Sreiously on line poker the hardest game in the world

[phydaux]

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Can you tell that I'm a little tired of reading the often stated advice that you presented?

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Sorry, but just because you do not know how to apply good advice doesn't mean that the advice is bad.

Have high starting hand standards, play agressivly, understand what hands do not play well in a multi-way pot and fold those after the flop, call when you have pot odds and raise when you have pot equity. Don't bluff or semi-bluff. Call liberally when it's just one bet back to you on the River.

The large pots you win will cover the bets you loose when you get drawn out, and provide a nice profit as well. Provided you play aggressivly, don't enter the pot with marginal starting hands, and don't go too far in multi-way pots with hands like TPTK or an overpair. Or worse, two overcards.

AND remember that "a nice profit" in Limit Hold'em is only 2bb/100 in the long run. If you're looking to regularly double-up your buy-in, then go play No Limit.

'Course, then you'd probably complain that you got stacked every 4th or 5th session...

[playersare]

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Another beautiful theory rendered false in practice. To be sure, if you face one or two of these calling stations, you'll be fine in the long run. But in practice, you will often face several of these players. The combined effect of their play greatly reduces the winning chances of the "good player," and usually, one of the "bad players" will catch a river that crushes you. The combined redraws of the bad players can be positively overwhelming -- regardless of how long your "long-run" may be.

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That's ridiculous, and mathematically incorrect thinking. even with 3-4 bad redraws against you, how many outs combined is that? even if you give them 4-5 each (12-20 combined outs), that still gives you well over the 50% majority for a top hand on the flop to hold up vs. the remaining 47 outs. so more than half the time, you win the entire pot and double and triple up your personal contribution to the hand, and only lose your fraction of the bets if you're drawn out.

flip a coin. tails you lose, heads you get 2-1 or higher. i'm all in.

[zerosum]

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... even with 3-4 bad redraws against you ....

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Nice self-serving assumption. Being up against 3-4 *bad* redraws is not likely.

[zerosum]

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[ QUOTE ]
Can you tell that I'm a little tired of reading the often stated advice that you presented?

[/ QUOTE ]

Sorry, but just because you do not know how to apply good advice doesn't mean that the advice is bad.

Have high starting hand standards, play agressivly, understand what hands do not play well in a multi-way pot and fold those after the flop, call when you have pot odds and raise when you have pot equity. Don't bluff or semi-bluff. Call liberally when it's just one bet back to you on the River.

The large pots you win will cover the bets you loose when you get drawn out, and provide a nice profit as well. Provided you play aggressivly, don't enter the pot with marginal starting hands, and don't go too far in multi-way pots with hands like TPTK or an overpair. Or worse, two overcards.

AND remember that "a nice profit" in Limit Hold'em is only 2bb/100 in the long run. If you're looking to regularly double-up your buy-in, then go play No Limit.

'Course, then you'd probably complain that you got stacked every 4th or 5th session...

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Your advice is good. I have no issue with it.

My reply concerned the original *advice,* not the advice you provided above. The original *advice* is nothing more than one of this forum's more popular clichés.

BTW, I expected my post to draw criticism. I submitted it with the hope that criticism would deliver a useful discussion. Your contribution fulfilled my hope. Thank you.

[playersare]

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Nice self-serving assumption. Being up against 3-4 *bad* redraws is not likely.

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so give me an actual example of a hand where opponents' simultaneous, non-overlapping combined outs on "good" redraws exceed the mathematical expectation of the leading hand holding up after the flop.

[AKQJ10]

In some sense I admire those who challenge the conventional wisdom, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to point out when they're wrong.

I just got in from Foxwoods so this may or may not be a cogent critique of this argument (and maybe the critiques already given have expressed the problem more succinctly than I can). I'll try to keep it short for the moment (heh!):
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But in practice, you will often face several of these players. The combined effect of their play greatly reduces the winning chances of the "good player,"....



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By "winning chances" do you mean the probability of winning any particular pot? If so, then I absolutely agree with you. But most people judge success in poker by winning the money, not by claiming pots, so that's my criterion for winning in the long run.


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The combined redraws of the bad players can be positively overwhelming -- regardless of how long your "long-run" may be.

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I'm very interested in the so-called "schooling effect", but I've never seen any evidence that it actually causes big starting hands to be unprofitable. It does cause a certain class of starting hands to lose value: offsuit hands with two big cards. But it adds value to speculative hands, and to big hands that combine the best traits of both (paraphrasing Ed Miller et al in SSHE; the concept applies equally well to NLHE).

Two secrets that people forget:

1. Each additional draw claims less equity than the draw before it.

The girl with K[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] 8[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] is causing you some vexation, because your strong hand will be beaten if three clubs hit the board. But the guy with 6 [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] 5[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] in the same hand isn't causing you much more vexation at all. The only way for him to win, if the higher draw stays in, is to make a straight flush. At some point additional draws staying in produce diminishing returns. They can't all be getting a positive return from the pot, and in fact they're not. The strong draws are getting laid the odds to stay in from the weak draws. It's not like each additional weak draw should be staying around (e.g. to see a flop in hold 'em), and the ones that shouldn't be staying around are enriching the pot both for the "made hands" and for the draws that are getting odds.

2. Good starting hands are allowed to hit monsters, too. When they do, they'll beat the lesser monsters made by bad starting hands.

Can J5 hit a silly two pair and beat AK? Sure. But AK can hit a silly two pair and beat J5 too -- no one thinks twice about it. Furthermore, AK can make two pair at the same time as J5 and win.

Look at how many people act stunned when their bottom two doesn't hold up on the river. To be sure flopped bottom two is a gift from the ether when you hit it, but the point is that TPTK still has redraws. BP mediocre K has few such redraws (a two-outer, I suppose) against top two. And all unpaired hands are allowed to flop two pair with the same frequency.

People tell you that big pairs will never hold up against a bunch of drawing hands. But guess what? Big pairs can play like drawing hands and make sets and full houses too. AKs or AQs can make a flush just as easily as 96s or T3s or whatever garbage people want to play. But it can also make TPTK, something those hands can't do.

This is getting long-winded, but the upshot is when you're playing good hands against a field of eight, you won't win nearly as many pots. You will sometimes make top pair or an overpair and win, though. Other times, you will make a monster; when you do the chances that someone else will like their hand enough to bloat the pot are quite good. Good starting hands can win at "small ball" or "longball" (to somewhat misappropriate Harrington's terms), whereas speculative starting hands can only win at longball. Sometimes you should play speculative hands, but not as many as you'll see from your untrained opponents (e.g. J8s in any position, any suited queen, any suited king, offsuit connectors from any position, etc.)

I've probably not explained concepts well that are pretty clear in my brain, so I'll try again when I'm more awake.