In Tommy Angelo's article "Reciprocality" he talks about how before anything flows, there must be a difference. Between different elevations, water flows. Between different pressures, air flows & between different poker players, money flows.

He says that the starting hand that wins you most money long-term is the hand that you play better, more often, than your opponents. He says that for him, that hand is QT. However, he doesn't give any hints as to how he plays it.

For me, at a generic table, I'm not open/raising with QTs unless I'm no more than 3 seats from the Button. And then it's a rare occurrence because if I do get a call, I'm OOP. So, I think I may be losing some $$ here, since I don't play well pf, OOP, when I flop say a runner str8 and flush draw with no overcard to my Q. I prefer KJs for this.

If 2/3 people limp in front of me, I'm not calling with it unless I can count on any raise behind me being small enough that I can afford to see a flop. This would also mean that the stacks are deep enough.

I don't o/r much in LP anymore because of the rake & dealer tip, so I don't open/raise in LP much. It just doesn't seem profitable, long-term, even against weak/tight players. They're only calling, usually, with a better hand & you're OOP. So, they have to be a 'fit or fold; weak/tight' player. Otherwise, you're OOP & the house is rakin' it in. Plus, the dealer wants his/her cut.

So, to me, stealing [opening weak] in LP to take down $3 in blinds is just not worth the trouble.

Now, on the flip side of the coin. I was at a table about 4 months ago, where this guy [whom I've not seen since] was raising on the button & 1/2 off the button, quite often when players limped or put in a small raise, i.e., $7/$10 and then hammered post-flop. He was doing this for so long that it was quite obvious he was doing it with weak hands. I just didn't have anything, even a KJs to tangle with him. Anytime I entered the pot before him, he usually was folding.

So, what do you think he means when Tommy Angelo says: "So what is the most profitable hand, reciprocally speaking? Is it pocket aces? Nope. The hand that has the highest reciprocal potential must be a hand that gets played lots of different ways. It's going to be somewhere between the hands that are rarely folded, and the hands that are rarely played. Aces are almost never folded before the flop, so we know they cannot be the most profitable hand. It seems most improbable that the most profitable hand would be exactly the same hand for everyone through all time and space, which means the answer will vary from player to player. And that means that any answer we produce is just an educated guess anyway. So what the heck. I'll go first.

The hold'em hand I think I've made the most reciprocal profit on over the years is queen-ten. That's the hand I think I have played most differently from my opponents most often."

http://tommyangelo.com/articles/reciprocality/

I'd guess he's playing it differently by open folding it instead of limp/calling with it most of the time, and by not getting excited when it hits top pair most of the rest of the time.

Good article. I particularly like what he says about grey areas and close decisions being the least important.

Re. QT reading the article I think Tommy Angelo does this: He folds QT more than most in early/middle positions while stealing with it more than most in late positions (position and betting reciprocality). Then postflop he is just making better reads in general (information broadcast and reception reciprocality) and is thereby able to make better betting decisions with QT than most players.

With what he says about grey areas and close/difficult decisions I guess he is playing all the grey areas better than most: I.e. He is making better decisions in all the 1-pair/no-pair spots that make up the bulk of flops. He is obviously trying to make better decisions than most in spots where he has a draw or a monster hand but they come up less frequently and are easier to play.

Where he is making/saving money is probably picking his spots/opponents to play trouble hands like QT in/against so that he avoids the difficult grey area as much as possible and makes his decisions simpler.

E.g. He might steal QT vs blinds who fold too much pre or post or he might raise a trouble hand IP to isolate a weak limper who he knows can call postflop with so many weak hands that QT isn't really a trouble hand against that player.

His whole piece is really about information and self control. His suggestion of QT is a tool to help us think about how having extra information and better self control can help us outplay our opponents, through the prism of one particular hand or type of hand being played by us vs the same hand being played by our opponents.

Certainly when you look at old school players' preflop hand ranges you see they are nit tight in EP and absurdly loose in LP. E.g. Mike Caro advocates a raising range from UTG of JJ+ AKs!!! But his ranges in CO/BTN approach 50% of starting hands - and not just for stealing.

The positional and information reciprocality are a virtuous circle: the more you play IP and the less you play OOP the more information you gather and the more you are able to play IP.

Best article I've read in awhile, Thanks for sharing. I think he finds QT,J9,QJ,K9 type of hands the most profitable because there is so much variety in the way they get played specifically pre-flop but also post-flop. Many people are limp-calling these hands OOP (Spew) and When facing an opening raise their only option is flat calling when 3betting/folding would be more profitable.

IMO Post-flop is a reciprocality gold mine because the average player severely overestimates their hand reading abilities, they are bad at manipulating pot size and don't have a solid understanding of how board textures hit different ranges. What this boils down to is them bluffing in spots where they can't rep anything and calling in spots where they aren't good often enough for it to be profitable. Also they are doing weird stuff like accidentally turning mid strength hands into bluffs by check raising and next thing they know they're playing a 250bb pot with TPGK.

Side note: love that bit he says about the 6th street.

The whole concept of reciprocity (or, "reciprocality," as written) is not that these hands are the most profitable. They clearly are not. It is that even bad players make money with AA, but the biggest differential in results comes with hands that most players butcher, but good players do not.

I think most of you missed the point where he said he doesn't provide information on how he plays. You're just speculating on how he plays (unless someone has played a lot with Tommy).

The point on that portion of article is that QT is a hand where there is a wide variation of play. How does your average villain play QT? What mistakes do your villains make that you could avoid? I'll note that how you play QT is going to change over time if you continue to improve. You may start out with folding QT in a certain situation because you can't play it profitably, but later develop the skill to be profitable.

Yes, there is difference between "reciprocal profit" and net profit.

My take on it is that the edges are in the marginal spots, not the standard spots.

Not according to Tommy.

He is talking about reducing the grey area to the minimum while accepting that there will always be a grey area full of unanswerable questions. With better information and self control his grey area is smaller than others and the difference in profitability for a trouble hand like QT in his hands and his average opponent's hands is the biggest out of all the hands, in his opinion.

That's why they are called trouble hands - because you have to be very good to play them profitably and avoid getting into trouble with them.

Agreed, but then they are not marginal spots. One could perhaps argue that the greatest reciprocal value lies in what are marginal spots for others, but I think QTo is not marginal for an average player. It is a straight up opportunity to spew.

Is it not that for a bad/average player QT and other trouble hands are -EV because they are in their grey area. The bad player can't answer the question "is this spot +ev or not?".

For a good player they are much more frequently black and white decisions. It is a complicated way of saying a good player wins because they know when to play a hand and how to do so but also when not to play it.

I'm not saying I think aces are the most profitable hand necessarily, but isn't this logic by Angelo flawed? I don't see how you can make this assumption based solely on the fact that everybody knows to play AA to the flop. AA creates large pots and the postflop decisions become important.

If your opponents are losing too much with their AA when you have better (they are), and if you're able to know when not to overplay yours while also making good value bets other opponents would miss, it seems to me the reciprocal value could be very high.

I'm not even sure I agree with the premise. Pocket aces can get played lots of different ways.

I think when you say "QT is a hand where reciprocality applies more often than AA", you're falling into a trap. I think QT is a hand where some people lose money with it and some can win money with it. But that doesn't mean that it is the hand that shows the most reciprocal edge.

If you can play QT in a certain spot for, let's say, a profit of 1bb, while your opponent in that same spot plays it poorly and loses 2bb with it, your reciprocal edge is 3bb. However, if your opponent plays AA in such a way that he makes an average of 10bb, but you in the same spot would make 15bb with it, you have a 5bb reciprocal edge.

In this totally hypothetical example, but one that I think can apply to real life, the fact that with one hand, you win while your opponent loses, does not matter as much as the fact that with a hand where you both win, you win more. The difference between the two profits is all that's important in reciprocality, not whether one is positive and the other is negative.

So it's not just about turning more hands into profitable ones. It's also about squeezing every last drop of value from hands that you already were profiting with in the first place.

EDIT: Was still writing this when the post right above me went up. Definitely agree. Also, by the way, if you read the article, he basically says the same thing later in the article than he says the original quote.

You're underestimating the raw equity of AA over a lifetime sample.

I think the point of Angelo picking QT was exactly because it's a marginal hand preflop and when it does flop something, you often still have a marginal hand. It's not that you don't have a reciprocal advantage with KK+ too, but QT is an example just because it's easier to see the reciprocality of how a good player plays it vs. a fish.

Unlike AK, AA, or even 77, where you tend to flop something very likely to be the best hand (TPTK, an overpair, or a set), QT flops TPMK (or even 2nd pair) and a variety of draws. It's harder to find value with these kind of made hands, and lots of players will chase silly draws when they're not getting the odds and don't semibluff in profitable spots, so it's just easier to see the edge with QT than AA.

This guy just writes so much nonsense. So the hand Tommy Angelo makes the most money with long term is QT. By definition that means if we replaced every hand Tommy gets dealt of AA-QQ with QT his winrate would skyrocket. In reality it would plummet.

No, that's not what he means at all. The whole thing he means by reciprocality value is that he's comparing what he makes with x hand to what his opponents make with the same hand, because that's where your long-term value comes from.

Imagine a world where the rules of poker state that if you get dealt AA you flip your hand over and automatically win 100 BBs. Everyone would win with that hand, but everyone would have the same win rate with the hand, and there'd be no long-term benefit. In this case, in terms of reciprocality value, there'd be 0 gain from AA (aside from maybe people misreading their hand).

I don't know if I even agree with some of the conclusions he's making, but you're clearly not understanding the concept.

He isn't saying he makes most of his money with QT. Like every other player he makes the most money with AA.

He is hypothesizing that QT (and some other trouble hands) are the hands where there is the biggest difference in win rate between him and the average player. Therefore there is the biggest scope for him to increase the flow of money to himself by pushing his edge on those hands.

I understand those who are saying maybe AA has a bigger reciprocity thingy than QT. It might well do for some players vs some player pools. Indeed I see some god awful mistakes 300bb+ deep with overpairs in my games. I also see players losing a lot of big pots with missed draws and weak top pairs. Not as big maybe as when they lose with overpairs and maybe that's the issue...

We remember the monster allin pots more because we see the showdown and the pots is memorably big. We don't see the showdown as often when someone has a busted draw or calls two big bets with TPWK and gives up on the river.

I think Angelo would say that you're missing the larger point. His main example of a hand that has little reciprocity is 72o. Both the nosebleed pro and beginner would fold them pf. There is no advantage to think about how to play that differently. What he is saying is to think about hands and situations where you can improve to win the most compared to the average player in your pool. Focus on the hands and situations where the difference can be the greatest and remember that it isn't necessarily the hands you win the most with. As a Buddhist, he wouldn't tell you that his thoughts were the only way you had to proceed and should be followed unquestioned.

I agree with most of this and in fact I do understand the larger point. What I'm trying to say is that the example he used is a bad example of that larger point.

I actually disagree with one thing in the bolded--well, technically I agree with it but I disagree with the connotation. You say that the hands with the greatest difference are not necessarily those hands that we win the most with. While you're right about that, I think it should also be pointed out that it's not necessarily--and also probably not in practice--the hands that you profit with and others don't. Like for example, let's say we have enough skill to play QT and squeeze 0.2bb/hand out of it where folding is worth 0bb. That's a gain, but it's not such a big difference compared to 0. But if we take a hand that most people will play, such as KK or AQs or even 88, now there can be a greater difference in profit simply because the amount of profit it's possible to obtain can be higher, while at the same time a bad player could conceivably lose money playing a hand poorly.

QT is an example of a hand where, by virtue of the fact that some people play it and others don't, there's a big variation in how the winrate (or loss rate) is achieved. But that does not necessarily translate to the biggest numerical difference in profitability.

EDIT: Also, this may not need to be said, but in LLSNL, probably some of our biggest reciprocal edge on some people is that we fold hands that they spew with. Comparing 0bb to -5bb is a bigger reciprocal edge than comparing 2bb to -1bb.

One thing people are missing in this discussion is that Tommy Angelo is talking about limit poker in his examples. For example, while an expert and a beginner will occasionally play AA differently in limit, it's usually incredibly straightforward to play it optimally.

Isn't AA easier to play at no-limit? Just open shove 200bb deep

Seriously though - I think he is talking about both limit and no limit.

The important thing is that QT is the hand with greatest reciprocity for Tommy in Tommy's games. His real point is to get us to think about where we find our edge in our own games given our own skill levels. Personally my easiest improvement to make is further reducing my tendency to tilt. I love what Tommy says about tilt in this article. It is certainly very helpful to me and I recognise my own slow but steady progress in reducing tilt in what he says.

For me I think the biggest reciprocity hand in my games are actually small/mid pairs and suited connectors (including Broadway). My opponents consistently pay way too much preflop and postflop drawing at sets, straights and non-nut-flushes without consideration of how likely they are to get paid nor whether they suffer RIO.

Big pairs must be quite close behind for me. My opponent's play them too passively preflop and get tied onto them postflop while I am increasingly adept at avoiding big trouble with them. I could improve my advantage by getting a better grip of when to let more players in the pot pre when I have AA and SPR postflop is going to be low.

I could also certainly increase my edge on Offsuit trouble hands, KXs and SC by being less lazy in late position and more willing to take on fish IP and trust my postflop skills more.

Right or wrong the concept is a fresh way for me to look at poker and that is always useful.

I didn't say it well. I'm happy to agree that it can be a hand where everyone makes money.

"One thing people are missing in this discussion is that Tommy Angelo is talking about limit poker in his examples."

True. And one of these days I'm going to revise the version of the article at my website to make that more clear.

Here's the bit from the article:

"The hold'em hand I think I've made the most reciprocal profit on over the years is queen-ten. That's the hand I think I have played most differently from my opponents most often."

I wrote that in 2005, and "over the years" referred to the time when 90%-ish of all games were limit hold'em.

Here's a revised version, intended to clear up two points:

"The hold'em hand I think I've made the most reciprocal profit on at limit hold'em is queen-ten. That's the hand I think I have played most differently than my loose-playing opponents most often, namely, by usually folding it before the flop, whereas they usually play it."

Hope that helps!

Tommy