Razz 8s - opinions please

[Praxising]

Before I read SoP, I only played 3rd with a 7 or better. Unless standard exceptions occurred - stealing with a hidden eight, 8 was lowest card showing, that sort of thing.

Sklansky says play 8 or better. I don't think this is working out so well, but I don't have that many hands. Today I started folding all the rough 8s. And any 8 showing against smaller doorcards unless I was pretty sure I would be heads-up and had a couple wheelcards.

So how do y'all play your 8s? Rusty, you're the resident data mining expert, how do they do generally?

[RustyBrooks]

8's and even some 7s depend on your position to the raiser and your liklihood of getting re-raised.

* I am never limping first in so I have to throw some 8s aways and even some bad 7s
* 87s are bad in early positions especially if a lot of your outs are gone
* 86s ain't no picnic if some of your outs are dead.
* I limp almost any 8 if I'm closing the action and I almost never re-open the action in late position with an 8 unless it's good like A28 A38 A48 etc and my outs are live.

I'm playing now but I'll check my "data" later.

I know you don't use PT but are you at least keeping Hand histories around?

[RustyBrooks]

I did a brief survey of my hands in pokertracker. I broke the hands into categories, 3 to an 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9. I did not differentiate door cards.

I found what I would expect... 3 to a 5 or 6 are about the same, and the biggest winners, followed by 3 to a 7, 3 to an 8, and 3 to a 9.

Even 3 to a 9 is a winner, *however* it's small (.3bb on average). I'm betting that it's profitable mostly because I steal a lot 2 or 3 off the bringin with 3-card 9s with hidden 9. The reason for this is, the farther from the bringin you are (and I'm just talking about low cards - if there are 3 high cards between me and the bringin I do not consider myself 3 off the bringin, but rather on "the button"). But if there are 2 or 3 low cards between me and the bringin, then I want to have a hand that can call a raise when I'm stealing, and a 3 card 9 with a hidden 9 is about my limit.

So anyway, the structure at FTP means that at a full table I make 1.1bb when I steal. I guess it's probably accurate that at .25/.5 I only manage to steal into 2 or 3 people 1/3 of the time. I probably win a few of those but I lose money to rake and what not also.

Speaking of which, pokertracker illuminates how sick the rake is at low limits. I've paid $180 in rake over 15,000 hands, that's 360bb for an avg of -2.4bb/100 you have to overcome.

The rake gets a little better at 1/2 but not much. Something higher stakes players don't have to deal with.

[Praxising]

Rusty, check out that rake thing on PT. I've read discussions before and they say it's misleading because it's the rake for the hand, not your personal portion of it. Maybe they fixed that, now. Not that rake doesn't suck and not that micro players don't get the biggest screwing. Micros support most poker sites, is the way I understand it.

[RustyBrooks]

I do believe it's the amount that I've paid in rake. It also matches pretty closely what my rakeback place says I paid in rake.

[jbrennen]

[ QUOTE ]
The rake gets a little better at 1/2 but not much. Something higher stakes players don't have to deal with.

[/ QUOTE ]

In my data on Full Tilt from .25/.50 up to 8/16, I get the following average rake per hand in BBs:

.25/.50 : 0.200 BB
.50/1 : 0.191 BB
1/2 : 0.149 BB
2/4 : 0.088 BB
3/6 : 0.117 BB
5/10 : 0.109 BB
8/16 : 0.090 BB

The reason that 2/4 looks so good is that no rake is taken at all until the pot hits $20, or 5 BBs. (At smaller stakes, pots under $20 most certainly are raked.)

If you extrapolate the 2/4 statistic to 100 hands, and assume that you are paying 1/8 of the rake at a full table, then you get a rake impact of -1.1 BB/100 on your profitability.


And at .25/.50, my stats show an impact of about -2.5 BB/100, almost exactly the same as your number.

My winrate at .25/.50 has been around 2.3 BB/100, so it would be about double that in the absence of rake.

[RustyBrooks]

Actually, Praxising, think of it this way also... avg rake at .25/.5 is about 10 cents. If PT was recording ALL of the rake as mine, over 15,000 hands that would be $1500 but I only see about $150 - because I'm 1/8th of the table and I play tighter than most of them (I contribute to the pot less often)

That bump at 2/4 does like kind nice. Soon, maybe.

[AggressiveCall]

[ QUOTE ]
and assume that you are paying 1/8 of the rake at a full table

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm curious about how much this fits winning players. I don't do a great job of keeping track of my own stats, but it seems like the correct way to account for rake that one pays is whatever rake is taken out of a pot you win.

Personally, I think that a winning player would tend to win less than 1/8 of the total money in pots over a given period (obviously complicated by pots which reach cap, but that's not very common at .25/.5).

Anyone with actual numbers one way or another? I could go through my HH, but I don't have a very significant sample size even if I did.

[Praxising]

[ QUOTE ]
Actually, Praxising, think of it this way also... avg rake at .25/.5 is about 10 cents. If PT was recording ALL of the rake as mine, over 15,000 hands that would be $1500 but I only see about $150 - because I'm 1/8th of the table and I play tighter than most of them (I contribute to the pot less often)

That bump at 2/4 does like kind nice. Soon, maybe.

[/ QUOTE ]
This makes more sense than most of the rake discussions I've read. And I wonder if that's why it's so frustrating to try and become a winning player at .25/.50?

[RustyBrooks]

I think it probably makes the difference between winning 1.5bb/100 and 2.5bb/100 or what have you. Rakeback helps since it's proportional to the size of the rake, pay more rake, get more money back. That's around +.5 or +.6bb/100 for me.