Hey guys. I used to be a tight, real aggressive, willing to gamble type player. Then started visiting this forum, switched to a safer, less variance style play where I need a strong hand to go all in. Then, after discovering pokerstove, and reading Professional No Limit by Miller, I found out my old style was superior to the nitty style.

It seems in every thread I'm always the one saying "easy shove" or "instant call" in spots where many other players say fold. Thoughts?

Well, are you making money over a significant sample size?

i wrote this long post then erased it.

basically IMO the nittier side maybe the optimal side only because of the information or lack there of on the Vils involved and the way we perceive labels put on these Vils.

IRL these lines may not be as optimal since we have other info that can sway a decision easily.

I hope you're not blindly following what people are saying without evaluating their reasons. If someone offers a convincing reason to play a more conservative or aggressive line, I don't see any harm of implementing in my own game, but I certainly wouldn't do something just because someone said to do it.

Also as I can imagine, a lot of LLSNL players are playing on smaller BR than what is optimal, hence the reason why a lot of decisions are on more nitty side.

Loose/aggro/crazy/intelligent guy........can be big winner
Tight/aggro/smart/tricky guy..............can be big winner

So....

Well a large % of hands posted here are the op loosing the hand trying to figure out what to do better next time

so its pretty easy for the majority to say its a fold when you basically know they already lost the pot and thats the reason they posted

imo

What is your hourly? I'm sure in another thread you said it was $9/h @1/2.

This is fine, but hardly grounds for criticising a while forum.

People call me a nit all the time when I'm playing. I don't really mind it, but I don't think it's 100 percent accurate.

Tonight, I got tired of a guy straddling my big blind and was joking with him that if it was folded to me, I was raising to $15 without looking at my cards. Folds to me. I raise. He calls. Flop comes Q64. I look at my cards and I have 84o. I lead out for $20 and he calls. Turn is another 6. I check. He checks. River is an 8. Check. Check. He shows K9o and I flip up my 4 after he asks if K high is good.

But, yeah, fold pre comes up in a lot of posts on this board. I think there are generally tight players on here.

If you can logically break down why everyone else is wrong in a hand while you are right, then there isn't a problem. It should be fairly easy to show why everyone else is wrong in a thread by posting it.

Well, obviously we're all playing cards within the vacuum of pokerstove and a book, so you're dead on OP.

But seriously folks..

People play super-****ty bad at 1/2 NL. Super ****ty. I've seen the level of live 1/2 play compared to anywhere between .01/.02 and .05/.10 NL online (I think the latter is generous).

Add to the super-****tiness, the fact that if you're playing at a casino table in a room that gets any traffic, all kinds of different players are shuffling in and out during a session and/or a trip. LAG and tricky play requires reads to be solid over time, and you just don't have those when you're playing against random people all the time.

I'm not saying your old way is worse than "nitty", but the typical variables surrounding a live 1/2 NL game favor tight ABC poker much more than LAG or overaggression with some trickiness in there.

100% true. I used to make "well planned" bluffs, hero calls, and tricky value bets w/o any reads and realized that overall everyone is so bad at 1/2 that its not worth it. I play ABC until I have at least 2-3 hours where I can pick up reads on the table.

Bet River you nit

I already made a thread like this that took off. But nit poker is winning but not crushing. People here say 10-15 an hour is really good. I think 25+ an hour is really good. There is a huge difference there in return and style.

Fyi: if you are beating it for $9/hour then good for you. But I think you an triple that!

Pardner,
Go back to your old style if it was superior

Che,

I'm at about 230 hours logged now at about $8.50 per hour. I started off playing "nitty", and my winrate was actually higher in the beginning. Slowly I kinda evolved into how I play now. So that's why I'm still unsure why still is better. W/ my new style, it usually doesn't take too long before I'm playing for stacks, and in quite a few hands recently I took some bad beats for 2 buyin+ sized pots. Such as $300 as a 90% favorite, $550 as a 75% favorite, $300 as a 90% favorite. All these would have affected my winnrate.

So I still need a larger sample size but I'm unsure which style to do. My results, playing loose and "gambly", haven't been too impressive recently (I've been breakeven for the past like 30 hours), but again I took some bad beats (and can only recall getting my money in bad once and winning).

And by nit, I really meant decisions postflop. For example, in a spot where we have a huge decision worth several buyins in size, I'm the guy always saying "easy call" because our equity is slightly higher than our pot odds. Everyone else says fold.

I must have missed the threads where everyone is saying fold when the equity is > than pot odds. However, determining our equity is dependent upon constructing an accurate range, and opinions can vary greatly on what is an accurate range in some of these threads. If you torture the math enough, you can justify almost any decision.

Here lies a huge problem for live players. 230 hours = ~5750 hands
I play this many online FR in a good day. Even though it is not exactly apples and apples, having ANY thoughts regarding results and comfort level blah blah with only 230 hours is completely off the chart. Sorry, but the poor guys out there playing like 2 nights a week (5 hours each) can play for couple of years as winners (actually losers) or losers (actually winners).

It blows I understand. But that is the reality of it.

One thing that's difficult to grasp is if the pot is, say $50, and someone shoves for $200, it's profitable to call even as an underdog of 45% against a 55% hand. It's difficult to understand this because we may only be involved for $10 so far, and it now costs 20 times that to call. But the math says calling is slightly higher EV than folding.

A spot similar to that in a recent thread was the KK hand on a Q high flop where 99% of the replies said easy fold to the flop shove.

In some ways, I'm not sure I buy all this TAG vs LAG vs nit vs loose vs etc. stuff.

Methinks every single situation at the poker table is different that the last one and we should just try to do our best play at any single given time, given our cards, position, number of players in the hand, the type of players in the hand, the board, the action, etc.

GcluelessNLnoobG

I read that thread. In that case, the information on the villain came into play, and the disagreement came down to assigning the correct range against the villain.
In general, when you are holding KK in a 4bet pot against a tight, passive player and they shove a Q high flop, the range you are up against narrows greatly. If you assign a range of AQ+, JJ+, then the call is correct. The issue becomes as to whether or not that range is correct.
Change that description to a loose aggressive villain that tends to over value TPTK hands and has air in his range, and I tell you to snap call every time.

In your example of the $50 hand, again it comes down to the range. If I have $10 invested into a pot, and someone shoves for $200, I have to be very certain about their range and how they are playing before I stick it in with an estimated 55-45 edge.
In live NL, I am fairly confident that I can get most opponents to get their money in against me when I have a much greater edge than 55-45. I will give up a call that might be marginally +EV if I feel I have a enough of an edge at the table.

I also think that you have to bring your objectives for playing into the context of this thread. What you are debating in your mind is whether to trade a lower variance for a higher win rate. Someone who plays for a living is going to look at that question differently than someone who is a serious recreational player. Personally, I think making the decision to play higher variance in order to achieve higher win rates is part of a maturing poker game, but depending on results you can either continue to play that style since you'll have the growing roll for it or if you run bad then you might have to play like a "nit" until you can stomach the swings again.

Truth is that although we may preach a certain move on certain hands, in reality, we all make mistakes and deviate from our base-style (be it by feel, a read, an impulse, tilting, w/e). Books like Ed Miller's are good at creating a base, but they really don't go beyond that. You have to play to develop your style and for some base-styles you will have more inherent weaknesses than others. There is no magic cure for live low-stakes, just general guidelines IMO.

I'm feel it's correct to be nitty in the sense that villains are rarely applying huge amounts of pressure pre and post-flop(especially the turn and river) and there are so many spots were it's obvious that certain bets are almost never bluffs at lower limits and I fold a lot in situations I see my opponents usually calling. So though I'm technicality not nitty as far as the amount of hands I play, I'm definitely nitty when my opponent is showing aggression in certain spots.

and why do you think people are playing on a short bankroll and not a real one most of the time?

This post needs a little more love.

When looking at these HHs, all of us are restricted by the information provided by the OP. When in doubt, I apply the reads given, even when minimal. If someone tells me villain is a tight passive, then I am going to credit that player with strong holdings if they start showing aggression. Often times it becomes the OP's description of their image and their description of the villain are not completely accurate. Oh well. I can only answer based on the information given.

A couple of weeks back RedsAddict and I were playing in the same game. He made a big call on the river that seemed a little iffy to me, but he was able to explain his thinking, and why he believed his hand was good often enough against the villain's range in that situation. Even sitting at the same table and having played the same opponent over a period of time, he and I still had somewhat different reads on an active villain (and to be fair, his was better and has changed how I approach that player in some hands).

Later that evening, I make a call when a player shoves on a board so wet it looked like a tsunami hit it. Reds first reaction was that he would have folded, but based on how I saw the villain playing made hands versus bluffs previously, I felt my villain's range included enough air + weaker hands for me to call.

My point is that the information we receive sitting at the same table is often different based on our perspective, and transferring that to this forum becomes extremely difficult. As players, our default will be to give answers based on our own experiences when the information is limited. In this format, that will lead to a lot of fold pre, fold flop, etc..