Quote:
Originally Posted by ChaosInEquilibrium
Here’s a loosely related question: Assume you have a skill edge on the field. Would you rather play 5/10 with $500 stacks, or 2/5 with $500 starting stacks? There is going to be more variance in the former game, but I think your win rate will be higher in the 5/T game.
Let me try to re-center this a little, since I think this is really relevant to the theory OP is trying to discuss, but got lost in the shuffle.
CIE seems to be claiming that if you limit your opening size to 3x, you would rather be playing 5/10 with $500 effective than 2/5 with $500 effective. I'm not sure I agree, but let me raise a different question: assume you have a skill edge on the field.
Would you rather play a 2/5 game with $500 stacks where you could only open to $30, or a 5/10 game with $500 stacks where you could only open to $30?
I think the answer to this question is "it depends," but what it depends on sheds a lot of light on this debate (in my opinion). To me the single biggest question is this: how often, when we open, are we going to take down the blinds preflop? Notice that how often we get 3bet (and have to fold) doesn't matter in my formulation because our (absolute) open size is the same.
If the answer is that we will take down the blinds a fairly large percentage of the time, then it seems to me that we would prefer larger blinds, so that we win more when this happens. However, as all experienced live players know, this is not what happens at live low stakes. Instead what happens is that we take down the blinds almost never. We almost always get action.
The more action we get, the smaller a percentage of the pot the blinds are, so they matter less and less as the pot gets bigger. Also, if we know we are going to get action, we need to remove the hands from our "normal" opening range that derive a good deal of their value from blind steals (or from opponents folding tightly behind us), which means we are folding more hands preflop. That means we want to play in the game with smaller blinds so that we lose less when we fold them away. We make up that value by taking down bigger pots when we get a playable hand in this altered scenario.
So basically, to get back to the original point of "why open bigger," if you are in a 2/5 game and you open to $25, just pretend you opened 2.5x in a 5/10 game. Your opponents will not react as if you're laying too high a price to win the blinds; they'll still play loosely. If you're so hung up on "correct theory," you can think of it as your opponents defending too wide because they don't realize the blinds are too small.