1. I do it in all blind structures in games above 10/20 online and when I have a tough player to my left in a live time game.

2. I am not sure how to respond to this question. The flops come out randomly. I will surrender with air if I get called on the flop. A good player's pf check range should be pretty weak. In higher stakes games people generally call with 100% of their range to a pf open, so I pretty much have 0 fe pf, but on the flop, I will have a lot more. Most opponents play pretty honest in tiny pots. Its also for balance. My general strategy against all but the toughest of opponents is to wait until the turn to cr my decent made hands/draws. Playing the turn in a hand that goes check/check on the flop, becomes difficult to balance, so I just simplify it by donking as it doesnt narrow my range and my opponent will almost always be making a mistake calling a turn bet with a draw and when he does call or raise his range becomes very narrow allowing me to make better river decisions.

2)I do it against all players, bc I see benefits against all player types. If I come across the ultra-rare foldy nit I will begin opening 100%. That is extremely rare though. Also, I dont bet into my opponent if he raised pf.

To put it simply, my belief is that for many years players placed a much higher premium on the value initiative in bvb than I thought was necessary. I believed that the position was much more valuable in bvb situations, so I kept looking for ways to cut that advantage so my goals was to find a bvb strategy that would keep the pot small when I was oop and punish the bb for making bb mistakes in small pots. making the same pf action every time accomplishes that and I will recoup the value I lost pf and on the flop in most cases. Against a tough player I generally cr the flop, bc they are less likely to barrel with air in such a small pot. I know I missing something important, but I havent thought about this in a long time.

Mitch- I take this to mean you utilize an expliotative fold/complete/raise strategy against mediocre/bad live opponents? Just trying to reconcile it with your second point #2

Sorry, I meant "all online players in #2." I feel like in live sh situations live medium steaks players fold the bb way too often. They also will be extremely inexperienced in how to use their position in bvb effectively, meaning they rarely float and are unbalanced a lot of the time. If you are in a situation where a bb is folding pf with any frequency and are not very good postflop, raising pf is a must.

In a limit game, is it generally accepted here that the main driver of the value of position is the pot size? There are definitely times when I elect to bloat the pot OOP because I think there is more value in it. In NL things are obviously vastly different since pot size dictate future betting size.

No, I think the main point is that when in oop it is good have a strategy that reveals the least info about your hand for as long as profitably possible, (generally on the turn and river) so the natural consequence of that is a small pot until the big streets. There are obvious exceptions to this rule.

I agree with this. I think you should employ this strategy only against someone who is calling 100% of their hands in the BB vs a SB raise. Against a dumb fish who is going to fold a ton of hands in the blinds or who will not put up a fight post flop, then you should be stealing.

Def true, although I think pot size does play a role. I actually think DpR's question is a pretty deep one, and could make for interesting discussion.

If we assume that the common mistake the BB makes is raising too often (both when SB completes and when SB raises), and barelling flop (and maybe turn as well) too often, then I think playing the SB is easier in the smaller pot because of the required calling frequencies.

If we complete and get raised, we are allowed to c/f 20% of our hands, whereas this drops to 14% in a 3b pot. Assuming the same extremely wide range in both cases, we are simply going to be forced to take more bluffing lines in the 3b case (since we won't have enough showdownable hands that can correctly take more passive lines), or else show down marginal hands like K and Q hi more often. This can certainly be done, but I think getting the correct lines and frequencies correct is much more difficult than it is in the smaller pot, where you can correctly c/f more and also correctly take passive lines more often (not sure about the 2nd part). And theoretically, it seems like the BB would have an advantage in a situation that required more bluffing and rebluffing from both players, because of his position -- this ties back into Mitch's point about information hiding.

An interesting though experiment: What does correct play look like in BvB, assuming the dead money in the pot is 100BB? Does the BB have a greater or smaller advantage?

If SB strategy is to limp/call top 90% it seems to me BB can exploit by raising top 50%.

How?

In case where BB raises they are playing for 4sb pot where BB has top 50% 100% of the time while SB has top 50% 50/90=55% of the time. In case where BB they are playing for 2sb pot where BB is bottom 50% 100% of the time and SB is top 50% 55% of the time. That is, when they go to the flop w big pots BB is ahead. Maybe I am over simp but

You you are neglecting to include how often they 3bet if I were to open the sb, which is probably the most important factor. What is your sb opening range against a tough bb in a mid/high steaks game?

mitch you should have been nominated in the top 5 most influential players thread.

My point was that BB can have advantage in limp strat' but your point is that alternative raising strat' gives BB even bigger advantage. Is that correct?

OK. Point is that the same raising opportunities exist but outcome limping is smaller pots.

I'd be nice to develop toy game a'la MoP to model this situation to compare strats and ranges.

No my point is that bb has the obvious advantage of position. High stakes online regs have a tendency to fight hard in bvb, so in order to help offset that advantage we keep the pot small, information he gains pf and on the flop limited and when we have sd hand or value hand any mistake he makes pf and on th flop is magnified, bc small size of the pot.

He only influences LHE players; and how much clout is that, really?

Wouldve been considered if the bvb strat ever caught on, haha, but I know like 1 other player that implemented it. 2p2ers would do it occasionally to mess with me. Pretty sure Chris did at least once. Stickman did routinely (doubt he knows who I am on 2p2), but I dont think he did much when I wasnt on his left.

I heard he was overrated.

I feel like maybe this is an issue of semantics if you are switching between informational advantage versus pot size since you specified that you did not thing that pot size drives value, although you then sort of write it here again.

You say we offset the positional advantage by keeping the pot small, thus magnifying our opponents mistakes. That seems opposite to me. I feel that being OOP means that we are going to make more mistakes since we have less information when we are making our decisions. Thus, the smaller pot magnifying mistakes hurts us more than our in position opponent.

In a game with fixed bet sizes, I think that larger the pot, the less the value of position. As per gaming_ question, if there is a ton of money in the pot already, it seems relatively irrelevant to me that we are OOP (tactical decisions are largely meaningless), we are going to showdown pretty much always - BB just gets to determine whether there is 100BBs or 101BBs in the pot....ho hum. In small pots that starts to have a lot of value, and tactical considerations are very significant since there huge portions of the pots value wrapped up in value/fold equity decisions.

Now, given that a large part of positional value is wrapped up in an information advantage, it definitely makes sense to me that you want to limit the information you provide for as long as possible. It just isn't really clear to me that a limping strategy is a great way to do that. In BvB situations, tactical considerations are very valuable, and I can think of some ways limping offers such advantages, but I am not sure that they are that difficult to counter by a strong playing BB.

I can't say I have thought much about this topic before right now, so I am really just spit balling here.....

I think from a theoretical perspective you are correct re: pot size vs. positional value. However, I also think that a lot of winning players play much better in bloated pots than they do in small pots regardless of position.

I do think there is a specific skill level of an aggressive opponent where limping the sb becomes the best strategy and that level is somewhere between awful and pretty decent. After that, I'm not really sure.

Yeah, I think I misunderstood your question. I agree that a strong playing bb can counter this pretty well, and I have actually thought of some ways to do so, but I will say that there were only a handful of players I came up against that were able to do so effectively. I wont name them here, but two are 2p2ers. I guess my writing was confused. What do you think a good way to counter an aggressive bb so that you are not folding away your sb 30% of the time?

Wasn't there a time where Deathdonkey was raising the SB polarized and open-limping middlish (connectors, but also stuff like K2s)? I remember that most opponents adjusted badly to that. It's been like 2 years since I've seen those vids, though.
I sometimes revert to some sort of strategy like that when I have a BB that just 3bets very wide, sometimes every single one of my SB opens. They play in small pots really bad in my experience.

Edit: No, these are usually not great BBs, they are just known for their relentless aggression. Obviously a competent BB would figure out what was going on eventually

Ping.

I didn't want this thread to get lost. Over vacation I have been playing poker, watching videos, and ... starting work on code to try to analyze this situation. If I actually get anywhere I'll post.

Bump in anticipation of forum software upgrade.