Two Plus Two Newer Archives - Advice f/ a MHNL'er Post #3

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Advice f/ a MHNL\'er Post #3

Hi,

Sorry it took me so long to get this one out. I've been busy lately, but a bunch of you bombarded me w/ PM's so here goes:

The first two posts focused specifically on poker strategy while this one will deal with profitability. Here are a few specific ways to improve your profitability (roughly in order of importance)

1) Game Selection: This is by far the most important thing you can do to improve your winrate. If your game selection consists solely of putting yourself on the waitlists of the tables with the biggest avg pots/highest% to the flop, your game selection sucks.

First, think about how important game selection is. At small stakes, if you are a good player, chances are there might be 4 or 5 tables out of 100 that you are unable to sustain a positive winrate. However, there is a big difference between winning 2BB/100 on a certain table as opposed to 15BB/100. Think about the times where you sat down with a fish on your table playing 70-100% of his hands. How quickly on average does he go broke? 30 hands? 50 hands? 70 hands? If you are on his table, sometimes you'll be the one taking his stack, sometimes you won't. However, the bottom line is, on average you will take x% of that player's stack. If you follow most of the following advice, x will be around 30%. Depending on how much he bought in for, this may average out to around 9-12BB's. If we take a conservative estimate and say he lasts 70 hands, that's a ridiculous 9-12BB/HR raise on your winrate.

I don't think there are many doubters to the fact that game selection is important so I won't spend much more time on it. Rather, let's move on to how you go about picking good games....

2) Identifying Fish

If you are to exercise good game selection, obviously you have to know what a good game is. Since most of you are probably multitablers, the easiest way to do it is to use PokerTracker and an add-on which superimposes everyone's stats onto the table. When you aren't playing, you should leave your computer on and datamine. Within a few days you can easily recognize the regular, winning players, and the regular, losing players.

Be warned that you shouldn't automatically assume that because a certain player's VPIP is over 30, he is a fish. There is a wide range of styles with which people can play profitably. Believe it or not, there are 50/20's who are winning players at 5/10NL and 10/20NL. However, like most things, you are playing the numbers game. Chances are that a player with a VPIP of 50 is much more likely to be a loser than a player with a VPIP of 15.

The next way to identify the fish is to observe how they play particular hands. TAKE NOTES. When you see someone check-call the KQ4 flop OOP w/ A7o, no draws, you can be pretty sure that he is a losing player. It's important that you note specifics of how the weak player plays, and ways for you to exploit that. For example, don't write "donkey" as your note. Sure this tells you he sucks, but what good is that if you are unsure of how to exploit it. Instead, write "calling station". Now you know not to bluff him. Or write "doesn't extract proper value from strong hands". Now you know that you should just check-call him down with your top pair type hand. Or write "fires three barrels with overcards". Now you know to just check-call him down to the river.

Once you are able to identify the fish, you need to learn how to take advantage of them.

3) Play more hands with the fish and less with the sharks

This should be obvious, but it is amazing how many players play on complete auto-pilot and disregard for who they are playing the hand against.

Here's an example. Standard starting stacks. You have 55 in the SB. Solid player raises 4-5x from middle position. All folds around to you. A lot of players will call and take a flop to try and flop a set. However, this is incorrect for a number of reasons.

First of all, a solid player's opening range is going to be such that every time you flop your set, he will not necessarily have a strong enough hand to pay you off. Say he raises KQ and the flop comes J75. You aren't going to win much off him. Remember, that you have to plan on getting 50 big blinds worth of his stack in the middle just to BREAK EVEN on your small pocket pair.

Next, because this player is good, there's no guarantee that he will even go broke with an overpair or top pair. Maybe a scare card hits on the turn to kill your action. Maybe he reads your hand well and can get away quickly.

The bottom line is that speculative hands fluctuate in value depending on the player you are playing them against.

Here is another example. Very bad player minraises UTG. One caller. You have 46s on the button. Standard stack sizes. You should be seeing a flop here every single time. Playing 46s profitably against a very bad player in this situation should be pretty easy if you know what his leaks are and how to properly exploit them.

Other than widening your range of hands you will play against a weak player, how else can you increase the number of hands you play against him...

4) Learn to play short-handed

This is probably one of the biggest fears of a lot of small stakes full ring players. I know when I first started out, I was scared to death of SH play. Now, I'd have to play postflop and not just win exclusively on the strength of solid starting hands. However, I can honestly say that after 2 or 3 days of playing 6 MAX, my winrate was significantly higher than what i was earning at full ring. This isn't because I improved my postflop play that quickly but rather because there are more fish on the 6 MAX tables, and I am now playing more hands against each fish.

I think that every player takes a progression throughout their poker careers from full ring to 6 max, to 3 handed and HU play. The fewer the number of players, the more potential the game has for profitability. The reasons for this are fairly obvious.

5) Seat Selection Issues

It is often argued whether it is better to sit to the left of the players who play well, or the players who play poorly. The overwhelmingly correct answer is the players who play poorly. Think about it. Not only are you now able to isolate against that player at will, but now when you raise, you don't risk getting 4 callers behind you. Even if once in a while you have to play a hand out of position against a tough player, you should be playing 4-5 times as many hands against the weaker player. If a seat to the direct left of a loose, weak player opens up, CHANGE YOUR SEAT.

Now what happens if you aren't able to move to the left of the weaker player. Let's say you are to his direct right.

This is what is going to happen. You are going to have to significantly tighten up your preflop raising. You can't open JTo anymore because the loose player will call, and this will entice others after him to follow. Who wants to play a 4 handed pot out of position with hands like that? Furthermore, every time you are in a pot against the player you are trying to play as many pots with as possible, you are out of position. You'll have to control your continuation betting because that player is probably a calling station. The bottom line is that because that player is so bad, the game will still be profitable. However, if possible, you should definitely look for another table where you can get more favorable seating.

6) Psychology

How psychology applies to poker is something a lot of people don't properly understand.
One of the important aspects of any hand is how your opponent perceives you. Unless you have a long history with the opponent, this usually involves how you've been playing for the past 40-50 hands.

Here is an example:

Say you've been making a lot of continuation bets after PF raises, and C/F turns when you miss.

You raise xy. Flop comes 982. One caller.

Check, Bet, Call.

Turn is a 2. In this situation, sometimes if you don't have a piece you might give up. However, given your table image, it might be very profitable for you to fire a second barrel as your opponent probably thinks you only fire 2nd barrels with legit hands.

The point of this example is that your table image can greatly influence certain decisions. One of the reasons it's so difficult to comment on HU NL hands is because a lot of that depends on the previous hands that you've played with the opponent.

Let's say an average player opens from the button. You reraise AQo from the big blind and he folds. Very next hand you are dealt AA. He opens from the cutoff. You should very seriously consider making an abnormal size raise. If he raises 4 times the blind, maybe you should consider reraising him 20 times the blind. This is especially the case when you have just sat down at the table. Most players don't have the thought process required to deduce the real reason you are reraising so much and will think your a nutjob and go broke with a mediocore hand.

Similar situation, however this time you hold a hand like TT or JJ. In this case, you should almost always just call his preflop raise. The reason is that he won't give you as much credit for a strong hand since you are reraising him two times in a row. You are very likely to be put all-in preflop, or get raised on the flop. A hand like TT or JJ will have trouble dealing with this much pressure.

This is all I can think of at the moment but I'll try to add something next week. If you have ideas on what you would like me to discuss, feel free to PM them to me. I'm too tired to proofread this, so if something doesn't make sense, lemme know and I'll try to address it.

Enjoy.