One last thing to add to my push for 2/5... If you do become a live pro you will never play 1/2 to make your rent. 2/5 is at the bottom of the totem pole. 5/10 seems to be the level to be pro at. 1/2 is a waste of time. (can you tell I dont like 1/2... it has become the .25/.50 game to me)

of course i think it is (or was meant to be, lol). but I'll stop derailing...

Very much looking forward to this thread. It will be interesting to see your views on online skill vs live, and your ease/difficulty adapting to the live game. Good luck/keep posting, I've enjoyed your posts in other forums.

Interesting story about thecollusion but very much looking forward to the rest of this thread.

Suggest you go to the GN from around 3am onwards. You can play some genuine lowstakes deepstack games there against weak opposition. Binions sounds similar. Avoid the Bellagio, Wynn and Aria. Great poker rooms and good food but you can find yourself at a table full of grinders all too often. Was there for a week in May.

**** I hate old people that play poker. Either they're huge useless nits, or ****ing cheaters.

That table I was at last night was just insanely loose passive. The table at The Palms the night before was similar, but not to the extreme as the table I was at last night. The table last night was seeing probably 50-60% of the flops as limped family pots with 5+ people, whereas the 1/3 table I was at at the Palms was maybe 30-40% limped pots by the flop, and maybe a smaller average number of players to the flop.

So my questions were stuff like this:

Clearly, if the table is going to be limping a lot, almost every high implied odds hand we see is going to become playable. But I am mostly thinking about the first 3 or 4 positions--am I going to be doing a lot of open limping from fairly early position? This just seems ridiculous to me. But the reason I don't normally limp/call 75s from early position is that it is going to be too hard to play out of position without the initiative when facing aggression from the preflop raiser. But at these tables I have a legitimate expectation that there will not be a preflop raiser much (at the Palms table) or most (at last night's table) of the time. I also have a legitimate expectation that I'll be getting huge implied odds with anything I limp.

It's clear to me that it would be profitable for a good player in such a game to just start limping pretty much everything remotely playable in a multi-way pot. What is not clear to me is that this would be the BEST adjustment to make.

Another adjustment that is especially vital for online players moving to a live game such as the one I was in last night--there is no such thing as an isolation play if, when you raise a limper, the normal outcome is for two or more people behind you to call, and then the limper calls, too.

You CAN argue that you can raise a wider range than normal and play it profitably. But you can't make plays that are designed to exploit the tendency of the people behind you to usually fold, and the tendency of the limper to either limp/fold or to limp/call check/fold the flop when the players do not have these tendencies. It seems like an obvious adjustment to make, to stop isolating, but go ahead and ask me how much I have lost in 4 days attempting to isolate limpers at loose passive tables. It's frankly embarrassing.

This is not really an adjustment issue, more of an observation: All of these people who are limping huge ranges preflop are not playing nearly as loose passive postflop.


In the meantime, I'd genuinely love to hear from the live guys--I know you guys have a lot more experience than I do with these tables where just by coincidence one table consists mostly of players who are just killing time and trying to have a little cheap fun by seeing a lot of flops. These seem like they could be the absolute best type of tables if you could optimize your strategy for playing them. I was a little lost, because you will never see a table like this online.

So what is your plan if the table turns out to be one like this.

I think the live 1/2 game is very interesting. I have seen 4 different games:

1. Day 1 at the V during the afternoon was a table of people trying to play a solid TAg style.

2. Day 2 at The Palms on a Saturday night was a game with a strong loose passive tendency, but not to the exclusion of any aggression.

3. Day 3 at the V again on a Sunday night was what I always think of as an "average game." There were 3 solid regulars (2 TAgs and one LAg), trying to carve up 6 or 7 somewhat poker educated players who clearly knew a little something about playing, but were heavily exploitable. The regs just dominated this table between them, so that the regs were playing aggro and the beginners were forced to adapt or die, and mainly died.

4. Day 4 at the unnamed room was a table that had such a strong preflop loose passive table that the majority of pots were limped with 5+ players seeing the flop.

That's a lot more variation in table conditions than online players are used to seeing. I haven't ever seen a day 4 table on FT or Stars, I probably have never seen a table like the one on day 2, either, and tables like those from day 3 at the V are what online players are talking about when we talk about the "good old days."

So far, this is the major adjustment from online to live. You can't sit at the table and expect to play your standard game. You can't really have a standard game. You can only have a standard playbook, that you pick and choose from based on the table conditions. This is much less of a concern for online players, who see a much narrower range of variation in table conditions.

My posts so far have seemed a little disjointed. I'll try to spend some time thinking through the adjustments I have made on each of these four nights and maybe find some common themes.

That is the first thing that online players say when they come here after playing live.

I made my "standard" raise of 3.5 BBs UTG and 5 people called!!!
or
What is the standard c-bet on a dry board after you opened preflop with a standard raise?

There are no standards and there really isn't a generic "live" player. They are all different. Better learn to classify your villians real quick. There aren't any "I don't have 10,000 hands logged on this player, so I take the standard line". You better get used to sizing someone up in an orbit or two.

$1/2 and $1/3 games in Vegas can definitely be very profitable. But yeah, if your only income is from poker, get to $2/5 as soon as possible.

The Venetian is a great room, but it seems to be where $1/2 nits go to die. The $2/5 game there is much softer. Also, Green Valley Ranch has a great $2/5 game, as well as a ridiculously loose and crazy $5/10 game on occasion.

****

The only thing I'd suggest is to adjust your opening raise up a bit. You don't have to throw in 6x the BB or more like everyone else, but 4x is a sold open.

You say the old couple was either colluding or very bad. Having played live for the majority of my career, I'd bet they were just very bad. And if they were colluding, I agree with you - stay and exploit it.

There seems to be some interest in the fact that I am playing 1/2. My basic plan is simple: Use 1/2 to figure out what is going on and to win the money I will sit with at 2/5.

As of last night, mission accomplished, and I'll be playing 2/5 tonight.

Now back to regularly scheduled programming.

This is the great debate that me and my friend have. I stopped limping up front because long term I think its eating away. So it then became where do we start limping from? I made it a point to only do the limp thing with SC's and gappers from L-J+. Unless it was folded to me which then I would raise. I will no longer limp from EP/MP. L-J is my cut off point as we can still play with some position.

One thing to keep telling yourself when you sit down at a 1/2 table is this: You are playing in a 0 FE game. You are strictly playing a game called matchboard where you sit patiently and try to match your cards to the board. Who ever matches better wins.

This is why I have a hatred for 1/2. When you get to 2/5 it becomes a little less than this and a little more poker just because all of a sudden the money matters a little more. Not saying the players at 2/5>1/2, just that the money matters more.

Bingo... literally Bingo. They call preflop because "OMG if I hit I will get paid." "Oh I missed, I fold."

1) Table selection 2)Playbook. At low levels 2>1. At 1/2 there is going to be too many tables and lots of tourists playing so you are never going to know who is who or what table is the splashiest. So, yes, design a playbook for each player/table. Should be doing that anyways. When you go higher though and its becomes more reggish and you can scope the tables out easier then 1>2. They compliment each other and you need to use both but know which is more important at each level (or when you have a clear choice of what table to be at. ex: My room has 3 tables, I can see who is playing and how they are playing and move if its optimal. The Venetian, a mirrion tables... never going to be able to tell.)

Couple questions:

1) Where are you staying at for the 3 weeks?

2) Whats your starting bankroll?
(if you dont want to answer can you give a range maybe?)

3) Do you have a set $ amount for expensives (food, hotel, etc.)?

I am seriously thinking about doing this but need to line some stuff up first.

1. I am staying with a friend at his house off of Flamingo east of the strip. I was planning to just stay in a budget room on the strip such as the IP, but my internet went out at the hotel on my first day in town. This is a big deal for me because I have coaching sessions lined up in the a.m. vegas time using skype/mikogo for most every day I am out here. So I came to his place for reliable internet that first day I was here, and then just never left.

2. Bankroll: Meh. My bankroll is way bigger than my risk tolerance, so it is a moot point. I have 30 buy ins for 5/10 readily available, and access to another 60 or so that I would use as my BR if my wife and I decide to live out here.

That said, I really am just out here to gauge the skill level of the various games, to see which one would be my regular game if I came out here. I don't want the trip to cost me money, so my plan is to not take big losses grinding through sick variance at 2/5. So if i lose a stack to a bad beat, I'll just drop down to 1/2 and grind it back and then go back to 2/5 again. None of that is necessary from a BR management point of view; it is just me being a semi-ridiculous bank roll nit, and wanting to enjoy my time out here, which I can't do if I am losing.

Part of the purpose for this thread is so I can extrapolate with a little better confidence from the small sample of hands I will put in over three weeks. Imma say, "here are my impressions of the necessary adjustments, skill levels of the villains and exploitive plays," and all of you who know the level will reply, "yes, that sounds typical," or, "wow, that is unusual," or "hey, mpethy, you're wrong about that, get your head outta your ass."

And I will use that info from you guys to gauge how variance-free and reliable my tiny sample seems to be. So i am tracking some of my basic stats, too, to see how hot/cold I am running in a few key situations. Imperfect solutions to the small sample size, but it will be helpful, I'm sure.

(As an aside, I asked my dealer last night how many hands he deals per down, and he said 22; so he thinks we are getting about 40 hands an hour, which is 25% higher than I was expecting).

3. Expenses. I am not worrying about them, I am just keeping track of them so that I can determine after the fact whether I made or lost money on the trip. But I am using cash for my poker BR and using debit transactions for my expenses so there is no intermingling. But I'm very lucky in that I don't have to worry about keeping expenses down--well, I mean, I'm not doing bottle service type balla stupid stuff, but I'm going to eat where i want, when i want and not worry about it too much. My friend saved me a grand by insisting I stay here for the 3 weeks, so ship the run good in the friends department.

Oh, by the way, and I am serious about this: If any of you are here in town and want to say hi, please feel free to shoot me a pm or stop by the V. I'm planning to play mostly there, but move around a little as I already have. But I really like the V, and if it is not missing major EV to play there, then I'll usually be there nights until September 10 or so.

If you are cruising through the poker room and you see a mid-40s guy with a pony tail who is somewhere between comically and tragically ugly, you have found me. Swallow the vomit and come say hi.

Mpethy, you seem not to have bankroll issues but are still being a bankroll nit. Do you really think figuring out how to crush 1/2 and 2/5 (which I believe you will) is going to help you gauge whether or not you'll make it at 5/10? If your goal is to see if you can stay and play live for a living, wouldn't your time be better spent familiarizing yourself with the game you would be playing?

For the sake of this forum I hope you stay at the low levels, it will be very instructive to observe your breakdown of the games and conclusions on how to best exploit the low stakes. I don't know how you'll make your decision to move to LV based on that though, unless one of your conclusions is that you can make enough at 2/5 to live on in LV.

Last question:

Why three weeks and why these 3 weeks?

You kind of answered this already, but do you feel 3 weeks is going to be a big enough sample to guage play out there? I would think these specific 3 weeks will be average in terms of play (optimal being conventions and wsop). Is that why you picked these 3 weeks, to get an idea of how it will be during average times if the year?

I'm not trying to figure out how to crush 1/2. If I couldn't crush 1/2 I would give up poker. The purpose of playing 1/2 was simply to reacquaint myself with the mechanics of live poker, and limit the damage of any stupid mistakes I made, such as misremebering my hole cards.

If I can beat 2/5, I'm pretty sure we could live on what I'd make at 2/5. Our expenses are so absurdly low that it amazes me.

The goal is to gauge the games. Of course my sample of hands isn't going to be big enough to extrapolate from by itself. But you guys will help by telling me where I am seeing things that are tpical or atypical.

But mostly what I will be doing is breaking down the games of my opponents and saying, "yeah, ok, I have an edge against this field; if this field is typical, then I can live on this game." I'm not trying to determine my true win rate; I'm just trying to qualitatively describe the size of my edge at 2/5 and 5/10. 1/2 was batting practice.

I assumed that these three weeks would be below average, because tourism in vegas is at its lowest in the hottest months (excluding wsop). Plus the recession has savaged tourism.

So, yeah, I intentionally chose these three weeks as representative of the worst case scenario.

I'm going to miss you by a few days - I'm heading to Vegas Sep. 14th. I'm confident that you will not have trouble beating 2/5..... enjoy the trip.

You know, I've been going under the assumption you were gay this whole time... anyway, I'm very curious to see what type of annual income you think you could make playing 2/5. I think I could grind out 80-100K if I went pro here in St. Louis, and perhaps more in Vegas judging from my two visits. But I'm guessing that wouldn't quite cut it in Vegas, if I wanted to have any life at all.

You mentioned your troubles with isolation betting. I find that isolating isn't worth the cost in these games while still relatively moderately stacked ~100bbs, unless you have JJ+. This is because you often really need to bet 8BB+1BB per limper to chase anyone out. And of course, if a station to your left happens to call everyone will join the donkey train and you'll end up playing 5 handed with your ATo in a nice bloated 50BB pot. I'm guessing you've noticed.

For that reason I tend to save my isolation bets for

1) post flop play - when I've hit a TPGK type hand and I feel I can get heads up with the fish by raising when it normally makes sense to just call.

2) deepstacks - If both the fish and I are sitting with ~200+, I don't mind popping it to 15BB preflop with 88-TT or AJo, if I think there's a reasonable chance the fish will call, because generally that bet will get heads up....and the right kind of fish will go ape**** post flop with any pair or any draw with that kind of money in the pot.

3) on rare occasions I'll isolate PF with normal stacks, but you really need to have nits behind you and good reads on the rest of the players who might call. And be prepared to abandon your plan on many flops.

This applies to my experiences playing 1/3 and 2/5, I'm guessing 5/10 is a bit different.

:subscribe:

+1. If this thread was a hooker, I would keep trying to offer extra money so I could kiss her.

Seriously, good stuff in here.

mpethy, i skimmed some parts but i don't even know if you've sat at a truly loose live table yet. i'm not in Vegas, but at my local Canadian poker room, at a standard 1/2 table i will usually make my preflop raises $10. anything less than that, at almost every table i've played at, gets no respect. on weekend evenings, tables at which $15 is a standard raise are very common in my experience

forget about iso'ing, for the most part.

your suspicions about open limping being ok at live are correct, IMO. you have such excellent implied odds with good multi-way hands, it makes sense to l/c a lot of the time from up front. APD is a much more experienced live player than me, so i agree that from UTG and the first few positions some of these hands, at some tables, become less profitable and potentially not profitable at all, and should be folded or given the right table, raised. however i think l/c'ing good multi-way hands from up front is, in general, accepted as a profitable way to play these hands in live low-stakes games. don't worry, eventually it stops feeling wrong ; )

also as you've clearly noticed, live low-stakes players generally have very little ability to monitor the size of the pot or of other players' stacks, or to plan their line. someone betting $60 into a $150 pot and believing it to be a normal bet is not uncommon. players who properly size their bets are rare in my experience. similarly, with no planning ability and very little concept of SPR, all too often you'll see players overcommit themselves to pots or bet amounts that make no sense given their or their opponents' stack sizes.

gL and looking forward to the rest

Mpethy, since you’re exploring the inner workings of the live game. I think you might like be interested in loading up your ipod with Bart Hanson’s Deuce Plays weekly podcast.

Bart has been a live pro at the Commerce for a number of years and plays 5/10-10/20 and has been doing a podcast for the past year and a half on Deuces Cracked and before that another year with Cash Plays on Poker Road. The main focus of his show is live poker and he often talks about typical players, situations, etc. that are encountered live; however he does mix in some online material, PLO, and guests (since it's sponsored by DC, there have been a number of their video producers on the show), and some general interest interviews.

For example, in a couple of his shows a few months ago, he examined the pros and cons of 3-betting against recreational players in live deep stack poker. In short, if I recall correctly, the position he asserted was that he probably shouldn’t in most instances because he believes his edge post flop over the table live is so large and they generally play so bad post flop, why inflate the pot pre; and further when the time does come where you want the big pot, there still isn’t a problem getting the money in post on most live tables.

Great thread.

Based on your track record, I'm sure you'll do fine after making some pretty basic adjustments.

Re: 3-betting, when it became all the rage online I started trying to incorporate it into my live game and was mostly unsuccessful. YMMV, but I don't think it's nearly as important or profitable since you usually don't get the folds you need. Now I pretty much save it for strictly value situations, although I use it more often at tighter tables.

As for open-limping, I do this too, but rarely in EP unless I'm like 90% positive there won't be a range. It just sucks playing draws/speculative hands oop. MP I start to open-limp more, but once I get to LP I start raising, even a small min-raise, because if the SB folds(rare, but it happens) I end up in a HU pot and they take the rake here in LA and the pot is only $1. I'll over-limp plenty of holding after several limpers though when in LP, treating it more like a PLO game instead of Hold Em.

Looking forward to more posts in this thread. There's a chance I'll be in Vegas the first weekend in Sept., and if I am I'll definitely be at the V.

GL

Just got back from my first 2/5 session at the venetian. Please, dear God, somebody tell me that this table was not typical.

It was a very tough table. When I first sat at the table, there were mostly very solid grinders there. I did not see an open limp for the first several orbits at the table. Most everybody was playing tight/aggressive; if I had had heads up display stats on them, it would have been a parade of 15/12/3 s all around the table.

Don't get me wrong, the quality of the play was good, but not great. I would have staked 7 of the 9 other players in the game at NL $100 online, though.

There were a couple of weak links, and, fortunately, I had the God seat on one of them. This, plus the fact that I am here explicitly to gauge the competition, is what kept me at the table.

The middle of the session went well, but the beginning and the end were horrendous.

The beginning of the session went badly because I have a nearly infinite capacity to do incredibly stupid things, apparently. I donked off half my stack in a 3 bet pot against the guy who seemed to have been dominating the table all night. It was so stupid a play that I am not even going to describe it.

I buckled down and played a solid middle of my session, got unstuck, and then ran up about $300 in winnings. With only an hour left before I had to leave to take my buddy to the airport, I got mildly doomswitched. Nothing major, just a succession of AQ and AK type hands that kept missing, and an AIPF against a 30bb stack my AK v. his KK. Gave back most of my winnings, and finished up 15 or 20 big blinds.

This table was a lot like the 1/2 table in terms of the lack of a need to make serious adjustments to my game. There were plenty of multi-way pots. I changed my standard preflop raise size from 3bb online to 4bb--more for value than to thin the field, because the table was playing, on average, maybe 150bb deep, and there were a few of us a bit deeper than that.

I am really torn about my c-betting frequency. I am pretty sure that I didn't stab air once in a multi-way pot when I was the preflop raiser. That would get pretty exploitable, but given that my c-bet success rate when I actually was value betting was close to 0%, it just seemed to be spewing to c-bet into a field of people who were floating like it was their job.

There weren't any really interesting hands to describe. Everything was pretty standard.

Here is the one hand that I played differently today than I would have played it online:

hero is UTG with K K and $570

Raise to $20, MP1 calls, button calls, BB calls. All of them have me covered. BB is the table lagtard, playing maybe 30% of his hands.

Pot: ~$80
Flop: Q 9 7

BB Checks.
I bet $60
MP1 folds, button folds.
BB calls $60.

Pot: ~$220.
Turn: 8

BB checks.
I bet $170
BB tanks and folds, flashing a queen.

Having just reviewed the hand history as I typed it out, I think I play it the same online. I guess the difference was in my head; online, I would be bet/folding there most of the time against most villains. In this game, I bet it with a lot more confidence that I would get a call rather than get a raise. Ranges were weaker enough that I figured someone had most likely only caught a piece; online, I would have looked at this board and thought, "zomg, this board crushes all of their ranges."

___________________________

OK, funny story:

I started writing this post about three hours ago. I had to stop in the middle of the hand history to take my buddy to the airport (Hawaiian vacations, FTW, imo).

I drive him to the airport, get a little lost coming out of the airport, and basically wind up doing a lap around the airport to find my way back on the right track.

I stop for a take-out burger to munch on while I finish this post, pull up to his house, and realize that my buddy's house key is still firmly attached to his key ring, in his pocket, on board the airplane. I call him numerous times as I drive back to the airport, but get no answer. I get to the TSA people and I explain to them the situation, and they get in touch with the plane's crew (they just shut and locked the doors) and a flight attendant agrees to bring me the key.

Heh, close call; I came this close to being locked out of his house with all of my traveling belongings locked up inside.

We have 14 years of higher education and 30 years practicing law between us--scary, huh?