Hi, our local tourney is starting back up this weekend. It runs for a few months every Saturday. Just a bunch of guys having fun playing poker in the winter. Having said that it's also good to win! I've been playing poker now for over 20 years so I know a soft game when I see one but how do you beat a full table of "bingo" players. I'll give you an example of a typical hand scenario. Hero UTG with Aces, now typically here I'd maybe bet 3x or 4x the BB but in our cases that would induce at least 4 callers!!! Going to the flop our aces don't look good anymore. So the question I'm asking is when you have a premium hand should you be pumping it up to something rediculous like 10x the BB? Trust me you'd still get at least 2 callers in our games. I do well already in these games but sucking out to a J5 off is a regular occurrence. Thanks

There is very little you can do against 'soft' Players 'having fun'. The issue is that 'the fun' is cracking your Aces and living to tell the story about it! Players that are new to PLO find out very quickly that getting HU with suited Aces is very difficult at relatively shallow low stakes tables.

You can take either the 'can't beat um, join um' approach or you will basically have to just lay low PF unless the stars align and you can c/r your way to a HU situation. Obviously both of these stink in a tournament setting if you don't run good as well.

You did hit the nail on the head though ... keep pecking away until you find 'today's' sweet spot for opening/raising. Charging Players as much as possible with lessor holdings is what poker is all about. You may sour their fun in lieu of your competitive spirit. It's very difficult to maintain a jovial mood at the table and go about the business of collecting chips without a few pot holes.

You have to come to grips with the idea that you aren't going to change their mindset and just prepare yourself for the variance of 'playing correctly' with unwilling opponents.

Ever play Ultimate Texas Hold'em table game in the pits? Same thing .. that dang Dealer just never folds!! GL

here's the cut and dry regarding the "why am i having trouble beating these horrible players" issue. playing texas hold'em with a system gets you in trouble against unique (to the system) styles of play. the key to the game is to break down each spot into a 1-on-1 (or greater if multiway) battle of ranges and executions where it's just you and the villain out in the streets....variance might go up* (swings!) but the amount of thought needed to win during the game should actually be going down.

This, dear Sir, was the best explanation of this common problem I've ever read. I'm tipping my hat!

AA is 63% favourite against 3 people playing 80% of hands. It's a complete myth that seeing flops mutliway with AA is a bad result. It's just massive entitlement to think you have Aces therefore you should always win a big pot.

By the way, a thick skin really helps in those games. I've been playing a couple of 2NL/5NL donkey shows lately and it can be really tilting at times.
Quad 7's beaten by JT on a 77T board cause the runout was TT. Set of Aces beaten by Qc6d on a Ac3s9h. Guy shoves, I call and lose XD.

And it constantly happens. All the time. And at a certain point you just cant take it anymore, tilt and spew.

A couple of tips though:
- frequent breaks to luntilt.
- although a big mistake in games higher up pot controll untill you have the nuts. Don't go for 3 streets of value with TPTK or a overpair in multiway pots.
- Always, I mean ALWAYS!!! cchange tables as soon as you have doubled up your buy in, especially when a big stack is on the same table.

I hope beats like this don't happen "all the time." A set of aces literally can't lose, or even chop, to Qc6d on that board.

I don't think this is necessarily the best play. If anything, the fact that you have doubled up indicates that you might be at the right table and want to stay. Now, if you are short rolled and have more than 10% of your bankroll on the table you do want to quit, or if game conditions have became unfavourable, but simply doubling up is not in and of itself a reason to quit and go to another table.

Its to keep variance down. Happened a lot of times to me that I played well against donkeys just to wake up with AK for example, make my top two pair and lose to the muppet who shoves with J5o cause he binks two 5s on the runout. Of coirse he is the bigstack who's on a roll, so you lose two BI instead of one.

Now from a mathematical perspective, it doesn't matter cause you could have won those 2 BI...but think about what it does to your mental side of the game when you lose.

You slash your winrate by like 20% by not making thin river bets against stations.


You slash your winrate by a ton more if you don't play against stations deep stacked.

From a mathematical perspective it does matter. You’re giving up a spot where your EV is +190 B.B. So when you win that second hand 95% of the time you’re now up 2 extra buyins. If your win rate is high enough where that kind of spot doesn’t matter, you can stay anyway because you’d be destroying the games

As I said, it is more +EV to play deepstacked. But the game is not just math. If you start bluffing off your stack because a fish sucked out 2 BI's again, well math wont help your tilt.

Also, especially with the low amount of hands/hour in live games it happens a lot that a fish who basically quadrupled his BI just gets up and leaves. Online, not a problem. Youre down 4 BI's, find another table and gridn it back up in a day. A live grinder might take weeks or months to get back to even.

Variance is not just a statistical problem. Low variance aproaches are less profitable, but they scale better and are more sustainable than approaches maximized for profit.

I'm happy to stack off for two buy-ins dodging only two outs. Happier, in fact, than I am to stack off for one buy-in dodging two outs. Not quite twice as happy of course, because of the diminishing returns of more money, but still quite pleased none the less.

Isn't that what a bankroll is for? What do you mean by "low variance approaches scale better"? And by nature of being less profitable, they are less sustainable. Also who says we're going to start bluffing off stacks? If you want to make any decent money in live games you absolutely cannot afford to quit a good table being deepstacked against the fish. It's lunacy.

play better postflop. problem solved.

Define "bingo play" and how it differs from normal play?

Bingo play means playing any two cards regardless and running all the way to the river with them, I've lost count how many times my AA KK etc gets donked by J3 Q4 etc

Does it always get donked when the flop is J38 Q49?

You're a very bad poker player. If 0 is the worst and 1 is a winning bottom stakes player you're a 0.6 at best. Which means you are still a big loser but because you understand a very tiny bit you have pretty big entitlement tilt and think you should be winning because you're better than the drunk button clickers.

You can play awfully and print money against players playing any two cards you're just awful too. But because you fold you feel like when you do have a playable hand you should always win.

do you only raise with premium hands? sometimes i call with junk hands against players who do so only because they can never fold their AA type hands.

This is literally a dream come true for a good poker player. You should print money vs huge whales like this.

Sorry if I've been a bit vague, I try to explain better. This is going to be a bit of a wall of text


1. Bankroll:

Yes you are 100% correct, that's why you have to have a good BRM cause your bankroll is supposed to deal with the variance.
Unfortunately, variance is not fixed but conditional.

So lets say your average standart deviation for FR live games is like 80$/100hands while your average winrate is 5$/100hands. You accept a risk of ruin of 5%, so you need around 2000$ as bankroll.

Now you get into a wild game, you vs 8 whales. Lets adjust for that by increasing standart deviation to 120$/100hands. Of course you win more, so we adust in a linear fashion (both up 40%) to 7.5$/100hands.
To have the same risk of ruin, your required bankroll for this game just went up to 2700$

I always wonder, why people scream and shout when a noob uses the same BRM for NLHE and PLO, but find it perfectly natural to play with the same BRM in nitty and wild games.

As a matter of fact, you cannot play every NLHE game with your 20BI rule. When variance goes through the roof, you have to either play way under your bankroll, play very nitty or stay out of the game or your risk of ruin increases dramatically.


2. Bluffing off stacks.
Look through the beginner section of the forum. The majority of post whining about not being able to beat donks are written while on tilt. We are not robots and every player has a point at which he just cracks. Get your balls kicked a couple of times in a row will have an effect on your game.

In online low limit games it's not uncommon to get sucked out 1-2 times per hour, which doesn't matter since you play so many hands that you can grind it back up within the same session.

But imagine you sit at that whale table, they are splashing money left and right, but you are card dead for one hour. Then you get 77 on a J73r flop, he bets, you shove, he calls, shows JT and the runout is TT. Then half an hour later your KK gets cracked by Q9o and then you lose with 99 cause counterfit. All that happens while you sit there and "know" you are the better player, they have fun and laugh their asses off.

At a certain point you will tilt and play worse, even the pro's do. There are more than enough youtube videos from high stakes games with Ivey, Antonius etc. tilting off their stacks.


3."I'm the better player":

This is always the most stunning point of rant posts. "they play so bad, while I play so well but I'm so unlucky"

With a winrate of 5$/100hands and a standart deviation of 100$/100hands your 95% confidence interval is -1.3 to 11.3 over a sample size of 200k hands. Estimating 30hands/hour and average session lengh of 5h, you don't know in 1300 live sessions, if you are a winning player or not with 95% confidence. Thats almost four years IF you play every single day.

The key fact here is: The higher the variance, the wider the confidence interval meaning you can be less certain if you are lucky or not the higher varaince goes.


4. Low variance approach is more sustainable.

This expression was a bit vague. But without going into more complex math/ portfolio theory I try to give the following example.

Let's say you have 100K in your account and you are looking at two investments:

a.)average 20% return per year with a volatility of 10%
b.)average 80% return per year with a volatility of 40%

Which investment would you chose if you wanted to quit your job?
Which investment will make you more in the long run?

So while its probably easy to say "well I take a.) if I wanted to quit my job and b.) if I wanted to make the most money" think about risk of ruin and confidence intervals and you realise, that you just cannot be certain when it comes to b.)

If you lose half of your account in the first year and make 100% next year, you have made zero moneys. You could make 200% 4 years in a row and be a millionaire... or you can blow up within the first 8 months.


Going back to a.) it's pretty certain that you are not broke within the first year and you will stay to play for a pretty long time.

This allows you to let the compounding interest effect work for you and - which is the most important thing - you can quit or shift towards another investment because you know early when a.) doesn't work anymore without going broke.


Let's relate this to poker:
With a low variance approach you can be more certain that you are a winning player at current stakes. Nobody will play for a living with 5BI's won in 1 out of 5 sessions and losing 1 BI in 4 sessions although it's +EV.
If you can rely on your stats more, you can move up in stakes earlier to make more and you can react to changes in the metagame earlier and lose less.

Ultimately, you can put more volume into your game the lower your variance/higher certainity is, either by playing more tables (online), quitting your job and play fulltime or moving up in stakes faster.
Ergo low variance (or better low sortino ratio) scales better.


TL;DR:

Wow, what a wall of text this became...I hope it's a little clearer now.
After all, it's understandable that you want to play as much and as deep as possible against a whale because it's intuitive. Idiot plays trash, never folds and is all in every second hand. But think about the fact that people thought of JT as the best hand for a long time, before online poker was a thing. Now you come along, shove AA pre and they mark you as the idiot, although you make the correct play.

So why do you think the "whale" is bad...he could play a high variance but overall winning strategy and you just don't get it.

The question is HOW you play against this guy and HOW your BR looks like. Will you be a nit, play fit or fold every street and only shove when you have the stone cold nuts?
Or will you also play flips (i.e shove AKs pre), shove combo draws (i.e. Kd2d on 3d4dKh)?

While the later option can make you more money and fit/fold is lower variance and the better option.


Also when you play usually 2/5 on a 100K$ BR and see a wild 1/2 game, of course you can to push for the maximum, cause you're playing under bankroll and the dollar variance will probably be less than in your 2/5 games.

But it is lunacy if you play 1/2 on a 1k$ BR and suddenly a drunk whale sits down to splash. In this instance you are definitely playing over your bankroll if you don't nit up by a serious amount.



Key take away: In wild games, always chose the low variance route since variance and bank roll requirements go up and certainty about your winrate goes down...untill you are playing well below BR and don't give a fk

The "open to 3x" (or even 6x) will not work. The whole point of such an open is to thin the field. If you can't thin the field then don't try. Just limp.

I have a similar game going with a rotating, large-ish group from work. The trick is to play it low (not slow but small bets to feed some money into the pot without making it too expensive for you should you get the feeling you're beat) until the river... and then bomb it when you're pretty sure you have it.

Beginners just cannot fold anything on the river if they have been paying any kind of chips into the pot on all streets. They always think you're bluffing. (as for bluffing in such games there's just one piece of advice: don't)

I almost couldn't get past the $5/100h which if is the case you might as well not play. Nobody plays live games to grind out that 2,5bb/100. Also your whole premise is that you're massively underrolled and therefor shouldn't play deep versus fish, which is obvious. It's just not true that you shouldn't play deep versus fish by default.



Categorically not true. The whole point of raising against stations is to get value from your big hands. If they still call 6x, try 10x. If that doesn't work, try 15x. If they still call with K8 against my AQs then let them. If it means you can shove preflop and still get called, then that is what you do.

No, that's not correct. The whole premise is that in high variance games the uncertainty raises regarding your skill edge and your bankroll requirements. As a result, you should play less on the edge that in nitty games.

Well I changed my game plan and limped a lot into cheap pots then when I picked up premium hands didn't get too carried away pre flop anyway end result was I won the tourney! So my plan worked let's see if it works next week now lol