Nice advice acid, really useful advice for someone like myself who has been interested in live poker.

its good advice if you wish to go broke.

Guessing this is only in reference to his 1/1>1/2 point.

In the past he advised 1/2 because of rake but is 1/1 that bad.

In my experience it's not that bad, although it's obviously the game where all the shortstack nits play buying in for min (At the Vic at least) and l/f any non premiums so it's a pretty depressing game. I'd rather shortstack the 1/2 games given pfr isn't hugely different in terms of £ rather than bb so it's not a huge disadvantage.

@Acidhauss if you're doing an introductory guide to LLSNL I definitely think you need to cover all the common angles you see people pull, eg; announcing a false hand out of turn on the river to try and get you to not bet/call and saying 'oh I thought you called' etc etc.

Yeah will cover rhat and more when i get around to it


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nice suckout tonight

Lol?

Info please haha

Hey Acid, could you PM me who you are if you wish (I'll do myself)?

I think we played a lot against each other since I play mostly in Empire and Hippodrome.

hahaha youve got wrong person I think, wasnt playing hippo friday ; ) Btw in genera agree with you to some extenr RE: games was just being a dick about it, but I think if uou look at some of the hands Ive posted....#livepokerisntdead


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Day-Trip

Before battling it out as I usually day Friday Night-Saturday Morning, as it was such a superb day I decided to hike around Kensington Gardens for a few hours. These pictures will probably be pretty zzzzzzz to most, but want to compile them into a nice little blog post for myself. It also represented an opportunity to escape the clutches of poker and work for a bit.

If you know a bunch of good Live players, you’ll know it can be very difficult to get away from poker as it can be such an all-encompassing part of your life. Constant whatsapp groups RE: game quality, hhs and the like; these are of course all good things but its important to switch it all off even if its only for a day or two a month. With that in mind, I chucked the headphones in the bag and flicked on Do Not Disturb for the walk.

Plan for the day-sat morning was to:

1. Hike to whole foods
2. Have a vifta
3. Stack a spaniard

This post details how I executed Phase 1 and 2 of this time-critical plan.











Ducks. Lots of ducks.









Cool pop-up (I think???) structure I found along the way. I’m a structural Engineer by trade so thought this was particularly sweet.















Stopping off at whole-foods for some pretentious overly expensive (but delicious) food.







This all-in-all cost me £31 (turns out £1.90/100g of salad adds up quickly….) didn’t taste that nice tbh (all your favourite foods
in one container doesn’t taste that great, who figured)





3/10 spliff rolled (had to roll it in my bag as there were people near to me, poor build quality). Sitting down to smoke it in a really secluded place with absolutely no-one about, yes even in London there are places to get away from everything!





Some place frequented by rare birds.







Tried to find the diana fountain for ages, but by the time I found out (litertally 3/4 an hour walking in a circle sigh) battery ran out.

Overall, really enjoyed doing this and would recommend it to anyone who's not an outdoors guy like me. Had a lot of time to think things through, and felt super refreshed for the upcoming livepokerz.

haha poorly rolled joint my g

Haha yes, smoked decently enough though

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Live Pokerz

Consistent with my general live poker aims and goals, I played £2/£5 for the majority of the session. Overall, not a spectacular game although some big spots came and went (or locked up) over the evening. I was pretty card-dead for the majority of the session, although I think I played the spots well that did come up. Other miscellaneous thoughts:

• Probably missed out on picking up a few small-medium pots
• Not 3betting light vs one/two regs on my right who were opening extremely wide to isolate fish in the blinds.
• Not paying enough attention to the action at times
• I probably had a very nitty image which in retrospect would have let me capitalise on some spots which I failed to.
  

Hand 1

MP2: Unknown asian guy, maybe reg, although had called me with K9o OTB when I opened on the CO, and a couple of other rather "speculative" holdings
Straddle: Assumed fish who is probably extremely wide here.

£2/£5 with £10 Straddle. £700 effective.

I open MP1 to £35 with QQ, MP2 calls, Straddle calls.

Flop 944 Pot £110 Straddle donks £55, I flat, MP2 flats.

Turn 8 Pot £275 Straddle checks I bet £175, MP2 raises to £600 AI effective, straddle folds, I call. River is a blank and MP2 mucks T7

Hand 2

SB: Tight-passive post, loose-passive pre OMC type who has probably been a slightly-losign regular here for years.

£2/£5. £1500 effective.

I open HJ to £15 with KK, CO calls, SB calls, BB calls.

Flop AKQ Pot £60, checks to me, I bet £45, SB raises to £150, I call.

Turn 2 Pot £360, SB bets £250, I call.

River 4 Pot £860, SB thinks and bets £1300, hero sigh-folds.


Hand 3

BTN: 5/10 reg who plays much bigger games.

£2/£5. £1100 effective.

BTN opens £20, I 3bet SB to £70 with Q9:club, he calls.

Flop QJJ Pot £140 checks around

Turn 2 Pot £140 I check-call £80

River 4 Pot £300, BTN bets £175, I raise to £600, BTN folds.

Sick hands! I'm surprised the guy didn't have 4x vs your QQ. I think the KK fold is super disciplined and shows how ahead of the curve you are with regard to live games. Q9 would 100% call river. Absolutely no reason to assume he bet folds a better hand. He just has air he sooo frequently.

Keep it up!

Cheers bena, as usual appreciate whenever you chip in!

Hand 1 944hhx I think its actually super close, and maybe bad. I leaned towards calling for the following reasons:

1. The guy had shown down stuff like K9o and 96s in spots where even a looser live reg would never show up with. This means he can have a lot more suited cards, although he probably has more combos of 64s 54s as well so actually this probably doesnt effect our decision really.

2. In general £2/£5 games tend to play out more aggressively than £1/£2 games.

3. I think he raises 4x with some frequency on the flop against a relatively small donk bet especially when I flat as well.

4. The 8d gives him enough combo draws like 65hh 75hh, QJhh where he might decide to go with it.As a small side note I have the Qh which blocks some of these. When making my decision I decided it was so close that if I had the Qh I would have folded.

5. In retrospect I like raising the flop, but from experience I really like underplaying our hand here and stops the straddle from "knowing where hes at". By underepping our hand i think we get a lot of value OTT and OTR as people love heroing flushing boards live that brick.

I think I was getting about 2:1, so in my head gave him 99, 44, A4s, 54s = 8 combos which we have conserv 0%. Then I gave him about 6 combo draws QJ JT QT 75 76 A8 whihc we have 70% equity with. = 4 combos.

Having done all that I think its very close and really looking back probably a fold!

Hand 2 N\A

hand 3 QQJ42ssxxx

Yeah should have must called basically, I think I got lucky here really.


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State of Live Poker

Recently on 2+2 I've heard accusations/opinions etc of the games being less soft. I don't want to give a detailed response as to whether I agree or disagree, but wanted to post a musing I've had this evening.

Live poler games often play extremely deep, relative to online 100BB poker. NLH is a form of poker where small mistakes in large pots can lead to extremely costly decisions, where a single hand can cost you your entire stack. While yes in zoom and normal games you will obviously sometimes see deeper stacks, only in live poker will you be constantly faced with deep stacked decisions.

I think every live poker player should really celebrate the fact that the games are so deep-stacked, and that the most popular game is NLH, a brutal variant of poker which can cost you your entire stack in a single hand. Live poker is not a game of picking up the blinds, or picking up small BTN vs BB pots. Its a game of patiently waiting it out, hoping not to capitalise on small HU pots vs weaker opposition, but instead on:

1. How prone they are to capping their own range i.e. Betting AA on 865r against skilled players.
2. How their oppoents are unable to fold in situations that are "coolers" whereas online may be considered a sort of cooler, i.e. Capitalise on a lack of fold equity.







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Simple Spot

When playing poker, whether it be online or live, you'll no doubt know that your emotions can vary massively over the course of a long session. These emotions can range from prolonged tilt, tiredness, boredom, to feeling like you're being exploited in certain post-flop situations.

In this post I want to focus on the emotion of "feeling like we've been exploited." I'm going to analyse what appears to be a pretty boring spot, and see if we can learn anything about our own strategy and use it to exploit our opponents in the future.

Its a very simple spot; its a £2/£5 NLH cash game and the effective stacks are £1000. I've put on the £10 straddle UTG, and for all-intensive purposes we can treat this like a "standard" 100BB game. The C/O is a good regular who has been a big winner in these games for a long-time, and from experience is definitely on the more aggressive side.

It folds to the C/O who opens to £35 with XxXx, and I call the straddle with A5. The board comes out K73, and we check-fold to a single half pot continuation bet. Lets break-down the action on each street, and look at our frequencies on each street.

Preflop

When the C/O opens, he's risking £35 to win the £17 that is already invested in the pot. By inspection, we can see that the BTN, SB, BB and Straddle need to defend a combined 66% of the time to prevent the C/O from raising any-two blank cards (ATBC) profitably.

As the straddle we are closing the action, and are getting a good price to call having invested £10 in the pot already. In this spot I think defending something like 30% of the time seems very reasonable here. I don't think this calling-range is perfect, nor 100% represents my range but lets go with it for the sake of getting on with this analysis. As we are only 100BB deep effective, I've generally emphasised flatting high cards; however if we were deeper I might remove some of the A-rag and K-rag hands in favour of more connected and suited cards.



Flop

On this flop, I think checking 100% of our range is a pretty reasonable strategy; first of all, the CO has a lot more AK than us, and probably has the same amount of flopped flushes as us. When he continuation bets 60% pot, it needs to work about 37.5% of the time to be +EV if the C/O were to have ATBC with 0% equity (not a fair assumption obviously). We should therefore defend somewhere around 62.5% of the time; however obviously to anyone who's been introduced to minimum defense frequencies / GTO analysis will understand that this isn't quite true based on the following points:

1. In this particular spot where we're closing the action and getting a good price preflop
2. Therefore there isn't really any particular "minimum defense frequency" in this particular spot due to the above points.

However, I'm not really interested in playing in some GTO type way. What I'm really interested in exploiting unsophisticated players, and picking up more pots on the flop. Lets look at some defending frequencies and see how often we can pick up the pot on these type of textures::



The frequencies/statistics represent roughly my own post-flop strategy (although obviously I may either call or raise with some of these holdings). Using Flopzilla, we can see that we're defending about 61.8% of the time on this flop texture. Conservatively I've added some rather "weak" holdings that I think a lot of people may just fold anyway. We're defending (calling or raising) with any flush, set, 2p, TP and 1cFD. I've also added things like 99(no hh) and middle pairs like 7x, which make up the "weak" holdings. Even though we're defending seemingly very wide, we're only just defending enough to prevent the CO from betting ATBC profitably!

In retrospect I'm probably not attacking these monotone boards as often as I should, despite being able to show a profit betting ATC on the flop. While we're here, lets play around with some other similar monotone boards.

A72 Defending frequency = 60.9% (a slightly more profitable board to cbet! This makes sense as it blocks a lot of villains AhXx draws that will continue).
Q72 Defending frequency = 60.4% (interestingly even more profitable)
J72 Defending frequency = 61.4%

For fun, lets generate a random board with no high cards thats all hearts...

532 Defending frequency = 49% (!!!) A lot of top pairs are removed from our range making this a fist-bump ATC bet.

Lets review what we've learned:

- Monotone boards present very profitable cbetting opportunities with 100% of your range, even with two blank cards.
- I think betting as small as 1/3psb is even better, as I think hands weaker than our "loose" defending rules are inelastic to our bet size like A-high, low pps with no heart.
- Monotone lowcard boards are the nuts to cbet.
- Listen to that naggy feeling indicating that you "feel like you're being exploited". Use it to patch your own leaks. Boot up flopzilla or CREV and figure out your own frequencies. When you're the other guy next time, use it to exploit your opponents when you're on the opposite side of the felt next time

Raising the q9 is super lol.
Kk does seem like a sigh fold

too much strat itt

more fun hh

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Poor trip photo game there. No chip porn, picture of a drunk, fat dude. Shoddy effort sir

haha you wouldnt believe how shot that guy was! Took some other loldrunk photos but security told me to delete them

Shortstacked £50 into £150 and think I actually ironed the lot on booze and some grim food from that 24:7 place down the road :/

Spew-Spew-Spew

As you might have guessed from my earlier post, I ended up a little tipsy at the Hippodrome on Monday.

Yesterday I got back on the grind and played what was a decent £2/£5. Although there werent a ton of spots that were VPIPing every hand, the standard was in general very soft.

Managed to get out of the hole in the end but only just. A profits a profit!

Hand 1

SB is a well-known big fish who'll occasionally run silly bluffs. Thinks im pretty nitty.

£1/£2, £350 effective

LJ opens £7, 2 callers, SB calls, I raise to £40 with QQ, only SB calls.

Flop 863 Pot £94 Sb checks, I bet £50, SB calls.

Turn K £194 SB leads £30, I call.

River 3 Pot £254, SB jams £160. Hero?

Hand 2

SB is the same fish as H1

£1/£2, £700 Effective.

I raise £10 UTG, one good reg calls after a cold caller, 4-5 other callers, SB makes it £25, I raise to £90, SB calls.

Flop 948Pot £240, SB xc £100

Turn TPot £440 xx

River 7 Pot £440 xx SB shows down A4s and wins.

Hand 3

BB is a passive fish who is a relatively big spot. No history with me really.

£2/£5 I open £15 UTG, 2 callers, BB calls

Flop 652Pot £60 checks to me, I bet £45, only BB calls

Turn 6 Pot £150 BB check-cals £90

River 8 Pot £330 BB check-calls £150 and mucks.

Hand 4

UTG is definitely on the fishy side.

5-max £2/£5 with £10 straddle £900 effective. UTG limps, CO limps, I check A2 in the straddle.

Flop Q34diamond: Pot £37 I lead £20, only UTG calls.

Turn 5 Pot £77 I overbet £95, he raises to £350, I jam £850 he SNAP calls (lol).

River A He showsdown K2 and we chop #shouldhaverunittwice

Hand 5

MP presumed good reg
LJ sort of reg, bit splashy.
BTN is the same fish from hand 3 who had lost some big recent pots.*

MP opens £15, LJ calls, HJ calls, BTN calls, I make it £85 in the BB with KQ, MP folds, LJ flats, BTN jams £310, I reship £1100, LJ slowly folds. BTN shows 73 and I win both run outs.

And finally...living up to the title of the thread a VERY special hand by me. What am I trying to get him off again?? Love having blockers to hands that will fold too ��������

Hand 6

£2/£5 with £10 (mandatory) straddle. £750 effective.

I open SB to £40 with Q9, straddle calls.

Flop KJ3 Pot £87 I check, straddle bets £55, I check-raise to £175, straddle calls.

Turn 7 Pot £440 I bet £200 straddle thinks and calls.

River 7 Pot £880 I jam £450 straddle calls with JJ

gg. I might look at these hands in more detail today if I feel like it.

We'll need your hands sir!

P.S. LOL at 73s. Why in gods name am I grinding the work game rather than live 2/5.....