Niche theory

[derosnec]

From this month's 2+2 Magazine article on Poker Finance:

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The secret to consistently good cash game results is not beating other players one-on-one, it's figuring out the soft spots at the table and picking one of them. Even with all top players at the table, you'll find these spots. For example, the tightest loose player makes money much more easily than any of the tight or other loose players. There are tables at which a niche such as aggressive preflop raiser, Ax player, semi-bluffer, is unoccupied; in fact there are too many possible niches for all of them to be occupied. Playing in an empty niche lets you pick up lots of chips unopposed. Playing in a niche with lots of other players means you have to fight for every chip.

[/ QUOTE ]

I've been experimenting with this.

Thoughts? Relevant/irrelevant to our games?

[Marshall28]

i'd say that its not too much of an important concept at microstakes cuz the whole table is full of "niche's" so we dont really have to identify them, we just know.

[jmillerdls]

I'm not good enough to come close to exploiting this...Might be more helpful in the higher stakes forums.

[Keyser.]

In practice I really don't think this concept applies. Each specific niche isn't nearly as a defined as he makes it out to be. An aggressive preflop player will also occasionaly make semi-bluffs, play Ax, etc. Also you'd have to be at the same table with the same players for a very significant number of hands for you to really carve out a niche.

[EnderIII]

This seems really interesting.

I'm primarily a tourney player, so the example that comes to mind from that area is when many players are trying to steal the blinds preflop, it is no longer as easy to do so since the entire table collectively stands up to them (or you just have fewer first in opportunities) so that it then becomes good to readjust and become a restealer. But if there wasn't lots of stealing going on, you wouldn't have the possibility of filling that niche.

I've been trying to see how tourney related skills would apply to cash games and this post makes me realize that since i've been playing in games where there is not a lot of preflop raising, there isn't much of an opportunity to resteal (since most preflop raises do not seem to be steals).

Also it seems that in blind vs. blind battles, people are much less frisky in comparision to tournaments, so when those do crop up, a little aggression seems to pick up a virtually uncontested money. This seems like a niche that you are only competing against the players to your immediate left and right, so will be easy to quickly assess and depending on the game, might be enough to let you be on a virtual free roll, since you'll be picking up blind money often enough.