The pretend (preflop) blinds and the real (position based) blinds

[SA125]

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sorry, some of us where 12 in 1998.

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Lol, so was my youngest kid.

[Dan BRIGHT]

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Even with zero antes or blinds, tehre would be an incentive for the other players to play simply to steal his opening raise.

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WTF HE WOULDN'T OPEN RAISE W/O AA IF THERE ARE NO BLINDS/ANTES. HOW COME PEOPLE CAN'T GET THIS?

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Again, you are wrong. Game theoretically optimal play != most profitable play in all situations.

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Game theoretically optimal play = a profitable and nonexploitable play

that is all

[maddog2030]

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Game theoretically optimal play = a profitable and nonexploitable play

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It does not need to be profitable.

[aejones]

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Are you serious?

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Yeah, in limit the play is easy and a no brainer. In NL, I don't think inflating the pot oop with a drawing hand is a good idea. The strength of your hand is also hidden.

Making continuation psb's when you miss vs playing the hand strong when you hit and you don't have the lead seems clear which one is better.

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When you 3-bet, often times you'd rather be oop because the strength of your hand < the weakness/reverse implied odds of their hand. If you're ever going to 3-bet with anything but aces and kings you should know this, seriously basic stuff. I suggest looking up that old whitelime thread with people arguing if we should be 3-betting QJo. You nits probably never 3-bet QJo.

[Pokey]

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For those who are saying "LOL this strat works fine when others play along," notice that your entire strategy relies on the assumption that your opponents are retarded and won't adjust their strategy to exploit your GINORMOUS PREFLOP ERROR

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Ever played a live $1/2 or $2/5 NL game?

"Others playing along" is exactly what happens when the standard opening becomes $15-20 in a $1/2 game.

Opening preflop is essentially an open challenge: "I've got a hand, who wants to play some poker?" and the blinds are disregarded.

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This has everything to do with the opponents and nothing to do with the stack sizes. If you've ever gone to an Indian gaming casino, you'll know they often force you to buy in short (sometimes ridiculously so -- I heard about a $1/$3 NL game where the only allowed buyins were $20, $40, or $60). If you were in a live $1/$2 or $2/$5 game where the average stack size was 40 BBs would your standard preflop raise be the minimum or would you still make a 10xBB raise, knowing that the opponents would call it with crap? Adjusting based on opponents is fine, but recognize that this live adjustment has very little to do with the stacks and very much to do with the (horrible) players.

I want to return once more to the idea of the full table of pros with no blinds, and their incentive to bet and raise anyways to create a game. In economics there is a concept called "the cartel problem." It says that a collective gain that is not individually maximizing will eventually break down. The classic example is the 1973 OPEC oil embargo: all the oil-producing nations restricted their production of oil, quadrupling the global price of oil. They made bank -- while it lasted. Unfortunately, each oil-producing nation realized that, while restricted oil production gave them much money for selling little oil, their PERSONAL interests were best served by "cheating," increasing their own oil production and making VERY much money selling regular amounts of oil at inflated prices. As everyone cheated, the cartel broke down, and oil prices returned to their usual lower levels.

Something similar would happen at the table of pros with no blinds. When someone loosens up and bets (any amount other than zero with any hand other than AA), they take a negative EV play with the intent of recovering their EV loss (and more) later in the hand. With everybody playing this way, they each take their turn with their EV hit preflop and they all "gain" out of it (by creating a game where one otherwise wouldn't exist). However, each individual pro has an incentive to change their behavior and do even better: instead of opening their fare share of the time, they could instead "free ride" off the openings of the other professionals, gaining the +EV from the game without incurring the -EV cost of opening in an empty pot. As each professional realizes this and adjusts his play, they will stop opening and the game disappears.

One last way of looking at this: if the world's greatest professional player said to you "I'm SO much better than you that I'd like to play you heads-up at a $10/$20 table, but I will pay all $30 of the blinds in every hand" could you find a way to win? By opening in an empty pot, that is exactly what a player is doing: creating a game by anteing for the other players. Clever opponents will be able to take this strategy apart. Now, it's possible that your opponents are SO deep and SO bad that you could recover this money and more down the road, but that doesn't mean you're not making a huge preflop mistake, and a clever opponent could guarantee that you would lose money.

The discussion in this thread has sort of bounced all over the place; sometimes we're talking about a full table of professionals and sometimes a table full of idiots; sometimes we're talking about a table with all incredibly deep stacks and sometimes some shorties mixed in; sometimes we're talking about small blinds and sometimes no blinds. The point is that having a standard preflop raise that is huge is an exploitable mistake. If your opponents choose not to exploit it, you can get away with it, but that doesn't mean it's not a mistake. Heck, in the vein of Sklansky's "swapping mistakes" philosophy it might even be +EV depending on just how bad your opponents are. That in no way means it's not a mistake when analyzed in a vaccuum.

[LearnedfromTV]

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Even with zero antes or blinds, tehre would be an incentive for the other players to play simply to steal his opening raise.

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WTF HE WOULDN'T OPEN RAISE W/O AA IF THERE ARE NO BLINDS/ANTES. HOW COME PEOPLE CAN'T GET THIS?

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It doesn't really matter what people would or wouldn't do in the blindless game. The point is that in regular poker, people make mistakes that are analogous to raising things other than AA in the blindless game. So when we're trying to isolate the effect of deeper stacks on how the game plays, one way to do it is to think about that game (with its infinite stack/blind ratio) and pretend it is sustainable.

Some percentage of the action in a game is driven by the desire of some of the people in the game to gamble, to play for absolute $ amounts that are meaningful, and satisfy their ego/prove their skill/win the most money by playing and winning big pots. People with $30K are not going to play ideally relative to 5/10 blinds, and some piece of the adjustment starts with preflop, adjusting your range, raise size, or both, depending on what everyone else is doing. I think people are hung up on the doubling. Raise size adjustments don't have to be big at all... open to 4.5x instead of 3.5x and then pot every street instead of betting 75-80% and see how much more money gets in. How does something like this not make sense if you are deep against a player who is going to put his money in bad versus you more often than not and who is going along by playing his hands roughly the same either way or even sncouraging the extra action because he wants to get his money in play or because he thinks he's better than you?

[LearnedfromTV]

Good post Pokey. I like this:

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One last way of looking at this: if the world's greatest professional player said to you "I'm SO much better than you that I'd like to play you heads-up at a $10/$20 table, but I will pay all $30 of the blinds in every hand" could you find a way to win? By opening in an empty pot, that is exactly what a player is doing: creating a game by anteing for the other players. Clever opponents will be able to take this strategy apart. Now, it's possible that your opponents are SO deep and SO bad that you could recover this money and more down the road, but that doesn't mean you're not making a huge preflop mistake, and a clever opponent could guarantee that you would lose money.

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[creedofhubris]

Hi Dan.

If you are playing online, and you automatically take note of anyone who

1) minraises preflop
2) raises or reraises significantly more than the pot preflop (exception: from the blinds)

and note down ENORMOUS FISH PLAY ANYTIME ANYWHERE, and follow him to every table until he is busto, that will be more +EV than any of the adjustments you describe.

[Matt Flynn]

Didn't see this first time through. It's indirectly covered in the forthcoming book in several ways.

[Anders]

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Didn't see this first time through. It's indirectly covered in the forthcoming book in several ways.

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When is the book coming out? I want it today [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]