I mean, obviously i do look at my cards, but yeah probably could make money agains stations without looking. C bets get folds at least half the time even against stations. There are very few true stations.

Shortstacked, yeah, you just ship the flop with ATC and they fold enough to be profitible. lol "bloat the pot".



Im not saying I dont limp at all, but its hillarious how many regs have written me a dissertation defending their limping, The reason people feel so inclined to defend it is because they know its stupid and they know it goes against the advice of any book or stickied thread they have ever read, but they are too undisciplined to stop.

WRT A, ok so you got to see a flop multiway... instead of HU or 3 way.

WRT B, poker skill is far more valuable Hu than multiway. Playing multiway pots just require you to play straightforward, which plenty of villans do.

WRT C I raise with like a 20%+ range and I can count on my hand the number of times someone has started 3 betting me light. Actually happened friday for the second time all year so i just table changed. I thought they were too passive to iso limpers but they are gonna 3 bet you light? Come on.

Dont limp is like, the (unheeded) advice as old as time.

So that's what "fold equity" is......

That's it in a nutshell! All those 10s of thousands of hands downloaded into pokertracker & QQ+ AK was where so much of the profit came from.

When it comes to the "meta-game" aspect of it, a lot of my money comes from [in no particular order]:
1. Quitting better than the vast majority of other players.
2. Tilting less than the vast majority of other players & being able to walk away from the game, no matter how good it is, when I'm in the wrong frame of mind.
3. Having position more often than my opponents.
4. Giving up as little information as possible. For instance, if I'm suppose to show 1st & know my V will show if I say something like "Your flush is good" & get him to show so I can muck face down; that's what I do.
5. Not playing 6 handed in a weak game when it's a full rake house. Leaving if it's really weak, even if it is a 1/2 rake.
6. Table selection & seeking out the best table throughout my session on a 45 min to 1 hr period unless mine is really good.
7. Willing to change tables in a heartbeat for many reasons.
8. Knowing I can play nothing but QQ+ unless I'm OTB, CO, HJ or Steal Seat & still grind out an ok profit.
9. Knowing to tighten up when I'm running bad & loosen up when I'm running good - to a point.
10. Remembering that those who chase straights or flushes, usually end up riding home on buses.......unless.......they love the price tag.
11. Remembering that I came to win money, not play poker & fold, fold, fold, without getting irritated when I'm getting nothing but mediocre hands.
12. [Which is a component of 4] Knowing my Vs better than they know me.

Like I said, the fact that the profit from QQ+ AK adds up to being most of your overall profit does not even slightly imply that those hands are more important than the other hands you get dealt.

They both did. The person with a set should have never asked to see a card if he folded (thank you for telling me you can't beat a set) and the flush should have never said anything after being asked.

Like everything in poker, there isn't going to be one sentence that is going to ever explain anything completely. I'm not saying that you should fold everything except on the button or AA. However, it does point to some directions people should look towards. One of the things I've noticed in the threads over the last year is people discounting position. This has seeped in from the general population that sees if a hand is playable in their mind, they're going to play from anywhere. Pocket pairs is the most notable hand that comes to mind. I see lots of threads where people are opening light in EP and MP. Unsurprisingly, you don't see these often with the Hero on the button. People should be opening up on the button first, then maybe move to the CO.

Sure, all players win when they have AA. How much they win is another matter. Figuring out how to maximize your winnings with AA would be a great place for a player to work on their value betting skills. You're less worried about getting beat and can focus on how to extract the maximum. The money you win with AA dwarfs the money with any other hand. If given the choice of earning 20% more with AA or learning to play connectors in late position, it would be AA every time.

Agreed. In fact, one could argue that they are less important, since it is easier to play them without making a mistake than the others.

At llsnl you should win your money from players putting money in the pot too often. Usually by calling and sometimes by raising.

If they are fit or fold post flop and very loose preflop you should frequently win without showdown on later streets when they surrender equity. You on the other hand should be playing with a range that has robust continuing equity. You will be doing so more frequently once you've entered a pot because you are generally playing less hands overall and thus are more selective with your starting hands (not nitty though).

If they are loose preflop and Agro postflop you should win by showing down better hands when they barrel off weak hands. And you should win when you bluff them off the same weak hands when behind. You on the otoh while perhaps playing similarly Agro post should be doing so less frequently and thus with a tighter more solid range such that you have far less airball bluffs and more commonly are more semi-bluffing or bluffing with decent equity.

If they are stationy postflop you should win when you have the best hand and extract more value than they would if the hands were reversed.

And of course you win money because you are playing far more hands in position than your opponent (this is not entirely dependent on your absolute position preflop).

You win by forcing players to make massive ranging mistakes against you when very deep.

Imo


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You know I've been thinking about this and I was wrong in my post. The only reason you can make money in Poker is off mistakes. It's zero sum, so if you play perfect and he plays perfect, you both break even.

This is pretty much the biggest mistake people make in LLSNL. If you studied and applied optimum 3b! pre strategy you will improve your results immediately.

10 years ago the biggest mistakes people made were bet sizing but I'd say the second biggest mistake people make these days is playing too many hands.

Then there is the pot odds issue. A lot of people don't give odds a second thought. Working with equity calculators will put you ahead of the game

JB Clark, Speaking of pot odds & equity calculations; what many do not take into account is "robust equity." Robust Equity, or "RE" is that equity you have in addition to what the math dictates you have. It comes to you when that dealer that has been "gettin' you there" OTR at a far greater rate than math dictates. When he/she sits down - shutup, open up & let the $$$$ flow to you!

I like what Chris V had to say because Sklansky influenced me when I was first starting out.

We only win at the expense of others & they need to make enough mistakes to cover the rake if playing in a casino. If everyone is playing perfect, the house solely profits. Once someone deviates from what is perfect, we adjust to that leak & begin exploiting. How do we know what perfect is? It's based on frequency and EV. For simplicity's sake, picture a 100bb HU match (BTW, I think HU poker is the best way to improve overall play). Also, for simplicity, imagine both players either jam or fold pre. If both players fold the bottom 50% of their range and shove the top, they'll never make any money off each other as they're playing GTO, a strategy that cannot be exploited. Now... say you have a nit, who'll only commit with AA, something that happens only 1/221 times. His frequency of jamming is too low compared to optimal. We exploit this by always jamming. In doing so, we make 165bb from his folds (amusing a 1/2 small:big ratio), and loose ~85bb when running into his aces.

That's a simple example, but frequencies and equity apply to all actions. If someone c-bets all flops when we know a person only connects ~1/3 of the time save for draws, 67% of the time they have nothing. We can adjust by raising their flop bets as bluffs more often... etc.. If we know from scant flop betting & showdowns that someone only bets flops with 2p or better, we can fold out our monsters safely & so forth... For anyone who hasn't done it, familiarize yourself with online tracking programs and the stats they keep, then read this & this and begin looking for and adjusting to the same frequencies, but in live play. Keep in mind, it takes hours and hours to get accurate info on some of these factors, but there's other stuff you can pick up quickly on because you see the villain.

In short, you make money in live low stakes the same you do in any other form of hold'em... adjust to the errors of your opponents... and readjust if/when they adjust to your adjustments. If people are adjusting too quickly, find another table.

In a raked game environment, you both lose.

Thankfully the vast majority of opponents still make far more mistakes than we do, and make much bigger mistakes when they do, so we can still outrun the rake, at least at a lot of a (most?) tables. The more our opponents improve, and the more of them at the table that do so, the more difficult the game will become to outrun the rake.

GthedirectiontheconditionsaretrendingareobviousG

I've often thought that if you took an OMC or similar nit and made them raise people postflop on like 10% of their actions, just completely at random, it would instantly make them much less profitable to play against.

It would be hard to get the data to prove this, so it's just opinion, but I think that this is a half truth along the lines of "most of our profit comes from AA". If you look at where your money won comes from, then it's people calling too much. But "money not lost" is just as important and I tend to think it is people not value betting us when they should, not bluffing, not making us fold our equity, that is why the games are so profitable.

There's a reason TAG and LAG are both winning styles and tight or loose passive are not. What would you rather do to your game if forced to choose - loosen it up a bit, or dial your aggression way, way back? Loosen up, right? Again, poker being a zero sum game, if the thing we would hate doing most is not being aggressive, that's a pretty good hint that our opponents doing that is super good for us. Our opponents calling loose early in hands wouldn't be a big deal if they'd just bluff later streets now and then.

Yeah that was my point with AA. OK, once in a while we're called upon to make a tough fold with AA, but mostly it plays itself.

So you blindly follow advice just because someone wrote an out-dated poker book or thread from 2007?

Isoing short-stacked limpers and shoving any flop with ATC will not be profitable. The fact that you think this displays your arrogance.

Did you know that there are some games where the maximum exploit is to play your hands face up? This may be shocking to you if you are a vegas grinder making $10 an hour, but I promise you, these games exist.

We really don't have to outplay our opponents through pre-flop isolation if they are bad enough to pay us max value post-flop. DUCY?

Speaking of outdated books (although this one is one of the better ones since it is more theory based) I'll paraphrashe from a book by Sklansky and Miller in 2006 called "No Limit Holdem Theory and Practice".

They assert that the best No Limit Hold Em players are experts at controlling the size of the pot relative to the strength of their holdings. This means that they don't get caught in crappy spots with marginal holdings. They get paid off when they have it and lose the minimum when they don't. To put it simply, they minimize risk and maximize reward.

Raising 2-3 times an orbit at loose tables is adding so much more risk to your bottom line with hardly any upside. In some instances (like bluff jamming shortstackers who put in 1/3rd or more of their stack in preflop), you are burning money.

I limp plenty often. Why? Because I make money doing it. End of story. Its not wrong and I don't need to defend it. I dont give a rats ass what some stickied thread says.

I'm trying to figure out where I lost my money in LLNL?

When I figure it out I will tell you how they won it.

But most don't. And virtually none do it in anything approaching any kind of a balanced strat. Most bluff way too little and a few way too much.

And I did refer to the recipricality of value betting.

But to the original point, you claim to be a half truth I'd ask what is the bottom of your UTG opening range?


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i said every book and sticky. I have ed miller's the course in front of me, the "dont limp" section is page 52-55

here is one from the LLSNL sticky.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...ve-nl-1169750/

here is another one explaining what the AG in TAG and LAG means. It means you dont limp for one thing, so if you are limping, you are playing neither of the two strategies which are profitible.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...nting-1125512/

My winrate is sitting at $37/hr over the past 350 hours of 1/2 and 1/3. not trying to get into a pissing contest about winrates, but my winrate speaks for itself on whether a near zero limping strategy, even with a huge range is profitible.

Stop limping and you will see results I guarantee it. Im not even suggesting to play tighter, just raise instead. Play tighter is probably better for you, but either option is an improvement. Raise or fold.

I think you misunderstand basic poker if you are trying to pot control preflop.

Master the art of Bet/Folding.

There's no one answer to the limp vs. raise pf dilemma. There are advantages to both.

The idea of limping is that there is no special magic to hitting a monster hand. Everyone is going to hit them at a certain rate per hand played. If you limp, you're more likely to pay a small cost that you can recover when you hit your hand. The more flops you see, the more monsters you'll hit over time.

The idea of raising is that you can win a lot of pots without having the best hand. If you have the initiative pf, villains are going to fold to your aggression post flop unless they have good hand. Since there are only a couple of them, that isn't going to be likely.

If you see the mods of this forum leaning towards raising, it is because of the LLSNL mod curse. Once you sign up as a mod, you'll never hit a hand again. The only way we can win any pot is to push people out.

Which is best depends on playing conditions. If you're at a passive, no-fold 'em table, you need to hit big hands to win money. You're not going to pay much of a price to see flops. If you're at a table where it is rare to see a flop without a pf raise, the limp strategy isn't going to work well. You're going to bleed chips as you continually fold.

There are a lot of good thoughts itt already. One aspect that hasn't been mentioned much is the money saved by utilizing good hand selection. Folding poor starting hands from the SB alone can be a few bb/hr of money not lost which additionally becomes more money won when you gii. Many llsnl players play way too many hands and would save money by folding the mediocre ones.

Tomark, just for the record, there are books and stickies on the other side of the limping debate, eg Harrington books and FlatTireSuited's Guide to Online-to-Live transition. That said, this is not the place for another holy war on the subject. As venice10 said, it depends on table conditions.

My point from the beginning was that isolating fish in position is the primary place to win money at LLSNL. This is clearly the answer to this question, at least for me. The way to get into this incredibly profitible situation regularly is with a raise.

And i suppose my point in response to the player responding to me isnt that there isnt a time and place for limping, its that the time and place is farrrr less common than the typical winning low stakes player thinks, specifically because it is nearly always wrong if you are forfeiting an opportunity to isolate a fish in position, as per the initial discussion.

Its also why limping may actually be more regular of an option against better players, you arent regularly in a position to isolate the fish.

"All players win when they get dealt AA"

I've lost 10 net buyins alone this calendar year with AA. I make a net loss with AA, KK and QQ. Last session (admittedly that's a small sample) I got stacked with AA twice.

And I don't overplay them. I fold when I know I'm beaten and my opponent fish shows accordingly.

The vast majority of my wins this year have been from value betting monster hands (sets and above) and being called by an inferior hands, assuming I don't get outdrawn. Overpairs have been just about worthless.