[redbeard]

First off, I just wanted to thank Matt and Sunny for writing such an excellent book. I've been a limit player for the last three years. I grew tired of the grind at those games and a couple of 2p2 friends of mine have convinced me to move over to the "juicier" no limit games. As I have no background in no limit I found that there was a pretty big void in literature on the subject. About the best book I found was the nl section in Doyle Brunson's Supersystem 2. Professional NL Hold 'em blows the doors off Doyle's book for sure. I found the SPR concept of your book to be revolutionary and it totally hit the nail on the head as to areas I felt like I was struggling most. In limit, top pair hands are golden and if you never folded them you wouldn't be too far off base. But in no limit I've felt like I don't extract enough with those top pair hands and I give away too much with them when I lose. Certainly a bad combination. So I wanted to ask you what your advice would be regarding hitting the target SPRs to make the nl game much easier to play post flop. You've done a good job in this thread and the other thread linked in this one in explaining your concepts. Now to put them in practice I have one of two general guidelines I'd like to put into place and wondered what you thought of each or if you think neither would be optimal.

First off, to give some background I play mainly 100nl and 200nl 6-max games. It seems to me my two options would go something like this:

Option 1 -- buy in for 40 to 50 big blinds. Then use the "standard" online raise of pot or 3 to 5 bb for all my raising hands. Using a mix of 5bb for my top pair hands (QQ, JJ, AK, AQ, AJ, KQ), 4bb for my pair hands (22-TT), and 3 bb for suited connectors (that i want to raise) and AA, KK, and AKs.

Option 2 -- buy in for the standard 100 big blinds. then use a 10bb raise for my top pair hands (QQ, JJ, AK, AQ, AJ, KQ), a 5bb raise for the middle pair hands (22-TT) and a more standard 3bb raise for the suited connector types and AA, KK, and AKs

Obviously table conditions are going to dictate changes to these strategies, such as the aggression of opponents to three bet, the willingness of looser opponents to fold on the flop if they always defend their blinds, etc. etc. But what do you think of the idea of adopting one of these strategies as my default style of playing? And of the two which do you prefer?