Musings of Learning Player Part 2 (Long Strat Type)

[QTip]

I’ve only been playing NL now for about 3 months, so I simply classify the following as the musings of a learning NL player. Like many others here, I come from the limit world where many Jedis have not experienced the full power of the force.

I’m planning on putting my thoughts down in posts as I learn and site differences between limit and nl. I do have some decent experience now as I’ve played from NL10 to NL400 over 156k hands. However, in no way do I consider these things to be held by the reader as accurate. I’d just like to post my thoughts to get discussion going.

Here was my first post about limit thinking in NL play.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showfl...ue#Post11827832

In this post, I’d like to talk about the all in thinking. I think it was Ed Miller that said NL would be better named as stack limit since you can’t bet the farm like on TV and so forth. Anyway, what I’d like to talk about here is what I’d call stack thinking or rather all-in or nothing thinking.

It seems that a lot of us seem to think that in this game we’re either planning on getting all in or folding about every hand. I blame this on a couple things. The first would be sngs…as this is about all they are. I was amazed when I was in the sng world for a while, how few of the actually good sngers really even understood “poker”. The didn’t know how to count outs, odds, etc. Just played great PF and used the Nash thereom well. That’s all they need. The second thing I blame this on is the poker sites 100 buy in cap. We tend to get in a lot of hands where we only have an effective stack of 80x or less, and it’s very easy to get all in with this effective stack. Even if you’re quite sure you’re beaten, by the time you figure it out, you’re pot committed.

However, the more I play longer sessions and end up doubling up with others that have done the same, the more I realize how different this game is with these larger stack sizes and how the smaller stack sizes have impacted our thinking. When’s the last time you thought “how do I get HALF my stack in here?” I guess what I’m getting at it here is the idea of “cautious play”. I think we need to think more about this esp. as we move up in stakes. I end up finding myself 150bb deep against another good tag. The fact is, if I get all-in with him, I’m probably either a huge favorite, huge dog (both from things like set over set) or about even. Most of the time I don’t even look to play with them, I’m after the poor players. There’s no need for me to be a hero. I think of the Rounder’s line “we’re not playing with each other, but we’re not really playing against each other either.” I find this to be my thinking when I’m playing these bigger tables now. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind a tangle with another tag, but I’m going to have a very serious hand when I get real busy with them. However, those are pretty rare, and what I’m talking about right now is all those hands in between there where we have a decent hand, but nothing to write home about and want to get to showdown while still getting the value we deserve…just playing some postflop poker. The luxury of the no-brain 80x stack isn’t around and now you need to consider more things like:

1. His range.
2. What he thinks your range is.
3. How to get him to make mistakes.
4. How to not open yourself up to brutal stack threatening raises.
5. How to deliver brutal stack threatening raises
6. etc.

I think we suffer in this area. I’ve been posting hands where people feel I’ve been pretty passive. The reason I’ve been posting them is because I think they fall in this category of decent, showdown wanting, value needing, but all-in dog type of hands.

That’s about it for now…not much meat here, but perhaps it will get some conversation going to help me refine my thinking.

Thx,

QTip