its more about not being a sucker. why sit in a casino rake trap, especially if its not your job. move to the $5 blind level where you are playing real poker against people and not against a usury 2.5+ bb per hand rake.

Perhaps he just wants to donk around in a 1/3 as opposed to “real poker” which often means a more serious game with hoodies and backpacks and whatever that entails

I like how the fact that it’s not his job got twisted into it. He didn’t need to be out earning the first $6, thus he doesn’t need the extra amount (if there is extra) to be made from the 2/5. No one who is making $6 in easier game is a guarantee to make more moving up. Different game and skill sets.

I don’t think people are suckers, pretty sure they realize rake is a little high. But they are playing for enjoyment. If only play sporadically, high rake or not isn’t that big of deal

that fact is not true as mass data analysis has shown us.

absolutely you can. until you play lots of hands and study solver stuff for over 40 hrs, you have no idea what youre talking about

so youre saying you dont understand how solver works

like I said, you wont be able to understand it until you play lots of hands and you do 40 hours of solver work and thats just to scratch the surface

how many hands of nlhe or plo have you played online in your lifetime?

how many hours have you gone over solver solutions? which solutions did you study and for how long?

talking about solver stuff is like saying you understand the bible but youve never read the whole thing, never studied it, and you never recieved professional training, or even amatuer training

what youre doing is picking a quote and then using it as evidence to support your theories, but you lack the base information needed to make any assumptions at all.

What do you mean by 40 hours of solver work? Forty hours on one hand analysis, 40 hours experience using a solver, or what?

theres basically zero truly tough players at the $5 blind level, 90% of the player pool is droolers, recs, omc's and wannabes and the rake is fair. its the dream level for a rec player. believe me now or believe me later. i can lead a horse to water but i can't make it drink.

Ok but that doesn't sound like your average low stakes live game

Oh I’m not a horse, I don’t really play two card. Posting on behalf of others. Not everyone is a hear seeking missile fixated on max EV, especially if it isn’t their job.

Maybe they will take your statements under advisement. However, the “wannabes” can create problems if we are thinking about same type of people. Sounds like tankers/hoodies.

I've read this entire thread and watched bart's response. Like others in this thread, I'll probably get the book. I always like 2+2 books. I have read plenty of poker books and watched poker videos that give bad advice.

I think a poster in this thread made a really good point about poker videos versus poker books. In a video, I think you can set the table to understand the context a little better in a video versus black and white text. Poker content for the past 10-15 years has been audio and visual, which allows the presenter to explain the context a bit better than in a forum or in a book.

I think I understand the scenario and context mason and david are trying to convey although I probably wouldn't use some of these tactics personally.

The last few times I've played 1/3, my strategy has literally been push/fold.

I was killing time before a show in Vegas a few weeks ago and stumbled into a 1/3 game.

15 minutes in, I enter my first pot: "All in for $200"

Just a cold shove.

For some reason, low limit players automatically think "He would NEVER do that with AA" and I get looked up by AJ and 10 10? I show down aces, stick around for about 15 minutes, rack up and go to the show.

Obviously, not all low limit games are like this... but sometimes you don't even need to help them give you their money. Some people just don't have a fold button... and if they do have fold button, they think you're an idiot for just random jamming which may or may not be true.

Magnus Carlson is the best chess player of this Era. He sometimes uses sub-optimal openings that are definitely NOT recommended if you are purely looking at the engine's analysis. For example, he is known to use the Bird Opening.



I guess that's the context in which I have ingested this thread. If I am playing chess against Magnus, I would never try the Bird opening against him. However, if I am playing some random joe in a series of 1/0 games, sure, I might play ONE game with f2f4 as the opening, in an attempt to catch my opponent off guard.

I don't think anyone buying this book is buying in an attempt quit their job. Atleast I hope not.

What’s this Larry Bird opening stuff?

My gust is some people might just like playing 1/3 nl, period. They might make 200K+ and just hate the feeling of dumping a thousand dollars+ in poker. There are people like that, I used to be like that. Big wins were meaningless, but any loss hurt.

But just because buy the book it doesn’t mean you have to go out and play 1/3 anyway. Good books teach you principles that can be used in basically any game.

I mean 40 hours of 1hr per hand would help a ton. But there are a couple paid courses that go over a bunch of solver outputs which help you understand why. Some of this information used to be partially freely available but that’s no longer so

I am not sure that you understood my original statement. I was saying that if the computer says to make what appears to be an unusual play I can often, after mulling it over (under the assumption that the computer was correct), discern why that play actually makes sense. I am not saying I would have come up with the play myself.

I was confused my apologies.

It was an example of a skilled tactician who knowingly gives up a large mathematical advantage in order to catch his opponents off guard.

Wasn't it Bobby Fisher who popularized the "Bong-cloud Attack?" (allegedly) That's immediately what I thought about when I read this thread, and watched Bart's video.

Whenever I play these low-stakes games, I pretty much only see ABC poker being played. Anyone who has watched 20 hours of World Poker Tour could likely play at the competency level I see at the low-roller games. These games are pretty easy to beat by simply following Bart's advice "Play tight." I'm still looking forward to the book though and I say that as someone who has sat down at no more than five 1/3 no limit games in 2023.

Pretty funny reading this thread with people talking about the beat-ability of 1/3 with a $5 rake cap.

Here in Toronto, the biggest city in Canada, the only legal poker room has $300 cap 1/3 with a $20 rake cap at 10%.

You guys in Vegas have it so good you don't even have a clue.

as someone who did 10% up to 15 , and even some 10% uncapped in nyc , the vegas 5 max capped has much better players in relation to private/house/club nyc underground games , my hourly was higher there over a significant sample size

I made no comment about Bart, or about that hand, or about anything being good or bad poker.

I commented on AAJT asking why the introduction of the book gave "outliers and [was] not representing the source material". Most 2+2 books do this, it's their style of writing. If you don't like it, you don't have to read the book.

In a more recent Hanson video, the guy has KK in ep in a private 2/5NL game like 300xBB. Hanson says Mason and Sklansky advocate limping AA/KK. "Isn't that shocking".

It would be bad to play face up like that deep in even a soft 2/5 game. You 3-bet to 100 with 1500 behind and it can be exploited in various ways. It is disasterous if they know you have a big pair and can only call with hands that have decent chances to beat that and only give action when ahead or drawing to be ahead. Then stack you when they have AA beat.

The examples in the Introduction are not only against bad players but not that exploitable. They aren't ep limp/3-bets with AA/KK, in which case it would look likely you had what you were representing and had.

With a 3-bet from the 5th limper, even good players will not be too certain it is AA/KK. Presumably there must have been a strong read that there would be a raise. Plus the likelihood a raise will get several callers with so many limpers.

Presumably, with the UTG limp of AK, the intention is to shove with the right action. Lots of money in the pot, no one appearing really strong. If you limp/call in certain situations, your hand is disguised and the raise is bigger than what you would make UTG. Obviously, this is not good if there are a lot of limped pots. When you shove, you are OK with taking the pot, and it isn't that easy to exploit.

Please tell me on which online sites I can play games similar to a 1/2 or 1/3 live game; that would be enough to bring me back to online poker!

Or did you not read my comment well enough to know what I was talking about?

If Hanson said this hr needs to reread what we wrote. In the fifth paragraph of the "Introduction" of my opening post it says:

But if you stick to a game like $1-$3 no-limit hold ’em where the maximum buy-in is usually 100 to 200 big blinds, and follow the advice that is contained in this book, we suspect that you’ll be quite surprised and pleased with your results.

Mason

You said solvers weren’t optimized for them. I disagree

un self-banned myself after 3 years just to comment in this thread. Wrote a super long post that took me so long I was logged out in the interim and the whole thing is gone :/

Going to go hang myself now before bed.

The ridiculously short summary is I always listen when smart people in a field say a thing that's new and everyone else in the room who's been doing it the same way for years is laughing. I will approach this book with an open mind at minimum.

I said I can't imagine any were optimized for them and that was based on what those advocating for them in this thread have said, that they attempt to play GTO and assume other players are doing the same.

My guess is that a strong majority of readers of this forum disagree with how the KK hand was played.

The introduction was a poor teaser because, especially for an intermediate player who is less likely to have read any of your books, it didn't give enough of a hint about the reasoning behind those plays, leaving many readers to conclude that the book's authors don't know what they're talking about.

He's just having fun at poking at the concept of ever limping KK in any scenario. As I believe you said earlier, Bart is only advertising the book for you.

I'm curious about something. I play as a hobby, small for profit 2/5 when I go to casinos, but I play a lot of 1/2 with friends for fun, over years, many hours. Not good enough to beat the rake in clubs, so I don't get a chance to play up unless i travel. My winrate later in nights at 1/2 home games after rebuys (when everyone is deeper) is substantially better than earlier in the nights when players are shallower. This is over the course of years.

Is this something you'd expect to hear from people who are "the best player" in a min stake game? Do you still claim strategies pushed by current pros like Hanson are best in a 1/2 game when many of the stacks have hit 300 bbs or so.