On Being Solid.
I used to make long posts like this all the time, and I haven't in a while. So here we go. Ups to Verneer, who I've been discussing some of these concepts with lately. This is x-posted on my blog
Verneer called me yesterday to chat about some poker ideas, our respective experiences with rush, and the idea of the "Ladder of Mistakes," that I discuss in the first chapter of the upcoming book, which touches on the idea of making small mistakes early in a hand to avoid or cause bigger mistakes later on, such as folding 77 on a J94ss flop even though it might be the best hand at the time, or 3-betting a seven-high type hand to cause an opponent to tilt when you later pickup Aces.
By his own admission, Verneer is a life nit. So am I. We don't like bankroll swings, we both play mostly SSNL, and we both play extremely overrolled. I play and advocate a relatively straightforward, super solid TAG style, using a lot of common sense decision-making mixed with a few choices idiosyncracies. I make standard plays 90-95% of the time. I'm sure Verneer's apple doesn't far fall from the Solid Tree either. In his blog post about his tremendous success at 100-200nl, he describes his game-plan as "Raising when I got it, folding when I don't, and letting the 2+2-ers try to 5-bet bluff-shove me off Aces."
Back in the day, people used to herald solid play as the key to beating SSNL-MSNL games. Then, after the poker education boom, solid play fell out of favor. People became obsessed with Hero calls and romantic bluffs, and lost sight of their roots. Rather than asking "how does my hand fare against my opponent's?" they asked "what can i get my opponent to fold?" Without balancing the two questions, they suddenly became marginal winners, and as their opponents became even better, these players became more and more breakeven.
So often, I see people say "ABC poker doesn't win the money." What?!? Says who? Did someone flip a switch and suddenly make solid play unprofitable? Did a bunch of nosebleed players all come out at once and say that solid play is a losing style? And even if they did, were they doing so for the benefit of their opponents, or for their own benefit?
Solid plays wins the money. If anyone tells you anything else, they're deluding themselves. When someone says "Oh ABC poker doesn't win," they're wrong. At least half a million hands between Verneer and I proves that solid play not only wins, but it wins at a steady clip. Don't believe it beats MSNL and higher? Go search up Nanonoko, or TcBlade.
Let's say a SSNL player-- Edward, we'll call him, because i love vampires-- plays a really solid, slightly nitty 19/16 style that focuses on putting in very little money while behind, and putting in as much money as possible when very likely ahead. This philosophy is exemplified by the poker aphorism "Big hand, big pot. Small hand, small pot."
Let's take a second SSNL player, Jacob. Jacob loves bluffing. It's a drug. He splashes around, and gets high off of stacking his opponents and running big all-in bluffs when his opponent shows weakness. He plays 27/24 with a 9% 3-bet, and spends a lot of time trying to “own” his opponents, which is arguably necessary with his much looser style.
If you took 100 Eddie's and 100 Jacob's, most of the Eddie's will be 2 to 4ptbb/100 winners, depending on their skill and how well they ran. However, if you look at the Jacob's, I'll bet they generally will have winrates closer to -.5 to 1.5ptbb/100. This is for a couple of reasons:
1) At SSNL, value-betting is often more powerful a weapon than bluffing.
2) Eddie is much less likely to have big swings, and hence, is less likely to tilt. Jacob's game is much more sensitive to gameflow conditions, making his auto-piloting game much less effective as his number of tables increases. While Eddie can probably play 6-8 tables very effectively, Jacob should usually play no more than 4.
3) When Eddie's playing his B-game, he'll rarely be making huge mistakes for his stack. More likely, he'll make more small ones than usual, perhaps calling raises a bit too lightly, or folding a bit too early in the hand. If Jacob's playing his B-game, he might poorly time a 4-bet bluff, or 3-bet an aggro reg too often and get 4-bet, or run a bluff that would've been effective in a vacuum, but is poor in a specific dynamic. In turn, this leads to a deterioration in play, and Jacob loses even more.
This isn't to say that there aren't outliers. There are certainly some VERY talented hyper-LAGs out there, but they are rare. Tableratings seems to anecdotally support this claim: when you look up very loose opponents who are giving you trouble, the overwhelming majority of the time, you'll find these players are small losers to small winners, and are rarely big winners over large samples. Of course, big winners are rare regardless of style, but I'd posit that players with 27 VPIP or higher are much less often 3ptbb/100 winners than their 22 VPIP counterparts.
When I first joined Cardrunners, I was one of the biggest winners at 100nl playing an 18/15 style. I table selected well, showed up with the goods, and generally didn't run huge, ridiculous bluffs. I wasn't a particularly fearsome player, but I grinded out a very steady, stable, low variance income, and that was good enough. As I became more experienced I opened up my game to 26/22, mostly to play more pots with the fish, though as I moved up to 2/4 and flirted with 3/6, I was having a harder and harder time maintaining a winning clip with a looser style. Those games are full of knowledgable, aggressive players, but if you dig deeply, you'll find that most of them are breakeven or very small winners. Why? Because these players are too spazzy, too suspicious. They're always worried someone's making a move on them, and put money in way too lightly. In fear of getting outplayed, they lose sight of “Big pot, big hand.”
If I was to seriously grind 100-200nl 6-max again, I would probably play between 19/16 and 20/17, with no more than a 5% 3-bet statistic (though I'd recommend my students to play very slightly looser, because they wouldn't have to worry about people trying to make hero plays on video against them). In the current state of the games, most regulars are Cardrunners or 2+2 members, and you'd think they wouldn't be susceptible to straightforward value betting and raising. Yet they are! They love to Hero call and they have high rebluffing frequencies. If you C/R a regular on JJx with a Jack, your value doesn't just come from a player calling you down with 88, it comes from someone bluff 3-betting and putting in 1/3 of their stack and then folding to your shove.
The tricky part, in my eyes, is how one defines “solid play” besides playing tightly pre-flop. I'm sure to butcher this definition, but I'll still give it a whirl:
1. Play big pots with big hands. When the pot's 50bb's or more, you should usually have a hand that compares very favorably against your opponent's. Against nits, that means you're near the very top of your range, and against fish, you've got top pair with a moderate kicker.
2. Run bluffs with equity. When deciding to raise a K84 flop as a bluff, it's MUCH better to do so with 76s or A4s than it is to do so with JT. Against KQ, 76s has 22% equity and draws to the stone nuts. JT has 6%, and sometimes when you backdoor two pair, you'll be paying off better two pair. This concept goes for both bluff-raising and floating. When double barreling, without a specific read, I'm barreling when A) my equity increases on the turn (I pick up a draw or had a premium draw to start) B) the card pooped on my opponent's flop calling range (aka usually an overcard to top or 2nd pair). At SSNL, I'm almost barreling with the sole intent to get someone off of TPGK.
3. Don't try to simplify poker into a pre-flop battle, trying to push tiny 3-4% edges. If you're getting in AQ or 99 pre-flop standardly in late position, you're not necessarily doing something wrong, but you're exposing yourself to significant trouble against perceptive or tricky opponents.
4. Play JUST loose enough to get people to assume you're a goofball. 3-bet on the button. Occasionally C/R and bluff-raise obvious bluffing spots and then fold. Let your opponents assume you're capable of more than you actually are. In a recent session, a 13/9 regular 4-bet QT and then CALLED OFF against my 5-bet. To make that call correct, either I have to be 3-bet/5-betting a hand like 55, or I have to be 5-bet jamming a hand worse than Q-high-- neither of which I've done outside of extreme circumstances. But my opponents don't know that!
5. Have a folding range. In every situation, you need to have a folding range. Be it folding to 3-bets, folding to 4-bets, folding to cbets, turn bets, etc. Though folding guarantees you'll lose the hand, folding encourages your opponents to put in more money with bluffs to try and run you over. Now, this doesn't mean you should fold too often-- you should still have a W$WSF north of 45%-- but it does mean that you should be willing to give up in certain positions, even when you know your opponent is going to be firing 100% of his air range. For example, occasionally C/Fing Kxxr with the betting lead encourages opponents to take shots at you when you check, which you can later exploit.
6. Cold-call very tightly. As you get more proficient, you can call much more loosely, especially with fish to act. However, standardly calling open raises with very speculative hands and 100bb effective stacks just isn't going to be profitable. Hands like 98s and A2s are going to require multi-way pots to show a profit if you're not accurately fighting for small and medium pots, or if you're misjudging how often a fish comes along for the ride.
7. Don't attack strength, attack weakness. There are a surprising amount of threads where I see someone shove over a 4-bet, or a C/R and turn bet, or a 3-barrel on a bad board to fire on. Yeah, there are some spots where this is right, but this should certainly not be the norm! Don't attack people in spots where they are trying to put a ton of money into the pot, attack when they can't possibly have a strong hand. For example, if two players check around to you twice in a small pot, or a straightforward opponent doesn't lead after you check back the flop, those are times to pounce or run bigger-than-usual bluffs. Not only will your success rate in these spots be VERY high, but if you're caught, you get to develop a crazy image very cheaply.
I'd like to end on a final note:
We've all seen videos where high stakes pros have said "well, I'm kind of a station." And then proceed to make a call-down. In your own games, you should greatly resist the urge to be a huge station. Opponents at SSNL simply are not as aggressive as their higher stakes counterparts, and don't have the theoretical knowledge base to back up more sophisticated plays. At 50nl, I've never once said "Oh, my opponent has a capped range here, so I should shove this river" or suspected my opponents of being sophisticated enough to turn 77 into a bluff on Q64KJ when I triple barrel. Of course, people ARE doing this, but those players fall into such a minority that I do not let it dictate my overall play (I'm also convinced most of those players aren't big winners).
Be proud that you can make big folds when the need arises. Don't worry about balance and exploitation-- people aren't observant enough, aren't good enough, to be consistently exploiting you in esoteric spots. There are a lot of times where I said to myself "man, if I posted this hand in the forums, I'd get so berated," then proceeded to fold a flopped set or KK pre-flop (usually multi-way, where my opponent's range are stronger, and I get the side benefit to see that I'm right or wrong). I've folded top pair to a single flop bet in a single raised pot. Do I worry about folding the best hand? Of course! But it's not like I'm always folding top pair, or even folding enough to be exploited. Folding the best hand, though it may be a mistake in the moment, can often be correct in the long run. Trust your spidey sense. Your first gut instinct is often right. When the nit snap-mashes pot, I don't care what he's representing or that I have an overpair. He's got me crushed. Nice hand.
Last edited by terp; 07-27-2010 at 01:15 PM.
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