Quote:
Originally Posted by zobenfeja
Hi,
A Few Questions to BlackRain, If he still checks the thread.
It is obvious that generally players play much better now, even at 2NL than few years ago. Most of the people now days are regs, so I find it really hard to be able to suck out money of most of the villains using betting patterns written by your book.
Only thing that makes me on tilt is constantly earning 3 or 9 cents with QQ+ .
People generally at 2NL are so damn passive.
So my question to you is, do you think your technique from your book is still a very solid way to play 2NL at pokerstars? Or are there any major changes/adjustments you have made playing 2NL on stars today?
Also, are there any huge tips table selecting? So far I'm just using 25% VPIP and 25% players per pot filter on stars and trying to find out if the fish I meet aren't playing on any more tables.
Hi zobenfeja,
Sure no problem. And yes I check this forum all the time to keep up with other new books being released. I am also subscribed to this thread in particular so I get an email immediately when anyone replies.
You are right, the games do continue to change. And they have even changed at NL2 and NL5 in the 1 year and 8 months since I released Crushing the Microstakes. And also, as anyone can probably guess by the size of this thread, a lot of people have read my book and implemented the strategies by now.
When I play these games now I don't use the kinds of crazy overbets pre and postflop that I recommend in the book nearly as much. Quite a few of the regs have probably read my book and so they know exactly what I am doing. And also, as you mentioned, the players who these strategies work best against, completely clueless fish, are more difficult to find.
With all of the above said, I do think that these games in particular are still ridiculously easy. People have been complaining about the games getting tougher on 2p2 and elsewhere for at least 5 years now. Have the games changed over the last 5-7 years for the worse? Absolutely. But there are still many people who play this game for a living or a solid side income so the bad players must still be around somewhere.
I am not saying that this is you but I find that many of the people who complain about the games are mass multi-tablers who have very lazy table selecting skills. I used to be one of them. It is a fact that in 2013 if you think you are going to jump on 24 tables or play 4 zoom games even with your VPIP filters in place you are going to be playing in a lot of bad games even at the very lowest stakes, NL2.
Table selecting now involves individual tagging of fish and not so much table averages anymore. And especially with the abundance of what I like to call "super nits" at the lowest stakes these days, these table averages have become almost meaningless. This is because all the 8 or 10% VPIP nits bring the average down so much that you don't even realize that there is a 45 VPIP whale sitting right there.
The strategies in my book still work against these whales (and always will) and there are still lots of them at NL2 for sure. They also work against the 25/7 types who I label SLP in the book. And they are clearly still everywhere even at much higher stakes. And while the proportion of regs is higher these days many of them are still extremely bad at NL2/NL5, don't know how to fold to 3bets at all and tilt very badly. So these strategies will still work against many of them as well.
The crazier overbetting strategies discussed in my book that were specific to NL2 have received by far the most attention because they were new (especially at the time) and nobody had ever really discussed them before in a book, training video etc. But these ideas really represent a small portion of the real substance of the book. The main idea behind the book is teaching the reader how to play a solid TAG game with high positional awareness and an exploitative approach to many of the bad players that you will still find at these limits, even in 2013.
I still play these games on a fairly regular basis which allows me to avoid talking out of my ass. I don't 24 table auto-pilot full ring anymore though. Most of the time I am starting tables, playing shorthanded and focusing heavily on table selection. I also am usually on no more than 8 regular tables at once (or 1 or 2 zoom) so that I have time to make higher quality more opponent specific decisions. My winrates are just as high as they have ever been. Online poker is not what it used to be in years gone by but there are still tons of bad players (including many of the regs at these stakes) and you just have to work a little bit harder for it.
I may make some updates to my book at some point to reflect some differences in the 2013 games but I hope this long winded reply helps answer some of your questions. Poker is always changing at all levels. And no piece of poker information is timeless. So you have to learn to make small adjustments on your own as I discussed near the end of the book. But I think the overall driving force behind my book is still fully applicable in today's games. The reader just needs to understand that certain adjustments will need to be made as the games change and this applies to all poker instructional materials, not just my book.
Last edited by BlackRain; 07-31-2013 at 04:20 AM.