The thing about "lol, that's so 2010 strategy" is that a lot of us would financially benefit more from trying harder to find (or get into) games that play like 2010 live cash game poker than to spend too much time worrying about making it 1bb larger or smaller preflop.

I will say this. Obviously there are crushers that do very well with larger open sizes. In live that is probably the majority of people crushing the game.

And I totally respect the logic of playing tighter and using the larger open size.

And frankly people are also crushing it and playing super loose with a huge open size too.

My small open size has just been an extended experiment in live poker that has worked out well for me, so I have kept doing it.

Also, I will say that in 1-2 or 1/3 unstraddled I am opening to 10 minimum always because people at those stakes are making the biggest mistakes of all, and I CBA playing small pots all of the time. I am only playing those stakes because when I can't find anything bigger. I used to open $15 minimum at 1/2 and 1/3 and crushed those games too.

I'm nowhere near a crusher, but I've done ~ok (I think) for my capped BI 1/3 NL game... and I haven't raised a single hand in the LJ- in ~7 years.

Gi.e.lottsadifferentwaystoskinacatregardingraisesi zing,includinga0xsizingG

This is the reply that best mirrors my thinking and experiences in the vast majority of games I've played.

I'd also add that positional advantage and disadvantage is being short changed. This isn't a brag, it's based on how important position is in the games I've played - with a few days of studying the intricacies of HU play, give me an average two plus two live game member (understands basic and intermediate concepts, isn't versed but still familiar with GTO, above average in observing and processing the information our opponents provide. Basically me. We have thousands of members. I'd like to think that I'm at about the 50th percentile). If I am last to act on every round of a hand regardless of our true position, my opponent will need to make multiple trips to the ATM. So I have a difficult time understanding why a high stakes player would advocate playing OOP vs opponents that are exponentially better than me. In a MW pot no less...

GG if I was at your table and you open limped UTG; even if it was folded to me in the BB I'd just muck my cards with anything less than TT!

"The better approach is to just accept that many (or most) hands are going to end up multiway......and play standard multiway theory. Which is essentially underplay your hands like top pair (compared to how you would heads up), bet much, much smaller sizing post flop......and bluff almost never."


This is how I've been able to be a long term winner in NJ and now, SoFla. It's not exciting, but allows for consistent wins with standard lineups seen in the $2/$5 games I play in. I have a medium stakes limit background and utilizing a tight preflop range with adjustments and the above strategy is a big time winning strategy for me. Mix in some aggression where needed.

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Petrangelo is in fact a donkament player, whether you guys want to argue it or not. He obviously hasn't played below 10/20 I'm guessing in a minimum of 5 years. I'll take my past and current experience in these games over what he is "GTO SOLVING" and saying. If you want to go and open $25 at 5/5/10 in LA with your Queens and get 6 callers then be my guest! I'll continue to use an exploitative strategy and not care about any of this.

I don't speak in acronyms, so I'm not sure what poker you're talking about. That said,

"LLSNL games where players are fairly inelastic, you gain nothing by opening to $30"

You're always better putting money into the pot when you will be ahead. So yes, there's an advantage to it. Less advantage since post-flop you're less likely to be ahead.

It's really not a valid premise. There's not that many tables where you're always getting 3 calls to a $30 open and then with 0 three bets. The playesr who do that go away because, barring some maniac skills, they lose money and quit. Even when you can afford the money, it's not an enjoyable game when you lose.

I'll chime in late. Best player at my local 1/3 and 2/5 game opens to 7$ at 1/3 and 10$ at 2/5. Sometimes 15$ at 2/5 if he's in a more normal line up of decent regulars. I asked him why and we chatted quite a bit about how the average live player looks at their cards and decides whether or not they're calling from minute uno. 93o? Folding. 98o? Calling. It's not until they get to see the bet that they get uncomfortable about the size, which at my game is about 25-30$ pre. And if other's have already called it they're much more likely to call it. So he advocates a 7$ open which keeps their ranges super wide (because they'll be super wide anyway) and then just navigate multiway post flop.

The other aspect he points out is that some of the better players will cite this open as weakness and 3-bet lighter. Not much 3-betting goes on usually so when someone opens 7$ and 3 people call and a semi-decent TAG from LP 3-bets to 30 he can 4-bet lighter (he opens AA for 7$).

Another aspect is most stacks at my 1/3 game on an average night are 200-400 dollars. An open to 25 gets 3 callers and now you're in a 100$ jackpot spinning the wheel with KJs from CO. Flop comes K-T-5 and my palms get sweaty because I'm ahead sort of but not always. With a 7$ open and a few extra callers the pot is maybe 40$ and I can still navigate, peel a street with my KJ and see how things go.

I am intrigued by this topic but one thing I think is the downside to the tiny RFI camp is in these games it is rare to be able to RFI in late position due to the limpiness of the game.
So this generally applies to early position and I could be wrong but I can't see how raising a hand like AQs to 3x from EP and getting 5 field callers is a fun place to be.
On the flip side, if we are in the tiny RFI camp, what is the adjustment for raising over multiple limpers? Are we still making $8 over 3 limpers OTB? I think at this point you are better off just playing the Gobbleygeek strategy and just limp in a tighter range than everybody else.

My guess would be that its all about stack sizes.

If you're playing in a deep game where everyone has 300+bbs, a 3x raise going 6ways creates a very large SPR of ~17 where it is still all about postflop poker.

But if you're playing in a shorter (run-of-the-mill?) game where a lotta stacks are 100bbs, a 3x raise going 6ways creates a much more awkward/handcuffing SPR of ~5.

GplaytoyourdesiredSPR?G

OK, I have time to add some thoughts of my own.

This, to me, is the key part of the post that I linked and recommended:

I think the bolded basically is the explanation for what this debate is trying to be about.

Some people are claiming that the reason we want to use small raise sizing is, to paraphrase, because it keeps our "postflop maneuverability" high. We don't get in spots where we feel like we have to double people up when we have a pair (forget AA specifically, this idea is for all hands that can flop good 1 pair hands).

The thing a lot of these arguments are missing is that this depends on stack size!

So my understanding is that, in theory, there are 3 important reasons for small raise sizing:

1. We lay ourselves a good price to win the blinds.
2. We are more profitable when we get 3bet.
3. We keep the SPR high for postflop, which helps us.

The first two reasons drop in importance in most LLSNL games, where getting no action preflop is extremely rare and people call too much and don't 3bet as much as they should. That makes things more about playing postflop.

So let's imagine that if we were playing 1/2 with $200 stacks, you think the optimal raise size is a min-raise to $4. That's 2% of the stacks.

Now let's imagine that instead of $200, stacks are $600. Is the optimal raise sizing still $4, which is now 0.67% of the stacks? I don't think it is.

Let's say that when stacks were $200, you were getting stacks in at some point in the hand X% of the time. If you triple the stack sizes, you're going to really lower the value of X! It won't be 1/3 of what it was, it'll probably be more than that, but only slightly more. Now when you have a big hand and you wish you could play for stacks, you won't always get it all. That means your "theoretically correct" small open sizes could still be profitable for you, but they're not allowing you to get the full advantage of playing deep.

The way to fix this problem is to start raising bigger preflop.

Just as a thought experiment, imagine that we're sitting $1k deep with 2 people, we raise to $15, they both call, we flop a boat and we extract about $500 each from our opponents. (This is obviously not an original thought experiment--check the link in the OP.) Without knowing anything about how the hand was played postflop, we probably could figure that doubling our preflop raise size, and letting the hand play out the same way otherwise, would have let us stack them instead of leaving them with money left over.

In short, it seems to me like in a typical LLSNL lineup, when stacks are so deep that it's hard to get all-in either way, increasing our preflop raise sizing would roughly proportionally increase our profitability from the hand.

Now the first part of that is important. You can call it an "exploit" if you want. It's tailored for games where people will call our raise, but not 3bet; otherwise we have to figure in the cost of getting blown off our hand, or the fact that now the blinds are a smaller percentage of our raise size. But in games where we don't care about those things, I don't think the theoretical reasoning for why you're supposed to raise small fully applies.