--something like 12/10, 12/9 is good.

--yeah. especially the chronic button stealers. double especially for the ones that fold a high % to 3bets. experiment a little by 3betting or folding rather than calling the hands you normally call with.

--your numbers should be similar to button, but a little tighter. throw out the bottom part of your button range.

--look for boards that have a higher likelihood of hitting your opponents range, especially when you completely wiff. also when you flop strong, you might c/c or check behind in position, hoping they might keep firing or catch something on the turn and get some value.

--when there is some dead money in the pot 3betting is not ever going to be very wrong. if you are up against EP raiser or a tight player in EP or MP, calling with position is okay. mix up your play a bit more is my main point.

MyHandle: If you played 85k hands breaking even at NL5 I would suspect you're playing more tables than you can handle. My advice would be to cut it down radically, maybe to two tables, and get the basics down. Search this forum, and read all the strategy guides you can find - sircuddles' guide, DiggerTheDog's Nit Clinic, and the COTW.

About the cbetting percentage: This has to be seen in conjunction with PFR. Of course somebody who raises 7% has a stronger range and thus can cbet more than somebody raising 24%. I don't think you can say "65% is the ideal cbetting number".

derek: This thread is here for helping people who have trouble with the basics. Of course they would benefit more if they would read the first page of the thread and then analyse their own game before posting here. Your results are nice, but we have a BBV thread for that. Of course you could share your knowledge and let us know why you think most players here do not achieve the same results.

I agree that 10ptbb/100 could be possible at NL50. However it wouldn't make sense for anybody to sustain that winrate over a significant sample size since they could most likely make more moving up to NL200. If you won at this rate over 50k hands you'd make $5k. So I don't think taking an extra $1,000 out of the micro economy would provide you a sufficient incentive to do it.

Just cruised through 1c 2c for 14.86bb/100 over 21k hands. Took about 20 hrs of play and my stats during that time were LOL. 9/5/.07

Was my winrate variance? Don't know, not sticking around to find out. I do have a feeling those stats and the wait for people to bluff off stacks postflop might not fly at 2c 5c with 100bb stacks.

The money isn't the main reason. It's because of how the argument is going. No one thinks its possible (except for you and a silent few ). And so I wanted to try it out for them. Also, I am not completely confident that I could do it. Which is why I only asked for a $1k bet. I'm very tilt-prone, and betting any more than that could have a negative effect on my January game if things go bad. But the bet is there so I don't look back and go "wow, I wasted a whole month for these guys." Also, sticking around 50nl for a little while wouldn't be too bad of an idea. Again, I have a tilt issue and it really shows at 100nl. It's probably my terrible bankroll management catching up to me. I moved up to 50nl when I built myself up to $600. And again, moved up to 100nl when I got to $1200. Anyways, maybe the double in my bankroll would be good for my 100nl game.

Also, as to why I think most players here do not achieve the same results, here are my general thoughts...

Too much multitabling? I'm not exactly sure, because I can't multitask myself, so I don't know how much attention you are actually giving per table, but the fishes at 50nl have huge leaks. They should be easy to exploit. I think most of you guys miss alot of spots.

Because 2p2 is the largest poker forums in the world, you guys expect that everything taught here is gold. I don't think so. I'm not going to list any common misconceptions about what lines to play in given spots, but I do disagree with many lines the average 2p2 player would take in those given spots. Sometimes I'm wrong. But sometimes the majority is wrong too, right?

So what kind of game do you think a 2p2er plays at the lower limits? I think I would say its something of a defensive game. Defense doesn't take any brilliant lines to take in given spots. You just plug your leaks by following 2p2 standard lines in given spots. And from whatever leaks your opponent has, you benefit. I think you should be playing the offensive game. And you can't really play offense without a clear understanding of another's defense, right? Exploitation to the fullest.

im interested in this bet. ill put up $500 to bet that derekeom can do it. any takers?

So you just happened to fall upon this thread as you browsed through 2+2 for the 1st time and decided to make a bet on a stranger. Sounds like a legit 1st post to me.

Meanwhile - we are causing a hijack that is probably unacceptable or at least rude to the scope and readers of this thread. I'm still up for the $1000 bet derek. PM me with a thread link for this in an appropriate place if you decide to go through with it.

/ my posting on the subject in this thread here and now. My apologies to the Official Stats readers.

I am actually up to 95k hands now and am down $100 total. I have lost about 20 buy-ins over the past 2 days (about 6 tonight). I have been taking beat after beat. Had a set lose to a guy with a K-3 who backdoored a flush. A fish moves all in pre-flop with 10-5, I have AK and he wins. My Kings are always up against aces. I make the nut flush on turn only to have a guy suckout a full house on river. Every time I get Queens a guy with A-3 hits an ace on flop.. On and on it goes. I don't mean to bore you with beat stories, but my point is I don't feel I am playing THAT badly. Obviously I am doing something wrong though, but I don't know what.

I see these people post their graphs that are perfectly linear. No great upswings or downswings. I want to know how they do that. I find it terribly hard to be that consistent.

So I have a question: what starting hand strategy should I use? I would like someone to give me hand ranges for each position (is there such a thing already in the COTW's?) I would like the same for 3 betting ranges.

I have read NLHE TAP and there is a chapter on their recommended starting hand strategy. They mention that limping is perfectly OK (even on the button), yet I hear people here say to never ever limp. I have never understood why.

If you're not playing badly, and it's just bad beats, then the good news is that you can just continue to play as you do now, and it will eventually turn around. The bad news is that you have no influence on that.

In my opinion everyone at the micros - including me - has big leaks in their game. Concentrate on the things you can change, and don't worry about those you can't change. One thing you can do is looking at you all-in EV line. If that one is positive then you are correct that part of your losses are due to bad luck.

Bad beats happen to all of us. However, sometimes we are to blame even for the bad beats.

• In the set against K3 hand, did you bet the maximum on each street? Or did you slow play it?
• AK vs T5 is only a 2:1 favourite, so you should expect to lose a fair amount of times.
• If your KK is always up against AA (and it's not just selective memory) then have a look at your opponents. Would they really 5-bet-shove QQ here? (Apparently some of them shove T5, so who knows.)
• QQ is the third-best preflop hand. However when an ace flops and you encounter resistance it loses value rather quickly. So if your cbet is called against an unknown you should be done with the hand. Hence you won't lose more than 7bb or so.

Part of this may be an optical illusion. If you play many hands with a big win rate then swings will not be as visible in the graph. Say somebody plays 100k hands with a win rate of 5 ptbb/100. This means the height of the graph corresponds to 100 buy-ins. A 5 buy-in downswing only shows up as 5% of the total height. If on the other hand you break even and have 3 buy-in swings they show up in the graph as going from the top to the bottom, so they are much more visible.

Another part is that if you have a positive win rate you won't have as many downswings. If you win at 4ptbb/100 and run 3 BI under expectation over 5000 hands, you're still up one BI.
Your starting ranges should depend on your postflop abilities. The more hands you play the more difficult decisions you will face after the flop. The same goes for open-limping. So I'd recommend to play tight and not open-limp. There are at least two threads in this forum with starting points for nitty opening ranges: sircuddles' Complete Guide, and DiggerTheDog's Nit Clinic.

I want to share my opinion on why this is true. I think there are different ways to play a hand. There are two extremes to the spectrum. You can play in a high variance fashion with a higher profit potential. You can also play a low variance game with pot control in many situations. Playing the lower variance game, I think that a graph can be pretty accurate in 5-10k hands (maybe I am biased, but I speak my thoughts honestly from my own experiences). Also, there is another element to poker that poker players have to deal with. Tilt. Everyone tilts on different levels and in different frequencies. This is not variance that you have no control over. So some people may have steadier graphs than others because they just tilt less.

Why does a losing player usually have higher variance than the higher winning player? This is because they are still learning the game, and have more unknowns than the winning player.

And I also agree with Cangurino about the optical illusion. Never thought about it that way.

Hey guys.
I am currently playing 5NL, after playing 100k hans on 2NL (14 BB/100 according to PTR).
I used to play as a nit, but I got bored doing it. Thats why I changed my style and now I try to play as a LAG. I am also multi-tabling max amount of tables. (more hands = more thinking = better player in the future???).
Playing those amount of tables probably isnt the best thing to do, but I believe I have enough time for my decisions.
But I have a few leaks and before I go playing 10nl I want to fix them.

I have some questions aswell.
I steal 90% of the time, is that to much?
Am I calling my SB to much?
Should my pfr% be a a few % higher?

I'm a new player, playing 2NL. I'm not exactly crushing it at 4.7BB/100 over 5k hands (20/12 because i limp into a lot of pots with small pocket pairs and suited connectors.) One thing that seems really different about my winnings graph compared to other micro players' is that my money won w/o showdown is very negative. what can this mean?

http://min.us/mvbDrDS

i think it's impossible to have a positive red line at 1c2c

theres so many posts about this and your not alone, the average micro player's red line is a straight down red line, thsi is a small hand sample also.

post your positional stats in the stats thread

I'm kind of surprised your redline is as good as it is at 2NL.

http://min.us/mvfdA1O

Sorry, small sample size.

Since this post I've played 17k hands at 2c 5c. My plan was to go in with my same ultranit style and adjust on the fly tweeking this and that. But I just kept winning, and have hardly changed anything. The only thing different is that my 3bet is dbld. Might finish up the year at this level if things stay on track.

Wow, Dream that's really impressive. Care to share a little more about your play? I'd like to buzz through 2NL that quickly, but I'm currently ~6ptBB/100. I'm guessing you don't limp into many pots with suited connectors or small pocket pairs? How many tables to do you play at a time, and how do you pick them? Always getting it in with TPGK on a decent board against a fish?

I've been 24 tabling, and I just pick them by highest avg stack. I usually get it in with a set or maybe tp t kicker or a flush. I hardly make hero calls vs even the fishiest fish, and I just valuebet for the most part until someone freaks out and shoves stack. Take it down, I have 23 other tables to get it in better.

I think I might actually play fundamentally bad when I look at the stickies and threads here, I limp a ton, at 1c 2c I almost never 3bet without kk or aa if there were like three limpers already (Chipstar was talking about it being really hard to isolate at 1c 2c if three guys already decided to limp in). Basically I limped pps a ton, did exploitable stuff like open larger with premium hands, and smaller with non premium hands, and valuebet a ton. Loosened up considerably from the button.

I'm sure this is going to bite me in the ass when I move to $10nl, and I'll have to make a ton of adjustments, but it seemed no one was really noticing what I was doing at 1c 2c.

(oh, also buy in 250bbs at 1c 2c if your br can swing it. obv it's gonna help your winrate a ton when you stack another 250bb guy.)

Do you use a program like Table Ninja that automatically requests time and what not?

Hi all,

I've posted my stats before (here) but got no answers. Back then I was at 10k hands NL2 and winning pretty good I would say, now I'm at 30k hands, and I think my game evolved pretty much since then, however I cannot translate this into $ as I was even the last 20k hands.

I know I have big leaks in my game and I would really appreciate if someone with more experience than myself would care to take a look and give me some advice. Generally speaking I don't want to play NL2 any differently than I would play higher stakes; I see that all the regulars are very tight passive, with AF smaller than 2, and they're probably winning money playing this way, probably more than I do, but I would like to keep to a game style that could help me when I move up. Is this correct?

My button play is awful, and I don't understand why. I analyzed all my winnings and loses from the button and I really don't know how I could have played them differently. I'm winning big from CO and later streets, but the BT is incredible low. And I KNOW that having an AF smaller on the button than on any other streets is bad, but once again, I don't know if I could've played any hand differently. Maybe I'm overlooking something?

I think W$SD, WTSD and W$WSF are in normal ranges. AF at3.25 is probably a little bit lower than I would have hoped for, but I guess a big part of it being so low is my button play once again where it's only 2.8.

As far as stealing goes, I'm winning money when trying to steal so this is good; I know I should try to steal more than 17%, but I'm pretty tight otherwise and I don't want to deviate too much from my play, so I'm never stealing with 78s and stuff like this. Maybe it's a leak, but I like it this way. Probably my blind play is faulty, do you see any stats there that should be different?

Anyway, sorry for writing so much, I just wanted to share my own feelings. Below are my stats, and thanks for sharing any info.

Hello everyone, I am new here and I just finished reading this thread. GREAT INFO!!

Anyways I took a look at my numbers and compared them to the OPs stat recomendations. Here are some of my more important stats (this is all $5nl fullring rush poker btw).

based on 17.5k hands
VPIP/PFR/AF:10.6/9.6/3.2
WTSD%: 28.65
W$WSF: 51
W$atSD: 54.88
Att. to steal: 21.61

So looking at this information it looks like I am playing too tight out of LP and maybe even MP. Here is a closer look at my VPIP from position:
BTN--14
1--13.5 So these numbers seem a bit low. Should I be
2--12 playing alot more hands in these positions? Could it be a
3--10.8 result of tighter ranges due to playing rush poker?

Another obvious problem is that my Att. to steal is low, which is probably related to the above problem..

My W$WSF is much higher than the 35% recomended. Is this a bad thing? I am I betting people off their mediocre hands too much? Whats the deal with this?

I would post screen shots of my stats however I am having issues with the "Insert Image" button lol..

Any advice would be great thanks!

MAAAAAAAAAAAAAJOR leak. you pass up on soooooooo much free money, which is where a lot of winrates are made from

I have a question. Why do I hear everybody playing tighter ranges in Rush Poker? I always see people saying this. People sit and nit and wait to get 10-AA, AK, AQs and that is it. When they hit the flop, they can't get away from it no matter what. If you call their raise in position w/ the right odds or even if they call your raise in position or you limp in w/ a suited connector or pocket pair they pay you off. When I opened up my ranges I started doing much much better in rush poker.. Don't know if anybody else has had this experience.

I play 21/18/10/3.5 4-bet when I play Rush. Small sample size, but I wouldn't change much about it except the 10% 3-bet - depending on how regs adjust to me. My winrate is ok - 8 BIs (9 BI EV) over 4200 hands. I have a weird graph though.



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