Steve Badger's advice

[pete fabrizio]

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Could you have gotten more off-track here? The part of the advice where Badger suggests LRRing AAxx when short is the only part of the advice that most people here wouldn't have a problem with. That's completely standard. The reason people don't like his advice is the way he advocates playing every hand but AA, namely limping and folding to a raise. He basically states that it's impossible to play hands profitably out of position.

Now, the thing about this strategy is that there's a maximum yield to it. It's zero. Badger himself states that "the main reason to play hands out of position is to get other people to play hands out of position". This means, he only ever plays them for metagame reasons and doesn't even believe that his strategy is profitable from those positions; just that it loses less than other people's strategies.

Well, guess what, tons of us out there are profiting from early position. Therefore, our strategy is better than what Badger himself says is the best he can hope for. Therefore, there's no debate. The strategy of playing 15-20% of your hands by limp-calling or open-raising is better than Badger's strategy.

I was going to try to prove this using my database, but I don't have a very large sample of FR hands, and then when I tried to make an analogous point about hands from the blinds, I found PokerEV's sorting capacities woefully inadequate. You can sort by how many seats off the button you are, but not by whether you're a blind or not, so the only way to get enough data to be relevant would be to manually compile the number of BB's won or lost from each position with each number of players at the table by working backwards from hands and BB/100 and then recompiling and the whole thing seemed like a little more work than I was up to tonight.

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You can do this in Pokertracker easily. On the General Info. tab click "Filters..." and Big Blind/Small Blind are options. Then click OK and look at the Totals in the "Starting Hands" frame. You can make do more interesting filters too. E.g., as I posted in this or some other thread, I tested whether or not raising out of the small blind is profitable for me. It is.