You Play Too Tight

[Nate tha\\\' Great]

Hi, all. This is a public service announcement intended mainly for players in the Shorthanded and Small Stakes forums. Most of the folks in the Mid/High forum are exempt. I don't know about the Microlimits forum since I don't read it regularly, but I wouldn't be surprised if it applied to many of the posters there too.

You're playing too tight before the flop. You should not be putting money in just 15% of the time in a 10-handed game. You sure as bloody hell should not be putting in money just 19% of the time in 6-handed game. You should be defending your blinds more. You should be stealing more. You shouldn't be looking for excuses to fold your good hands before the flop; you should be looking for excuses to play them. I find myself saying this in response to more and more hand posts so I'm posting this in order to save myself some time in the future.

I don't know whether this is some sort of trend or not, or whether it's always been going on and I just haven't noticed it as much. In any event, I think it's caused by some combination of three things:

1) The Ray Zee factor. Sadly, I can't seem to find Ray Zee's seminal essay on the evolution of a poker player. But its main point is that a lot of developing players go through a phase in which they play too tight. This is only natural, since the primary sin of most bad poker players is to play too loose. And, indeed, playing too loose is usually going to be a lot more harmful to you than playing too tight. But playing too tight is still going to cost you a lot of value, especially against poor opposition whom you can outplay after the flop. I estimated in a recent post in the Mid/High forum that I've made about $6,500 in the past month from playing hands that an overtight player might fold. This translates to about 0.60 BB/100 given the limits and the number of hands that I'm playing. I hope you don't think this that amount of profit is trivial.

I also hope you don't think that this is a gross overestimate. While I've been running pretty well, it's easy to see how these numbers are well within the realm of possibility. If you're playing about 15% of your hands before the flop when you should be playing about 20%, that means that you're folding 5 hands per 100 that you should be playing. How much profit is that costing you? A good educated guesstimate is between .10 and .15 BB per additional hand folded. At that rate, five incorrect folds per one hundred result in a sacrifice of between .50 and .75 BB/100 in your earn rate.

Disclaimer: Ray Zee also notes that the overtight phase is usually proceeded by a loose aggressive phase. I have been through my loose aggressive phase and both me and my bankroll have survived it. In fact, it was pretty fun.

2) The multitabling factor. Let's face it: multitabling online poker games is a very good way to make money. I four-table, and should be adding a fifth table soon. A lot of people on here manage to play six or eight or even more tables at once, and many of them play them very well.

It is natural when you're multitabling to play somewhat fewer hands. It may even be +EV. If I can make a couple of cents by defending my blind with 76o when I'm fully attending to it, but I see that I've just gotten AA on my 30/60 table, I'm probably doing both of the hands justice by mucking the loose blind defense.

However, I think some of you are overcompensating. Your multitabling and making pretty good money doing it by being a rock-peddler, and you don't see much reason to change. But you're not merely sacrificing *small* EV plays in order to maintain your attention span and your sanity; you're probably sacrificing some fairly large EV plays as well. What's worse, being a rock-peddler may preclude you from future profits by preventing you developing a sense for how to play your more marginal sorts of hands as well as you could.

For what it's worth, I was a lot more eager to move up in limits than to move up in the number of tables that I was playing, and I think this made leaps and bounds worth of difference in the rate at which my game improved.

3) The Ed Miller factor. There seems to be an inverse relationship between weak-tight play and Ed Miller strategy posts. Ed isn't posting as much these days. Ergo...

-Nate

[Gregatron]

[ QUOTE ]
3) The Ed Miller factor. There seems to be an inverse relationship between weak-tight play and Ed Miller strategy posts. Ed isn't posting as much these days.

[/ QUOTE ]
The last post I saw from Ed said that people on the SS and Micro forum are making recomendations that are too aggressive. I am not trying to twist your argument, or make this a you against Ed thing, which it clearly isn't... just a thought is all. It does, however, confuse the censored out of me, esp as I am one of those guys that has a vpip of ~15. Of course that in itself doesn't make one weak.

This is good food for thought though. I think a lot of people have a tendency to think preflop play is not that important -- "it's postflop play where money is made." I don't think this is necessarily true, and seems to me to be a perversion of what Miller and co pointed out in SSHE, which is that what turns a player from beating the game to crushing it is how he or she plays from the flop on.

Nice post Nate. Thanks for the thoughts. I'm not sure how much I agree with all you wrote, but I will keep and open mind as I read other responces. Thanks for taking to time to spell out an intersting and compelling argument.

[Burno]

I'll be the second of many to say it. Nice post.



Edit: Changed first to second

[BusterStacks]

Nate. You hit the nail on the head, for me at least. Been trying to loosen up but it's hard once you are set in a certain way.

[nolanfan34]

One thing you left out was the Pokertracker factor. People can check their stats so easily, that I think people become obsessed with their PF numbers.

I know I'm fairly loose PF, but it works for me. I don't use Pokertracker, so I don't obsess over it either.

[toman8r]

Ray Zee essay

[Michael Davis]

What about the fact that I can't turn a profit with as many hands as you can?

-Michael

[bear187]

I suppose I should take this advice with a bucket of salt rather than the standard grain?

[Nate tha\\\' Great]

[ QUOTE ]
What about the fact that I can't turn a profit with as many hands as you can?

-Michael

[/ QUOTE ]

Michael,

You play pretty well.

I took a look at some of the EV numbers that Pokerroom keeps, which can be found here:

http://teamfu.freeshell.org/poker_hands.html

Now, this is a sloppy way of estimating things, but the stats reveal that roughly the first 20% of hands are profitable. If you go down through KTo on the chart in that link, which shows a grand old profit of +0.01 BB per hand ... that works out to 20.4% of all hands.

But the situation is even more favorable than that, since these stats are from average players. The average player loses a tiny bit of money with 87s because he plays it in the wrong spots ... a better-than-average player should be able to play that hand for a profit, both because he picks and chooses his preflop spots, and because he plays it better than an average player would after the flop.

It wouldn't surprise me if the truly optimum VPIP was something like 22% or 23% in a 10-handed game for a really good player in a game with no tip and a proportionately small rake. It might even be as high as 25% for a true expert who knew his opposition well and was comfortable working with a somewhat loose table image. I'm at 19%, and I'm not really losing money with any major hand groupings ... in fact they're all healthily ahead of par, when in theory I should be scraping the barrel down to hands that make me just a penny when I play them.

[bicyclekick]

nate,

I've noticed this for quite awhile, so no, it's not just you.

Great job getting the point accross...better than I could've dreamed of doing.