is that mainly because they usually don't play with the same pool of villains session after session? I find my poker room, which usually only has 1 to 3 1/2 tables going, is made up of the same fairly small pool of villains; i.e. almost everyone at the table is a "regular" (good or bad) and there are very few players we play with that are literally unknown. Or is it because we feel villains at this level aren't attempting to read our range? The one thing I really like about HOC so far is that Harrington doesn't treat his villains as clueless morons and thus tries to make a strategy (such as balancing) based on this, which I think would actually come in quite handy against quite a lot of the regular villains I play with.

But maybe I'm overestimating the thought process of my villains.

GormaybeI'mnotG

The only time I have actually done this is when I have KK or AA first to act and am deciding b/w limp/rr and just raising. At aggro tables I just go for limp rr, at passive calling ones I open raise. For the weird weak tight or half and half tables I occasionally use this method but I generally find just raising first in tends to be the better choice.

What percentages do you use? How often do you get KK or AA UTG that you feel you need to randomize it?

I always raise with those two hands UTG, I only go for limp rr when I get a definite read of someone squirming in their seat or reaching for a stack of chips first.

I only follow this strat at certain kinds of tables, and when I do, I use the 1st 10 seconds of the minute to limp. The other 50 seconds I open raise.

I also occasionally limp-rr other random hands to balance things out, though I doubt anyone is paying attention.

This is actually one of the great weaknesses of HOC. You get to about the end of book two and start reading the chapter about playing in weak games. Essentially he goes, "All the stuff you've been trying to absorb on balancing your ranges: Forget about it at 1/2."

It was almost as if he and Robertie submitted the first draft and Mason Malmuth came back with, "Our core buying group is people playing 1/2, WTF were you thinking?"

H&R: "We can rewrite the book more for beginners, but it will take us 6 months to do it."

MM: "I can't wait that long, just write a chapter on a 1/2 game and we'll tack it on at the end."

In better organized book, they would have gone over the basics and "standard" plays, then at the end introduced randomizing play. The excerpts from the latest book indicate they've organized it much better.

Even if it is with a group of regulars, I think a player at SSNL is better off with Shania to mix up their play than trying to remember, "now do I check 20% of the time here or 40%."

You will get AA or KK every 110 hands.
It will come UTG (at a 9 seat table) every 990 hands.
At 30 hands per hour, you will get it every 33 hours.
You claim to "randomize" it 16% of the time, so every 206 hours ...

Or in other words, to fool the other players (who must be playing with you 8 hours a day, 5 days a week)
once every 5 weeks (or maybe 1 time a month) -- you limp.

Of course, you also limp/rr with some other hands to "balance it out"

Ha, I haven't gotten that far in HOC yet!

The one thing I have noticed so far, especially with all of the example hands, is that the preflop raising size is totally off what's normal at my live table. It woulda been nice to at least have some examples where regular 5x - 10x BB raises are done (again, I haven't read the whole thing so maybe he addresses this later on).

Saying that the villain has no reason to balance his play because of the odds of being dealt AA/KK UTG is like saying because you have a 10BB/hr earn rate over a significant sample of play that you always make 10BB/hr every hour you play.

No, I am saying that AA/KK UTG occurs about ONCE every 990 hands. So at 30 hands/hr getting AA/KK UTG for any particular hour is a 33 to 1 shot. So you are "balancing" a 33 to 1 shot? Ya think there might be about 10,000 other things that happen much more frequently that could be balanced.

"Let's see 33 hours ago I did this, I guess I will do the same thing, and then when it happens again 2 days from now, I will "random" it up!" - LOL - "Oh, wait, I only random it 16% of the time, so I guess I will have to wait two more weeks before I throw 'em for a loop"

If AA/KK UTG occurs more than once in a session, play it the same freakin' way -- no one will believe you can possibly have it again.

It must be nice to play in a market where you are always playing every session with people you have never played with before. Oh wait that is too ridiculous for even you, the regulars must have no memory because sslnl players are lol bad... Am I right or what!

Seriously you are quiting LE to learn NL. If I remember correctly you are playing a lot of hours which means you are going to be booking a lot of hours with the same people unless you live a in huge market area, which if I remember right you don't. (Sorry I don't remember better, but frankly I pretty much ignore your posts since they tend to be ridiculous/illogical and hostile/confrontational)

If you are always playing BPPs from EP the same way you might as well print engraved invitations to the regulars saying "Please exploit me!". Do not under estimate the ability of the regulars to remember and/or recognize patterns and play accordingly.

A few things...

1)I don't believe I ever said anything about being UTG. I said when first in, which could mean anything from UTG-BTN. Of course my raising frequency increases dramatically from LJ-BTN so I rarely slowplay big PP in any case from there.

2)While most of the low stakes NL players I have played with probably have trouble tying their shoes in the morning, I have been consistently surprised by a few regulars who occasionally ask me questions about hands in the past or make an observation about something going on at the table. Some of the players do have memories, and they are certainly using them to modify how they play against you.

3)This isn't exactly a big part of anyone's NL game, and shouldn't be the deciding factor for anything. For most games where people will call with far worse hands this strategy should take a backseat to open raising; people will call with hands like KJo and be completely dominated. However! Against a mix of tight players and loose passives a standard opening usually creates a tough SPR and makes it easy for people to play perfectly against you for set mining purposes. Additionally if you just open raised large enough to deny those odds you're not getting good value out of your hand. Hence, sometimes you should limp-rr. My memory isn't good enough to recall how often I have done it, so I rely occasionally on randomizing it with my watch.

4)Oftentimes you can afford to limp speculative hands such as Ax suited or 33 (though KneedurDough would raise them! I feel out LAGged...) or 56o. Limp-rr helps balance out your range and can make opponents less likely to attack perceived weakness in your limps. Of course you can additionally balance out by limp-rr your speculative hands too.

5)Often there are so many bad players in play, you just want to play a wide range against them with any speculative holding, even OOP. They don't care what you have or your range or about balancing. You just want to be in a hand against them where you can use your post-flop edge to juice the pot.

However, there will be other more aggressive and observant players who will attack your limps, and you must "balance" between keeping them at bay and staying in hands with the weak players.

I hope that helps clarify things.

Playing with the same people 8 hours a day, they will see me raise AA/KK UTG once every 4 days. HUGE LEAK. EXPLOIT AWAY.

You seem awfully worked up about this. You sure you're still in the same location?