General question regarding vp$ip

[snoopdawg]

A friend and I are having an arguement. We play Thursdays in a $20 buy in NLHE tourny. The people we play against are extremely (and I mean extremely) LP, usually 5+ to a flop in an 8 person game. It is raised preflop (with no regards to position) about 25% of the time. After the flop, you could (on average)increase your chipstack by 80% if you hit. Here is the arguement which I consider basic.
He claims it will increase your winrate by at least calling (raising occasionaly) every hand, regardless of position and callers, because of the huge payout on the flop and <25% chance of raising after you act. I think you could loosen up a little, but hands like J8 and 47 should still be junked.
Opinions?

[machine]

i agree they say the best strategy is the opposite of everybody else at the table so in this case play tight pick your spots and try and double up,let them knock eachother out.

[VBCurtis]

Your friend thinks "everyone else plays like an idiot, so I must be able to make a profit doing the same." Rather than argue the point, let him try it, see what he thinks. It's quite likely he'll learn to play unusual crappy hands postflop, which is a useful skill to have; he'll also bust before you most of the time, making your path to the money that much easier.
-Curtis

[Zetack]

[ QUOTE ]
A friend and I are having an arguement. We play Thursdays in a $20 buy in NLHE tourny. The people we play against are extremely (and I mean extremely) LP, usually 5+ to a flop in an 8 person game. It is raised preflop (with no regards to position) about 25% of the time. After the flop, you could (on average)increase your chipstack by 80% if you hit. Here is the arguement which I consider basic.
He claims it will increase your winrate by at least calling (raising occasionaly) every hand, regardless of position and callers, because of the huge payout on the flop and <25% chance of raising after you act. I think you could loosen up a little, but hands like J8 and 47 should still be junked.
Opinions?

[/ QUOTE ]

I suspect that increasing your chipstack by 80 percent is optomistic.

Take J-8 off. You will flop quads, trips, two pair, or a straight 6.27 percent of the time. So are about 15-1 to hit one of those hands. I suspect you simply can not profit even in the game you describe by making a PF call with those odds.

I haven't included the odds of making an OESD because I don't know what that is but even if its a percent or so, it doesn't help you much. I presume that a jack high flop is not one you like much against five opponents, some of whom are probably staying in to the end (where else is your 80% coming from), so I haven't included the odds of hitting a pair.

Also note some of those hands are pretty vulnerable and you won't win everytime you hit them.

Bottom line, I think your friend is nuts. However if its litterally true that you will increase your stack 80% when you hit, a lot of times that means you will get say a 20 times or more payoff when you hit. Which would make your friend correct. I simply doubt you will get that good a return often enough to make it worthwhile, and meahwile, limping off 15 BB's with these hands is going to help knock you out of a lot more tournaments than you would otherwise.

--Zetack

[MTUCache]

From my experience, in my LP tournament, I've come to a couple conclusions about my play:

Prospecting for hands, especially with hands that are easily dominated (J8o) is a pretty dangerous thing to do in these games. You've got people limping with AJ, you've got people limping with KJ, you've got people limping with JT. Why make your post-flop play so difficult on yourself?

Keep choosing premium hands in early position and controlling the pot-size and number of opponents to get rid of the limpers, to make them profitable.

In late position, prospect cheaply, but only with hands that make post-flop decisions easy. With suited connectors, if you hit the flop, you play aggressive. If you miss, you can easily fold. With broadway cards, you can be relatively confident that if you do hit TP, you'll have a decent kicker. With trash like J8o, or 47s, you can never be sure of your strength, especially against calling-stations who are going to call anything with TP.

Don't bother slow-playing and rarely bluffing anything, because everyone else is only playing their cards, they're not even considering what you're holding. If you've got a hand, keep playing aggressively, making them pay for their draws, you'll have people chasing you all the way to a huge pot. Sure, the suckouts hurt, and tilt you a bit, but you want them to keep chasing.

I've also noticed that when the blinds go up during the first couple of rounds, people get shell-shocked by how much it suddenly costs them to limp, so it's easier to steal a couple rounds of blinds with a healthy raise.

Same story as always... you manage to double up once early, and you can become the table captain pretty quickly, winning lots of small pots by pushing people around, or start really juicing the pot when you've got a premium hand.

In these tourneys, you just get a premimum hand and push huge. Raise 10x the BB or more if people are already in. If you hit something, shove all in, some donk will call with 3rd pair.

Variance is huge because you've got to win at showdown to win, there's no bluffing people out. But the payoffs in stack size are equally huge.