The remarks on relative strength in particular helped me prepare for a game this week. I picked the perfect time to call an UTG raise with 64s, hit a well concealed straight on the turn, and doubled up against an opponent who couldn't get away from what must have been some kind of broadway pair.

In the hand I was quite confident that my opponent put me on anything but what held. I had been playing snug verging on nitty for two hours. My problem is I still don't really know what my opponent had other than that he liked his hand and a reasonably dry flop.

I was playing what I think is a fairly standard line - that an UTG raise in a weak game is two big cards, either two broadways or a pair 99+. After I turned the straight I kind of stopped caring whether my opponent had an overpair, two pair or a set. I was only thinking about whether he'd call the jam based on how I'd been playing.

Am I OK executing based on this kind of standard line, or am I in trouble if I know more about my own image than my opponents' tendencies? I feel like I might be skipping level 2 thinking and concentrating on level 3.

^^ you should be just as aware of villains tendencies. I.e. they dont stack off lightly, meaning you wont get paid if he has an overpair, etc.

It's impossible to be on level 3 without knowing level 2 first. You basically described how villain should see your image, if villain was a competent, thinking player.

You have no reason to believe that is the case though. Level 2 thinking would give you an idea of whether or not villain was good and adjusting to how you play, but since you have no read on that you have no idea whether he's going to give you respect and fold his overpairs etc or whether he isn't aware of how you've been playing and will call you down with any pair.

Which makes your "level 3" thinking entirely irrelevant and your play entirely level 1.

Dude, this isn't Inception.

I want to argue back that no, I was watching this guy for hours and I believe that I did have some sense of how he saw me because I was playing tight in a loose game and he was making the usual "Uh oh, here he comes" type of comments you hear when a tight player bets.

But every time I try to think it through it falls apart, and that makes me think you're right and all I'm doing in this spot is hand selection.

Think this was a bit of a leak of mine for awhile. Even HU vs LAGs, I blindly followed the 10x rule for pp's and 20x rule for sc's every time "because Bart Hanson said so" (and, uh, he's better than me) without thinking about it deeper. Getting better at set mining the strong narrow-ranged tags and not the lags (unless occasionally if I'm in position and can use my image to steal on dry boards some to offset).

I take a slight bit of issue of games being sooo nitty that it's only sets that call when when stacks go in. In fairness, you did qualify the condition first. I just don't think I've been in a game in years where the table was so nitty that 2 pair, combo draws, often overpairs and sometimes TPTK won't get it in 100bb's effective by the river if not sooner. Then again, most times it's a 5-7 way flop.

But I think your rant will be helpful to many. Thanks venice.

LMAO +1

Bart mentions the different situations when it's not profitable to set mine, even getting proper odds. the classic one is when you are OOP, and Villian is good and laggy, and if you hit your set, you are'nt getting paid anyways, because V has a weak range usually. I remember a hand Bart discussed (can't remember the episode) that he played w/ Bobby Hoff where he called OOP PF w/ a small pair, and why it is a horrible spot, even when you start with the best hand vs a good player. If he can put on the brakes (good lag), it's easy to pass up. target the easier spots at the table. you want to set mine the guy who only rasies QQ+ PF.

if your game is so nitty Vs need a set to get it in, i suggest finding a better game, btw.

This, or

be that good laggy guy who knows how to put on the brakes post-flop and steal lots of pots IP.

Really enjoyed this. Especially enjoyed the observations that you can't blindly set mine, you need to make sure you can actually stack people when you hit. Thanks.

nice post venice. enjoyed the read

excellent comment about the ag in LAG/TAG

I totally disagree with this because against a very large % of the player pool we can easily fold because their bluffing/value bet worse range will be non existent or tiny on the river, NOT EVEN CLOSE TO 25%! In fact I think this logic is used by people who are very poor at estimating frequencies to make calls because, well, they prefer to see than face the possibility they were bluffed. I think it is psuedo poker thinking to arrive at the same decision a fish does.

Wow, same decision as a fish. Very interesting, cant wait to hear more.

I think Bart Hanson talks about this a bunch in his podcasts, LATB commentary, etc. In general, the majority of the players in the player pool at 1/2, 2/5, etc are not value-betting their medium-strength hands on the river. Thus, their river betting range is strongly polarized between monsters and air (and probably more weighted towards monsters). And check-raise bluffs in LLSNL are almost not-existent, so we can fold with confidence to check-raise bluffs and ignore pot-committment type issues.

This does not take away from the point about planning the hand around what it will mean for pot-committment on the river, however.

You make a valid point. If the bet is only $1 into a $10,000 pot on the river and the villain showed you his cards so that you know you're beat, you don't call because of the odds. In LLSNL, you need direct experience that the villain does c/r on the river as a bluff (several times) before even considering to call down light.

My point was more that if you've put yourself in the position of betting half your stack then folding on the river to a raise, you've made a mistake with your hand. If I have top set on the river against someone who was the pfr in EP, I'm not folding because there's a chance they could have raised with 86s and now have a straight.

And my point is that this is incorrect. Why have we made a mistake? It is totally possible that getting half our stack in was the most EV play because their calling range on every street is massive but their raising range is much smaller. How would that be a mistake?

And again the fact that they may have 86 is not important. It only matters whether it is 25% of their range or more in this spot.

Well... quesuerte does have a point. There are a lot of fish out there in SSNL-land that are so passive that if they call, call then wake up and shove over your river bet, if you have anything significantly less than the nuts you can fold getting 5-to-1 because you're not winning 15% of the time there; you're winning close to 0% of the time. Against some loose-passive fish that never raise without the nuts, bet/fold on every street with top pair is a pretty obvious winning strategy.

But I don't think venice10 really had that situation in mind, and in general he has a valid point. I say that because it seems like half the HHs that get posted in here, Hero is up against a reg and in a flop or turn spot--not even a river spot--where he doesn't know what the hell to do because, due to the fact he didn't plan his hand and used piss-poor bet sizing earlier, the SPR is now such that if he bets (or calls a bet Villain just made) he's pretty much committed.

But that highlights another problem: too many threads here are about pissing matches with other regs, not enough about extracting money from fish. None of us who take ourselves seriously as poker players like to admit that we don't know how to properly maximize profit from fish. It would embarrass us too much to admit it. So we say lolfish and then post threads asking advice on fighting regs.

Here's some advice on fighting the two or three other regs at the table: don't.

Also, a lot of us talk about ranges this and ranges that and ranges blah blah blah, but the frank truth is that a lot of us don't think about opponents' ranges at the table and honestly don't really know how to.

I have to admit that while 2/5 isn't super sophisticated where I play, but it is a very rare player that is going to call 3 streets with TPNK, which is what it takes to get to the river and put that much of my stack in where the SPR was significantly large on the flop. If you play where the majority does this, good for you. b/f each street.

So, I'd say getting into pots with regs or not is not really our choice. We should do it when it is +EV and not otherwise. Having said that, the point about killing fish is huge. It matters far more to our hourly than close spots with regs and is the reason I always bang on about sizing to extract the most EV from THIS HAND and nothing else. What you give up from being exploitable will almost always be far less than the EV you gain on that hand.

Yeah, but what I see a lot of is regs trying to setmine other regs from the blinds (thus, out of position) or calling a tight reg's open with eight-seven suited from the cutoff... and stacks are 100bb. It's just throwing money away to do stuff like that. Frankly it's fish behavior.

And then the other thing you see now and then (at least I do) is regs get into preflop/flop 4bet leveling wars with each other, and completely lose focus on where their profit comes from (the fish). But maybe I play with drunker players on average than most.

Also, people don't pay nearly enough attention to stack sizes. 100bb is not very deep, and anything less than that is damn shallow. your implied odds SUCK when your opponent only has 75bb in front of him. A lot of players badly underestimate how important stack sizes are when they decide to call that raise with a suited queen-jack.

Yep, all true. I've noticed pissing matches between regs alot lately, typically during down times like this (at least in St. Louis) where there just aren't that many well-funded fish around and the regs are bored. But we should be able to beat the regs too, and 3 or 4 betting them should not be a problem as long as you know how to exploit them and have a solid plan.

This is actually the main reason I think this forum is necessary, because the complexities of switching gears between exploiting all types of badfish, slightly proficient regs and decent regs all at one table (sometimes within the same hand) is a skill in itself and probably the most important one at low stakes since these spots are so prevalent.

Has this forum become as bad as the OP implied? Please tell me TT wasn't right...?

TT had a different vision of what forums should be about than I do, IMO. TT envisioned the forums as reference materials. They were a place where lots of information was gathered neatly and if there was a question and it was found to be relevant/new, posters would provide definitive answers. At best, there would be a containment area for lower content chatter, but the standards of the forum would still be quite high for posting. To me this is the source of the "Rapini Sucks" threads about B&M. The above vision is still for the most part the guiding principle for B&M.

My belief is that merely reading material and good answers to questions only takes someone so far in actually learning a subject. In order to master it, you have to put yourself out there and be willing to make some mistakes. That's how I got a lot better when posting in the micro FR forum. It requires to some extent to be willing to look foolish when wrong. Given the slow nature of live poker, it is expensive and lengthy to try out what you've learned to see if you understand it.

The results are often messy with an introductory forum like this is. The most knowledgeable posters move up to more difficult problems in another forum and they are replaced by people who are often quite green. The posts and threads are going to be unpolished to downright wrong. However, learning is going on. To encourage this process, I see my role as making sure this remains a safe, friendly environment to make mistakes in. That makes it easier to post and learn knowing that you won't be made to feel like a complete idiot as a human being. Being infracted or having your post deleted because it doesn't meet a high enough standard is a good way to take a potential valuable contributor and have them decide there's another activity they could be doing. Allowing conversations take place further builds the bonds of the community, even if the thought isn't high content.

The analogy that comes to mind is the difference between a golf driving exhibition and a driving range. People are going to watch people drive the **** out of the ball in the exhibition and be impressed. The driving range shots are going to be often ugly. I'm confident when comparing watching someone hit a drive and practicing driving yourself with people working on your swing as to which one will improve the person's play faster and more effectively.

So after tl/dr, the answer is this forum is a partial failure from TT's perspective (the activity far exceeds what he ever expected though). From the perspective of encouraging players to learn more about poker and help them improve, it is a success.

Poker is hard.