Texas Hold'em has been my intro to poker back in late 2007. That's all I played. In fact, back then, Omaha seemed like an esoteric game for gamblers, etc.

Also, I wasn't at all serious about poker. What this meant was that I stuck to playing at the micro tables. Hell, even $25NL was "more than I wanted to risk." Needless to say, I was a long-term losing player.

Anyway, I became interested in poker again, after about 3 or 4 years of absence. But this time around, I investigated PLO8, and even PLO. They "made more sense" to me than Hold'em. It felt like there were fewer spots where I'd have to see the villain's cards to have a reasonable idea of what my actions should be. Which is ironic, considering there are more cards they hold, and so it should be harder to put them on a hand, you'd think.

But seeing that Texas Hold'em is the "standard" poker game, I feel that I need to at least know it enough to keep up with the jargon being thrown around by regulars.

Now, what I've noticed in so many DC videos is how often the players are betting with what at the micros would be considered completely nothing. Totally air! The board can be K55 and they'll raise and re-raise with 98s! Like wtf...

That kind of behavior is complete donkey vomit at the micro stakes. But I'm starting to have a vague "sense" for why it's actually the correct play once you go up against thinking players who actually care about winning if it goes to showdown.

You can't get away with that in Omaha or Omaha 8/b. Stud, Razz, Stud/8? You're burning money if you try that ****. But No Limit Texas Hold'em?

I'm starting to appreciate at a gut feeling level why NL is a game, indeed, of people, and not of cards. Am I headed in the right direction? Or am I forming a gross misconception that will set me up for disappointing failure later on down the road?

Yes, you are right. As Lefort would say, people will be mad at me for revealing this: at its highest levels, the cards are the least important part of the game. They cease to matter and it becomes all about leveling and metagame. The best players are in tune with this. They've reached a point where they can feel their opponents' mind-state even over the packets transmitted over the internet. At the highest levels of NLHE, you don't even need cards or chips.

I think it's best summarized by the last few sentences of this post. It's from five years ago, so the names have changed, but the fundamental undergirding remains the same.

Yeah 2012 poker is all about the metagame and being unpredictable. For example is good to 3bet with hands like 34s, 72s because they dont expect it and you can win a big pot when you hit your 2p/straight/flush. Equity is an useless concept nowadays.

But dont try this right at the highstakes, better to start at nl100-200 fullring because its full of nits and you can own their souls.

Yupp. I Mean the really good guys at highstakes often play 55-65% of hands preflop at 6max (some even more, although I haven't seen any good players play above 75%) because they are so good at reading other players postflop that they can make sick moves. They also tend to fold to cbets like 20% or less and then just play very agressively if they think villain is bluffing a lot or calling down suuuper light. You really have to know what you're doing but yeah for very good players, the cards they have barely matter. Ofc it still matters a bit but for example QJs is only marginally better than Q7o for them, whereas the difference is huge for players who are not so good.

The thing is, you can only learn this style but playing it very early on to get a good idea on how to play "weaker hands" and really put yourself in a ton of spots where you're going to have to make big calls and big bluffs to make it profitable to play those hands.

I wish I had that done earlier rather than being a nit and only playing 25-30% of my hands (Probably why I can't make it above midstakes). So hard to learn it now. I might actually move back down to Microstakes to learn to play that way and then move up and crush.

Bluffing with equity is so 2008.

I started folding any hand w/ equity in 2007 and shoving the bottom of my range...now I'm a millionaire.

lol @ the last two posts. Mostly because they're not complete bull.

so you need to play 60/41 to beat the games?

yeah c/r 98 on k55 would be really really tough to counter

You can do the "reversed strategy", as I call it.

You simply click CHECK whenever you have a hand, and BET when you don't. So the few times you actually do BET, opponent will think you are Strong, and when you CHECK, they will do the betting for you.

I have been doing this since way back in oct 2012 and so far I am 214bb/100 over a 116 hand sample. But this was on micros, where Deception is far more sought after than in the Higher Stakes.

I also have a strategy which I call "MPB" (multi-purpose-betting).

It's kind of a bet that can be a for value or simply a multiple street zero-equity bluff.

It all, works.

At nitty tables I play 100% vpip.

What makes the strategy great is the fact that I can always rep the nuts. I play every hand in a way that would only make sense if I had the nuts thus forcing the nits to fold 87% of the time.

Another new complex strategy is the "mirror strategy". You simply pick the strongest reg at the table and copy exactly what he's doing. If he's raising you raise back. If he checks, you check. This automatically puts you in the top 5% of regulars.

haha

I think this is the famous "twilight strategy".

edit: agreed that this is a very high level strat.

No, the twilight strategy means betting to fold out better hands and keeps worse hand in play due to leveling. The bets sizings and timings levels opponents into the infamous "twilight zone". Once you trapped them in there, they keep on making those costly mistakes. But in general, its not well accepted between High rollers.

oh, and don't use "twilight " vs drugged people, they tend to recognize that.

i love this thread

No one else open this expecting seat script and note caddy etc talk?

AA is good.

not a fan

I like to use the almost time out technique against regs, basically every hand you get against them you time the clock down to one second before you make your move. This way the opponents can't get any reads against you and it looks like you thought to the maximum about his hand and he knows that you will be able to easily out level him in the future.

There is an option on Pokerstars to hide your hole cards. I only play up to 5/10 but friends of mine who play higher have this option checked by default. Some are even using some new software (think it's called RongHand) which is like a HUD that overlays random hole cards in the same spot and then they simply play the "false" hand. Impossible to hand read those guys as they don't even know what they have themselves, pretty sick.

Party have even started integrating this feature into their software. That site is always ahead of the curve.

Is it true Stars are beta testing a new high stake metagame option to Run It None? It just ships to the player who reps the best hand.

LOOOL