When I got back to playing poker frequently last year, I was looking to remember my strategy but found it rather difficult especially regarding preflop ranges. I have about 340 poker ebooks in my library, but very few helped me with this. Eventually, I discovered the preflop strategy as presented in the book "Power Hold'em Strategy" (2008) by Daniel Negreanu, and found it to be easy to learn and remember, compared to memorizing a ton of charts. In fact, I made the following table from it ( where I think I have transferred the information from the book correctly), so that it is even easier to use while I play.



To be honest, I deviated from that already. For example, I never limp, and also I wouldn't play some of the hands as suggested from early position.

However, my question is, is this ever a good preflop strategy today?
Also, is Small ball play as presented by Negreanu still relevant today, or is it dominated by other strategies?

Personally, I am currently playing Microstakes and Low stakes MTTs, and I think there it is better to play TAG or try to exploit opponents, but I am still wondering because that book is one of the few that explains things simply enough.

Ill small ball nits all day every day. If nobody is 3 betting in position a lot vs my opens, ill attack nit blinds with very wide ranges. The postflop plan vs tight passive opponents takes one of two forms:

[(+ free/cheap showdown ev in my check range) (+ free/cheap draw ev in my check range) (+ late street value betting ev) vs the more showdown bound nits]

And:

[(+ flop non showdown winnings) (+ free river card ev) (+ free/cheap showdown ev) vs the more foldy nits]

And i construct my postflop lines with hands that seize these ev sources most effectively.

Fish, tag, and lags in the blinds get different treatment.

Negreanus chart is the effect, not the cause. His ability to play small ball and soul read are the cause. He certainly has a much deeper grasp of where hes earning ev than this rudimentary representation would suggest.

Nah sorry, this is horrible and useless. Preflop charts are your best friend. But you should not try to memorize them, you should try to understand them. See how other players are supposed to react to opens or 3bets, think about what are you achieving when 3betting for example. What worse hands will call you? Which better hands can you force to fold? What kind of hands do you block in your opponent's range?

And dont expect some deep knowledge from 2008 Negreanu. Compared to the state of poker in 2023 his understanding of poker was laughable. Which is not an attack on Negreanu. Everyone sucked. It was time before solvers and even the highstakes regs would be crushed by someone who plays NL100 or $109 online tournaments today. Study materials from that time are long outdated today.

Thank you for the clear advice! I agree with you! By the way, I recently went to your site and was impressed by your knowledge and experience in poker. You are "Like a G6", right? I saw you play on a Twitch stream last week on a final table. Great stuff!

+1

Ahh 2008... wish I had played more live tournaments than I did. It was wide open back then.

I would definitely agree that info from 2008 is completely outdated.

“Small ball” as a general strategy might still have a place in modern day poker, but Negreanu is probably the only person who can implement it properly. It’s also definitely not the way to go at micro stakes.

It's easy to discard poker strategy just by using dates, and then say "that's old, things have moved on". For one, they always move on anyway!
It is also wrong to say that, because some info from 2008 includes fundamentals such as how to calculate pot odds or EV, and others, which still apply today.

But I don't think you understand the gist of the issue here, and why I was even led to consider Small ball. I am looking to a my poker strategy, specifically how to play range (and all associated poker thinking with ranges, although not GTO). I actually own 340 poker books and articles, and not a single one appears to present a strategy for playing today - excluding some books about GTO. Playing range isn't in any of them even though that strategy is used by players since at least 2012! I've only found few sources (blogs and some videos) which present how to do that well. I am actually disappointed that none of so many writers wrote about how to play range, as if it is some well kept secret.

My point is, rather than simply "discard things because they are old", I would appreciate also providing references to what you could instead consider up to date, aside of just GTO. Otherwise it just seems like you are snobbing whatever is old.

You cant find it because nobody is ever going to spoon feed you the secrets we all had to uncover ourselves for free. We can point you in the right direction (my effort in the deception exploitation thread) but ultimately you gotta put in work.

In the words of the immortal Smokey from the movie Friday, "you didnt put in on this, man!"

The usual approach these days is to play around with the solvers, develop a reasonable preflop strategy that is not too far from GTO, develop reasonable heuristics for playing the flop (like "as preflop raiser usually bet small on these flops, usually bet big on these flops, usually check these flops, etc.") And from there just apply poker logic to turns and rivers.

Daniel's 2008 strategy is probably going to be pretty decent in low stakes tournaments. You're giving something up by not re-raising very often preflop, but if you have hands like AA and AK in your calling range it will put you in some very profitable situations post flop. You will probably want to modify your strategy based on position, like from SB or BB you probably want to fast-play more to avoid alot of multi-way pots out of position.

Also the chart you posted has you only 3-betting pre with suited connectors. That's a pretty bad idea. First off, you need to have strong hands in your 3-betting range to balance the bluffs. And secondly in tournaments you're often playing against short stacks and hands like 67s are not the hands you want to be playing 40 bb deep (nevermind 20 or less). It's way better to 3-bet bluff with something like A8s, blocking strong hands like AA or AK, and having decent enough equity against stuff like KK or QQ. This is one of the major changes in the last few years, in the 2000s it was considered hip to 3-bet 78s stuff to balance your range (even in 100 bb cash games), but these days the solvers prefer to bluff 3-bet Ax, Kx, and Qx suited (in part because the mid-low suited connectors are very good hands to call and see a flop).

Yes obviously fundamentals don’t chance, you were asking about strategy though.

There is plenty of “old” content on fundamentals, psychology,… that’s still very useful today. But when it comes to specific strategies and more concrete concepts the game definitely has moved on to the point where you would have to make a lot of adjustments to these things in order to successfully implement them in today’s games.

I am not necessarily advocating blindly following solver lines, especially not at low stakes. But the basic of modern poker is GTO and solvers, then adapt from there for your game, play style, etc