Review my PT stats please. (LC)

[Leader]

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Apparently I am about a 31/22, isn't that a little laggy?


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Not these days.

The only thing I can comment on about your stats is that most players with similar preflop stats are less aggressive than you postflop, and have showdown numbers closer to 40/50. I have no idea how this translates into expectation. I have similar aggression stats to you, and SD stats of 39/50 [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img].

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shouldn't your wsd% be lower if you are entering pots more often?

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I think that depends on how much looser you are. If you're twice as loose, then yes. If you're just a little looser, people's reaction to your increased looseness may make it right to go to SD more. There's also the fact that increased looseness comes in high SD situations like blind stealing and defense.

[kiddo]

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There's also the fact that increased looseness comes in high SD situations like blind stealing and defense.

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yep, the difference between a 35/22 and 25/18 is that the 35/22 play more HU (defending/attacking blinds) and play worse players more ... its not cause he comes in with a ton of crap UTG and get a lot of callers

[admiralfluff]

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yep, the difference between a 35/22 and 25/18 is that the 35/22 play more HU (defending/attacking blinds) and play worse players more ... its not cause he comes in with a ton of crap UTG and get a lot of callers

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Yeah, the higher WtSD isn't a reflection of looser calling standards postflop.

[siegfriedandroy]

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Apparently I am about a 31/22, isn't that a little laggy?


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Not these days.

The only thing I can comment on about your stats is that most players with similar preflop stats are less aggressive than you postflop, and have showdown numbers closer to 40/50. I have no idea how this translates into expectation. I have similar aggression stats to you, and SD stats of 39/50 [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img].

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How can guys be 40/50 w/ just moderate aggression. My wtsd is comparable to vegan's, and (as explained in the hoss thread) i am still clueless how you can hit 40 w/o just calling down in clear losing situations. do you guys just bluff constantly, value bet super light (to induce loose calldowns), etc. Or do you really just call down w/ pair, peel flop super light even though not immediately justified?? This is the most confusing part of the game right now for me- how do apparently good players have wtsd's above 40 w/o making clearly incorrect calldowns quite often? I have been doing well for a long time w/ around a 35 wtsd, but would like to increase this if it really is optimal.

[admiralfluff]

The increased SD numbers do not come from calling down with weaker hands multiway. A few things:

I think you would agree that in general you should call down with weaker hands HU than multiway. If not I can explain why this makes sense mathematically. I tend to get in far more HU situations than you. I 3bet liberally for isolation and in SB defense, I openraise from all positions more often than you, my ASB is ~47, my FBBtS is 44. I play very aggressively on flops. I make plays that cull the ranks of my opposition. This induces more HU decisions, which naturally lead to more SDs.

Another big part of it is that playing laggier postflop causes people to call down against me lighter, which increases my WtSD.

[siegfriedandroy]

cool. good response- thanks. wow, 47 attempt to steal! that is huge. I would like to start widening my range a little here, too (i am around 40 normally). i was reading stox's new, and the steal range he recommends is relatively tight (i believe it comes out to less than 40). he says the #'s are based on tons of research, etc. Curious how you (or I) could justify adding substantially more hands here, if they dont appear profitable mathematically. i assume the idea is that we will simply outplay them post?

also, what types of situations do you commonly make these light isolation plays (probably many situations w/ a 47% stat!)? primarily against people who dont show down much, or play predictably (or badly) post? any other major factors that encourage you to do this? thanks

[admiralfluff]

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i was reading stox's new, and the steal range he recommends is relatively tight (i believe it comes out to less than 40)

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??? My steal range is really similar to Stox's. You sure about this figure? I'm pretty sure 3bets don't get included in steal stats so that wouldn't explain it.

One thing that I think a lot of people do wrong that I try to avoid, is that they assume their opponents use a static strategy. I've made a few posts on this topic over the years, and I guess here comes another one.

I think most bad players at higher stakes are just as (if not more) adaptive as us. The difference is that they do not adapt well. They use the information they collect incorrectly, and inconsistently. We can't turn an emperically losing hand into a winner by 'outplaying them postflop'. The additional hands are losers, albeit small ones. The key, is that by playing laggier preflop than the 'tighties', the bad players take notice, and adjust incorrectly. They call-down more often, and take more shots at me cause I always 'raise with nothing'. The key is to maximize the number of pots you are involved in against fish, and minimize the number of pots your opponents are involved in.

Read The Mathematics of Poker. Try to think about the game not just in terms of maximizing the expectation of a given hand, but maximizing the expectation of a given strategy evaluated over all hands.

Also consider exploitable river play. Look at the games where folding is allowed, and think about how optimal bluffing and calling frequencies relate to pot size. It's easy to end up getting exploited by trying to make maximal and sub-optimal plays against 'bad predictable players' by folding to river bets.

If I were you, and for some reason wanted to increase my LAG/SDmonkeyness, I would first look at preflop, and then look at HU on the river.

A little out there:
Don't forget though, that as you makes these types of plays to increase overall strategy expectation, you often have to sacrifice specific hand expectation.

There seems to be a spectrum of solid winning players from TAG and fairly straightforward, to LAG and somewhat of a spazzmonkey. For a given set of relatively stable game conditions, I believe that simialr expectation could be earned over a wide band of this spectrum. I prefer LAGgier because I believe it is more optimal, whereas the more straightforward approach is designed (with many remnants of SSHE) as a maximal strategy against poor static opponents. The more optimal strategy should be more robust, meaning that over varrying game conditions we would suffer smaller EV varriations sticking with a 'default' strategy. The default maximal strategy is more susceptible to these varriations. i.e. it is more important to adapt correctly to specific opponent conditions playing 27/18 35/53 than it is playing 32/24 39/51.

The former strategy incorporates fewer optimal components (if you know he never bluffs you always fold the river, you don't bet/raise weak to gain value for your strong holdings...), and therefore it's exploitable components carry a higher game value(the guy who never bluffs realizes you fold the river a lot, so he stabs a little more, the [censored] loose fish realizes you don't play as crazy preflop as that fing [censored] stealer, so he folds a little more). The cost of making strategic mistakes in this strategy are large.

The latter strategy incorporates more optimal components that are impervious to varriations, and the exploitable components tend to be smaller in magnitude, and require adjusatments that only good players tend to make (if he steals a lot 3bet, don't just calldown, if he tends to have weak flop holdings due to his preflop play, but plays very well postflop, c/r-bluff and give up usually if he doesn't fold, don't barrel off at him when he clearly has a piece).

This is why I think there are more winning laggier players than tighter players. (Remember the stars results thread? Well I'm getting a pretty similar collection for FT, and it's the same story). It's not that the LAGgy style is necessarily better than the tighter style, it's just easier to be good.

If you made it this far, take all of this with a grain of salt. The strategic differences we're talking about are relatively small. Maximizing against fish, avoiding being exploited by good players, general good hand-reading, and tilt aversion are necessary to win no matter how you play. That, and I don't really have any idea what I'm talking about.

p.s. Sorry for not proof-reading.

[mikeysong]

nice post admiral

[veganmav]

At what point does a tag become a lag? stats wise.

[admiralfluff]

Well, it's a spectrum of course. 'TAG' and 'LAG' are just arbitrary definitions. There are lots of dimensions to TAGginess and LAGginess. I think a reasonable middle-of-the-road player would be 29-31/20-22 ish. But, what about a 33/17, or a 33/24, or a 29/24? I didn't mean to imply any kind of dichotomy of TAGs, and LAGs. My point is that I think there might be a continuous surface between a traditional TAG, the lagTAG, and the good LAG, over which strategy value remains fairly constant. This can only happen if a significant population of the 'bad' use adaptive strategies. Otherwise, there would be one maximal strategy, and any deviations would suffer losses in expectation.