For long-term winning poker players out there, is there still value for a 2nl 6-max player in studying the stickies/wells/threads?

I am aware that there are some concepts that will always be relevant like the math, but how can a newbie like me, without a hindsight of how online poker strategy evolved, know that what I'm reading is outdated or not?

Should I just use the The Grinder's Manual as my main learning material and pair it with posting hands here?

Any advice will be helpful. Thanks!

Did you have any examples of strategy posts that peaked your interest?

Generally, all of the wells and stickies in each forum are relatively timeless and are still relevant to today's poker games.

Posting hands is still a great way to learn and resource, but be careful whose advice you take.

It's 2NL, nothing much is really going to have changed, and did you really need to make a second thread?

good to know, thanks!


I know, my bad.

None as of now as I haven't started reading.

thanks

For a beginner these will be enough to get you better than the average 2nl player.

These are quite outdated though and solver work is all the rage these days.

that's my main concern though, the these

if you don't mind, can you give me at least 1 or couple concepts that were standard or +EV strategy in the sticky but are now outdated?

I won’t be going over them once again but I remember them being tailored towards the meta at the time.

Stuff like punishing limpers with almost ATC is a losing play depending on what stakes you play.

Just read them and bear in mind if they are basing anything on reads etc., it might be outdated.

To add to this it’s also very read / stats based.

So it’s full of common sense advice that is “if he folds to 3bets a lot we can bluff him”

Which is useless advice if you have no sample on a player, or if he realises you’re 3betting him too much and then he starts adjusting but his stats haven’t caught up yet. At some point you’ll want to know which moves are solid even when reads and stats are absent, which those COTWs mostly don’t cover.

This is from the Moving up through uNL in 2010 thread, do you think this read is still true today? or at least at 2nl?

If you ask anyone who was around they’ll tell you 2010 was a very different time. I wasn’t around then so I couldn’t tell you how it compares.

I would say it’s true to an extent. People aren’t idiots and if you keep showing down the goods they may start adapting. For me this hasn’t been a big issue, a lot of the atrocious fish I run into I don’t see again.

Also imagine if every time you’ve 5bet in an anonymous pool you get folds 10% and they show down QQ+ when they do call. Should you start balancing in these spots vs unknowns? **** no.

Now imagine if you bet pot on the flop every time you do bet. You look in your database and see that your average success rate is 45%. Does this mean you should check back every bluff? No! This is somewhere I’d play more balanced since It’s not clear cut what I should do. Trying to go into an extreme of never bluffing or bluffing everything will be punished by other more solid strategies.

Here's some info I'm pulling out of my ass but I still think isn't necessarily that off-point:

To me, it seems information older than 5 years old is still absolutely going to be helpful up to 10NL.
If you're playing above that, try getting something more recent.
Nothing older than 3 years old for 25/50NL, and above that it's the norm to be up to date with current strategies.

Along that same vein, if OP would read every COTW thread HERE ..... and then reads a bunch of current strat posts in the 2+2 area most closely related to his game of choice..... OP would be a top micro player....maybe a bit beyond as well. T O P .

I still cringe whenever I hear poker advice referred to as "outdated".

No matter what poker book, sticky or article you read or no matter what video you watch or coach you listen to, you *must* always be aware of the assumptions that go into the advice.

You might hear advice, "Never bluff" and immediately think, "that's terrible advice", but if you're against 1 or 2 villains who will never fold as long as they've caught some tiny piece of the board, never folding is great advice. If you're at a table where people are not willing to put their stack in the pot with an overpair, you need to be more willing to triple-barrel-bluff often for your whole stack.

The "optimal" pre-flop raising and 3-betting ranges, c-bet %s, raising c-bets, double-barreling, triple-barreling and value betting percentages vary with the opponents' playing styles.

As long as the advice you're reading is either teaching you how to NOT mistakes, or teaching you how to identify and exploit mistakes being made by your opponents, I can't imagine the advice could possibly be too bad.

A lot of strategy content, even from well respected individuals, is incorrect (or applied incorrectly). It's going to be nigh impossible to tell the difference until you properly build up your understanding and apply the context of the situation to the information being supplied. It's likely that any play could be justifiable under the right circumstances.