I moved to southwest Florida last year. I'm fortunate to live ~10 minutes to a poker room, and although it is not the best run room, it's close and they always have multiple games running. During this time of year we are in what the locals call "season". This is when hordes of snowbirds come down from the north and spend the winter months where it's at least 75 degrees every day. They start showing up in October and leave in April or May. During the summer it's dead around here. There's no traffic, no waiting in line at the supermarket, no wait lists at restaurants, etc. These older folks completely inundate the area during the winter, and the poker room is deeply affected by these players.

During the week at a 1/2 table, there are at least 5-7 totals nits at the table. I've seen people minraise a straddle with aces, and then check-call down on completely dry runouts. People limp with AK. People fold AK preflop to a single raise (I overheard someone tell their neighbor they limp-folded AK to me last night). People don't bet any street without a set of better. A 3-bet preflop is always AA or KK, rarely QQ or AK. It's impossible to get any money out of half the table. There was an old guy sitting next to me last night that had $20 in front of him. TWENTY DOLLARS. He doubled up and was happy about it. Changing tables just gets you a different table full of nits.

What is the best adjustment to make with these players? Bluff more? Open more? I was raising so much the other night that a player invoked IWTSTH. The dealer didn't hear him (maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but I'd been tipping him all down) and he mucked it. He called the floor over and got so mad at me he was shaking. Frankly, I like when my playing style puts people on tilt, but I'd like to better translate that into winrate.

How would you adjust?

I would just do the opposite of everyone else.

I play in unraked games so I’m not losing $6~ every time I win a pot but a Good LAG style at nitty tables would still be extremely profitable in a raked environment.

I would attack capped ranges with multi street bluffs for about 2 hours and then switch to a more TAG style (25/15) and get max value.

Solid hand reading skills and understanding board textures extremely well never hurt anyone.

#1 Rule is to be friendly and pleasant. You're going to take all their money, so make sure they at least like you for it.

Bloat the pot pre with strong hands that don't need to improve much. JJ+? raise 20bb and agree with them that you don't want to get sucked out on (trust me, they will call and rebuy).

Call down light with S1C when you can do so cheaply, and when you hit (or when you have 1 mirrion outs +) bomb the hell out of the pot.

My guess is MikeStarr plays in these types of games and would have a suggestion?

My guess is the most common advice you'll get is to start opening up in position and attempt to run over the table. But I'm also not too incredibly convinced that's going to work at a full table. Cuz that means it's mostly you and your super wide / dominated range going to the flop HU against the combined tight / dominating range (including limp/flatted monsters) of the rest of the table, and I'm not so sure that works out too great.

Honestly, if the game is also littered with small stacks and has a relatively high rake, is it really a game that can be beat for very much? The best adjustment might be with regards to your expectations?

ETA: Also +1 to Lapi's suggestion of being friendly and pleasant. This might be the single best adjustment in this environment as people are just much more willing to donate money when they have a smile on their face as opposed to scowl, imo.

GgoodluckG

Depends on the nit flavour. Are they 30/1/0.5 nits or 3/1/0.5 nits? The former you raise big with premiums to attack their weak limping range. The latter you just go mental raising everything until a nit wants to play, at which point you fold unless you're getting solid implied odds.

Also a 1/2 table full of tight players that know how to fold is never going to a be great table.

I would just have fun being the whale I guess.

But tbh I would just stay home and play online instead.

How are the weekends at the casino? Surely the action has to be better? Mid-week poker is rarely going to be a great time to play unless there are games built around certain action players.

I wouldn't waste my time at tables like this or even try to figure out an adjustment. Spending your time driving to a casino with better action sounds like the GTO move here. Save yourself from tilt and boredom and find a juicier game.

I think only your second slash line is a nit. The first is a standard loose passive perhaps with a few less raises than normal.

You are correct, Sir. Although, I'm not sure if OP is saying its Nittsburgh during season or all the time. Is this Naples/Ft. Myers Dog track? Most places in S. Florida are very nitty during the summer but loosen up a good amount during the winter when the snowbirds arrive.

The avg age in these poker rooms has to be 70+ and it goes up during season although the snowbirds are looser and a lot less nitty than the standard OMC types that live here.

The answer is to run their asses over and learn to when to bluff (hint :very often). I used to sit around and complain about the nits like all the other guys not old enough for Social Security but I finally realized that if these guys wont put any real money in the pot without a monster that I was going to stop complaining and start making them fold all day long. Its pretty hard to hit a big hand.

Just raise a lot, bet a lot and fold anytime anyone fights back.

I'd RFI 5% wider from every spot and play 3-bet fold to a RFI pre-
post in single raised pots I'd do what mike says and if you catch a good flop or some equity just bet bet bet...these games its pretty important to pay attention to other showdowns (sounds obvious but its pretty easy to auto-pilot). I like to against new players try to play along at home and range the new players and see how well my range did at showdown and note outlier hands (I can only really intently follow for a couple hours but it def helps). If players are folding hands well outside MDF on the river (to show how well they are playing) I'd keep betting until I get caught a few times then nit it up and value town...

These kind of games are plenty exploitable. If they are that nitty, you should be able to squeeze several bb/hour out of them easily. Which is pretty good! That's what you'd hope for in any other game over the long run! But it's not sexy because it's such a slow, smooth line upwards. Maybe you just like gambling.

Early position: limp speculative hands, raise large with value hands, fold marginal hands

Folds to you in late position: raise small with just about everything (literally everything can be okay if they are too tight!) - careful though, huge difference in ranges between btn/co. HJ is not late position.

Limps to you in late position: raise large for value, overlimp speculative hands

Bluff 1/3 to 1/2 pot on all favorable flops. Favorable being anything it is hard for a limp/caller to hit. Flops with two low cards and a non-ace high card are great. Flops like QJ9 are bad.

Usually A-high flops are bad too, because live players like to call raises with Ax so they end up having an enormous amount of aces in their range. But some super nits will call large preflop raises with any pair just to set mine, and not even peel a small flop bet if they miss. So a small cbet on a-high boards can still be profitable even if their range has huge equity. Player/situation dependent.

Turn, called, bluffing: Give up
Turn, called, value: Bet/fold whatever will get called by worse even if it is very obvious and exploitable.
Turn, called, monster value: Bet whatever will get stacks in even if it is an overbet. Bet more if turn is dynamic (meaning hand strength can easily change by river, eg. flush draw, straight draw, highest card is low). Nits have been waiting all day to hit an overpair and aren't going to give it up now.


bonus: So if you're clever you may notice, why are we giving up turn when bluffing but betting small for value? Good question. Barelling nits works too Either they call wider than you expect and you can valuebet larger, or they do fold pairs and you can bluff. But obviously that's a lot more player dependent and then the strategy becomes a little deeper than following a flowchart. Probably don't triple barrel bluff.

At some point the answer is to stop playing poker and get a part time job as a barista. Even if you're crushing the table, if no one is putting money in, you're crushing for a few blinds an hour, less that minimum wage. You need to decide if that is worth spending your time. You can either move to a higher limit, or go do something else with your time. You can't force other people to put their money in the pot.

Nobody is making livable money from 1-2 even against regs, let alone nits who you can make money against, but just slowly, so some of your EV has got to come from enjoyment.

Technically, if no one is putting money in, you would be making about 35bb/hour

Realistically, "good nits" -- the kind who play totally face-up but win because they are so disciplined -- are going to salvage a huge chunk of that just from having a tight (but not wildly so) preflop range and having good hands often enough postflop that you can't just run them over without really thinking hard.

Most nits are not good nits. They are nitty because they don't know what to do and playing fewer hands makes them lose less. They might not even be nitty by VPIP - they might actually be very loose and limp with a lot of weak hands and then throw them away to raises. Or they might call large raises with pretty speculative hands and give up on any flop they don't smash. They will have a huge exploitable gap somewhere in their range pyramid -- if you've read Poker's 1% by Ed Miller, he visualizes a balanced range as a pyramid. You have preflop hands at the bottom, a smaller flop range above that, an even smaller turn range above that and an even smaller river range on top, and if balanced the sides will make an even slope. A bad nit might look like this

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .= CALL TURN =
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . === CALL FLOP ===
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .========= CALL PREFLOP =========
============================ LIMP PREFLOP ============================

That's someone who rarely puts more than 1bb in the pot but will lose piles if exploited.

Agree, however it’s not clear from OPs description that these are real nits. Just that they are way over passive with big hands.

Awesome post! Reminds me so much of the game at my casino before 6 pm. It's a nightmare. I call them the Trappist monks because they won't bet their hands and are always trying to min-raise any river bet. They are beatable but it's so boring and lifeless i now only go after 6 pm.

I like that comment. I've met many "1/2 pros" and most of them are living subsistence level only--with a few windfalls a year--but I'd hate that life. The rake and the nits kill you.

You should be able to beat these type games for a lot more than a couple BB/hr. If you just keep raising every playable hand from reasonable positions, they will get fed up and start calling our raises with hands they cant play profitably.

In a 1/2 game you can raise $15+ with premiums and still get called once they get ticked off with you. There wont be many showdowns so you can raise bigger with premiums and smaller with speculative hands and nobody will ever know.

If almost everyone is only playing 50bb or smaller stacks, the casino is raking 50bbs/hr off the table, and players and playing extremely passive/tight, what is the highest bb/hr you can really expect to make here? $10-$16/hr?

I’ve played in these games before and they mess with your mind. You value bet AK on a AQ922 board and get check called by AQ that limp called pre and suddenly all your profits from stealing small pots is gone. You start to question if this is real life and wonder how you got to a point where value betting top top on a dry board might be too thin.

I still say find a different game or casino OP. Try PLO, check out a different casino, move up in stakes of the game looks better, play online, etc. There’s always a poker game running that will be waaaay better than a short stack nitfest.

Most of the advice here is pretty solid. Just run the table over. Just be aware that the winrates in this game won't be that great. Most of the gaudy winrates people at low stakes have are from the fish that punt stacks regularly. It sounds like a miserable game, and the best advice I've seen in this thread is to try and find a different game if possible.

Imagine a game where you get dealt your cards and that's the hand you're playing (you have the choice of playing it or not playing it), typically fairly aggressively, and you raise and go HU to the flop against your opponent. But your opponent gets to choose the best hand out of the 9 other hands dealt (and if he doesn't like any of those hands he also gets the option of folding preflop).

And now give that opponent a fairly short stack.

That's the game you're playing, imo.

Give me a table full of 9 nits playing a passive tarpy style with a short stack against the single aggrotard, and I'll take the 9 nits every time.

GImaybebiasedG

Gg as the resident nit, when a Lag starts targeting you and raising all over the place particularly post (because I know your style is limp call pre), how do you react?

The aggrotard would destroy me in a game that is HU, especially with deep stacks.

But he's not playing just me. He's always ending HU against one of 9 guys who almost constantly has a dominating / solid preflop hand, which will mostly destroy him long term thanks to the stacks being non-deep. Good luck running over people who have 50bb stacks and are seeing a flop with a solid hand that is much better than yours.

As to how I would play against the aggrotard as one of the 9 nits in the game, I'd do exactly as they're doing: passively letting the aggrotard spew his stack into me.

GimoG

Great post but this doesn’t account for the fact that most nits are way too fit/fold and only felt with the nuts/near nuts.

If a LAG has 56s and someone in the field picks up 10s but is folding on an A, K, Q, J, high flop OR turn when barreled into it doesn’t matter.

I don’t believe OP mentioned anything about the average stacks being shallow and since we’re paying a lot of the rake the other peoples stacks should stay +/- the same.

Although side note- I’m realizing how much better time raked games are for an active player, even at 1/2. Paying $7 in rake/drop in LA 5+ times/hr is gonna suck lolz. Not looking forward to it.

I may need you to teach me your ways GG

Agreed that the lag is going to pick up lots of uncontested limps as well as some medium sized pots when his opponent folds their TT on a J+ high flop. And yeah, the bigger the stacks the better off he's going to do.

But the question is whether this is going to make up for the times he punts his stack with air against the committed short stack who's calling him down with his overpair.

I think (???, don't quote me on this) it was Ed Miller that wrote somewhere that his second favourite type of game (apart from the obvious loose calling station game) was this type of game where he'd just run over people. But I've always found that a little hard to believe, especially the shorter the stacks and especially the higher the rake.

GbutImaybewrongG