tldr

great bump

Now that I've started to 4 table, I'm really iso playing against fish, against certain fish I'll literally limp with ATC and call raises with any suited cards, any connectors, broadway cards, any ace and just out play them post flop.

What I've done with the aggro donks though is randomly bluff and get aggressive with them so that they know they can't push me around. I need them to get in the habbit of folding once in a while but I also make sure that they push me around once in a while, I will dump a little bit to them chasing and let them bully me out of some pots, its all settin them up for when I decide I want to get stacks in.

Its a mix of slow playing and getting aggressive depending on the timing and what you hold. However knowing the fish's tendencies is key to success, I find they give reads off based on bet sizes as to the strength of their hand. Sometimes they shove with the nuts, sometimes they massively overbet with air, sometimes they underbet. Its all villain dependant and you have to be watching them and see what they show down, sometimes you have to invest for that information.

Thanks for bumping this was just about to look it up

Omg... the interviews are just hilarious... Can we expect more of them?

This is gold
TY OP YOUR MY HERO
lmao @ interview- calling station to preflop raiser "why is he making it harder to get to showdown" bahahahha CLASSIC!

That was nice!(Y)

finally finished all 4 pages, great post.

Not much of a first post but I lol'd at the baby avatar. Might get me a baby avatar aswell to tilt the regs but oh well....

Sticky. Deifinitely one of the most valuable threads at the micros.

It wasn't until I started playing poker that I really understood the line from Rounders in Atlantic City casino where Matt Damon talks about how the rounders didn't play with each other, but they didn't play against each other either.

Funny OP.

I doubt that these basic types still exist, though - at least not in larger numbers.

I still remember one opponent from my NL2 days. I was to his left. Every pot he entered, I would enter along with him. He would never cbet and I would just bet with ATC and he would invariably fold. If he called on the flop, I'd bet big on the turn and take the pot. Like literally, every single time he played, I would do this.

More common, though, is the aggrodonk.

All fish still basically fit into one of these three types. It's just that fish keep slowly getting rarer and rarer in online poker as time marches on.

I do think the percentage of loose-passives-the most profitable/lowest variance kind of fish to play with--relative to the other types is going down, and the percentage of aggrodonks is likewise going up. I think 1-2 years ago the distribution of fish was like... 60% loose-passives, 30% weak-tight, 20% aggrodonks, and now it's more like 40% loose-passives, 20% weak-tight, 40% aggrodonks.

In particular, what I call the 'new aggrodonk' is springing up all over. Your classic aggrodonk runs stuff like 53/30/9.0. The new aggrodonk runs 53/0/9.0--they limp-call constantly and then go crazy postflop. I intend to write up a PSA on dealing with them soon...

There is also another kind of fish: one with robotic 2plus2 stats that does not know how to deal with being 3B/4B and being raised on the flop. These are players who try to make their stats look right but don't really understand what they are doing so they fail to adjust properly to aggrodonks.

Well, that was just a long way of saying 'lol I'm a better better than all of you' and not worth ten seconds' time to respond, but... you know online poker's getting bad when people start confusing bad regs for fish

That's weird. I'm still on the first page.

What's your definition of a fish? Mine is that they are consistently big money losers.

Hey, don't hate on me. I loved your OP. I just think things are always changing. The nits tend to have 2plus2 stats now.

If someone's SN in PTR shows big dollar losses and they also show a loss in my own sample then they probably ARE a fish! And many of THESE fish have 2plus2 stats! They aren't just bad regs, they are fish.

These days it is hard to find many loose passives and they usually go broke very quickly. The aggrodonks are everywhere. Many nits now know how to steal but can't hand read, playing only fit/fold. What I call the 2plus2stats guys are a new-improved variant of your nits. They steal but they steal badly. They still play fit/fold but they also try to steal. They fold to 3B's of their steals very frequently.

I like to differentiate between the true nit who doesn't steal and the 2plusstat guys who do steal as the play against them is different depending on where they are opening from.

Fish are still abundant, they have just camouflage themselves with better PF play (but still not good).

+1, exactly what I'm trying to say. Fish now read things like 2plus2. Their pre-flop play now camouflage's crappy post-flop play.

don't stop.

So does this make tight/aggressive the most "ideal" way to play with small variations to counter these types?

imho, no.

as mentioned in the OP, each of the three styles of fish does

1. really badly against one of the other styles, but
2. really well against the remaining style.

so if your opponent is the weaktight, then you do best against him by becoming somewhat more like an aggrodonk when you are against him in a hand (lots of bluffs, but fold when the weaktight plays back at you and you don't have a monster, because he surely does.)

this is, i think i'm right in saying, an exploitive strategy; we deviate ourselves from the 'correct' way of playing, in order to maximise our profits from our opponent's deviations. NLHET&P has a great chapter on this, i think it's called 'swapping mistakes' or something similar.

now obviously if someone else spots what we're doing, they can then exploit us; in the above example, if we're playing like the aggrodonk, someone else can start calling us a lot lighter, since we're playing more (and thus on average weaker) hands than is 'correct', more aggressively than is 'correct.'

(some further reading on a slightly more refined version of this idea in this article if you're interested)

one way of avoiding these problems would be to play what we think is 'correct' poker all the time, mix up our play judiciously so as not to be readable, and not adjust (or adjust less) to exploit our bad opponents; i think i'm right in saying this is an 'equilibrium' strategy as opposed to an exploitive one, since our primary focus is on avoid getting exploited ourselves, rather than exploiting our poor opponents. possibly this is what you meant when you asked if TAG was 'ideal' vs all opponents.

considering we play the micros, and we are (hopefully) better on average than our opponents, i hope you can see that we are better off adopting exploitive strategies than equilibrium ones; the gains we achieve by using exploitive strategies over equilibrium ones far outweigh the disadvantages of getting exploited ourselves, because our opponents are not, in general, good enough to correctly exploit the mistakes we are purposely making.

hth and makes sense, and all imho in case it doesn't

hahha the end interviews are great!!

lol nice one.

I'm No 3 (about 70% est) but I'm working hard on changing that way of thinking.