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

[Pokey]

[ QUOTE ]
I guarantee you if you sat down 6 high-stakes players who think they can outplay each other, and who know that the others think they can outplay everyone, there will be alot of action.

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So you think the pros would play in a way that was a guaranteed loser to a two-line bot?

<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
10 If "AA" then raise=all
20 else fold
</pre><hr />

The strategy outlined above cannot be -EV to ANY strategy at a table with no blinds, and it is neutral EV to ONLY itself. Expectationally it beats every other strategy. If there is an utterly unexploitable strategy that beats any strategy other than itself, and if that strategy can be neatly printed in 30-point font on a business card, is it really reasonable to think that professional players would fall prey to it?

[Keepitsimple]

This thread was great. Not so much because of Lord Dans post but because it got some people to reveal how retarded they are.

[LearnedfromTV]

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The strategy outlined above cannot be -EV to ANY strategy at a table with no blinds, and it is neutral EV to ONLY itself. Expectationally it beats every other strategy.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is wrong. At a table with no blinds, where everyone has $10K behind, if someone opens to $100, they are making an error with all but one hand (now this may be an error they can make up for later in the hand, and the deeper the stacks relative to the bet and the worse their opponents play, the more likely they will be able to make up for it. Indeed that's why they open, although some of them are wrong to do so), but to everyone else (assuming the opener opens the same range), it is exactly as though he opened to $70 in a 10/20 game (well, technically in a 10/20 game it's slightly different for the SB/BB). Pushing AA and folding anything else is unexploitable but hardly unbeatable.

Also, answering this hypothetical by talking about shortstacks is silly. The question is what six very deep stacked pros (or anyone, really), all of whom think they have an edge (or who don't care about playing +EV games), would do. And the point is not to act like this game is actually going to happen, but to help think through which portion of the action in a game is a function of the blinds and which portion is a function of the stack sizes. NLHE is not a struggle for the antes in the same way as limit holdem; because of the size of mistake one can make it is worth more to be able to trick your opponents into making stack-sized mistakes than to play technically perfectly re the blinds and antes, even more so the deeper the stacks to the point where with infinite stacks the blinds would be irrelevant, as long as everyone in the game was either dumb enough or clever enough to believe they could win despite having to make an initially -EV play with every open.

You can argue that percentages of the bad players' stacks are effectively antes only if there are bad players, but there are always bad players, and it's foolish to ignore this, especially when the best strategy to beat players who risk too much of their stack relative to the blinds is to risk too much of yours.

[Requin]

Yeah man. Like I said one player starts splashing around, raises say 1$ out of his million dollar stack. Another player can wait for AA and make a profit, sure. But wtf, they all think they are the best player at the table. The others will jump on it with a wider range than AA because they think they can outplay him thiss deep, no matter what his range is. If you make the starting assumption that one player will put a little money in (no matter what his range), then you have a game. And this first player WILL put money in, because he knows that the others will jump in to outplay him, and he thinks he's +ev in this game so...
All you need is a table full of egotistical players to generate a game.

[kotkis]

[ QUOTE ]
ok so if the blinds are 1 cent/ 2 cent with 5 k stacks youd raiuse to a quarter or some [censored]? 175 is more than reasonable, but that should be youre opener with whatever youre opening with (if not more)
There reaches a point where the blidns are completly irrelevant and you should just raise based on stacks

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Wow... just wow.

[Ryendal]

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I try to play as few as possible save for times when I am taking shots at a guy in position by calling his raises to fkk with him postflop or overcaling preflop with good relative position (ie co opens button calls sb calls im in the bb with 9to I call b/c of good relative position. Compare this to absolute position which is having the button. Relative position usually deals with your position in relation to the preflop raiser or the person you expect to make the first bet on the flop. Relative position can change street to street though, while absolute position cannot).

[/ QUOTE ]

Could you or someone else enlight me about this " relative good position " ?
I am really lost.
Is it to use the idea of a check raise on an interesting flop? ( may be my comment is dumb ... )

[aejones]

OK I will clear up some of the arguing that has been going on, because I've read some, but not all, of the replies.

Dan Bright is correct to some point that we should put more pressure on ourselves to play more hands in position that are +EV. For instance, small suited double gappers with deep stacks. If we can call with proper implied odds and play well postflop, this is a no brainer to me. In fact, I've been doing this in very marginal situations without deep enough stacks for a very long time. So this is a valid point, in order to maximize our EV from position, if we want to play "perfectly" we should technically be doing that. OK. Point taken, but let me clear up please that this is very high variance and not a good idea for people who don't play extremely well postflop. In fact, there could be an entirely different thread about play postflop with bad hands in position or whatever, what types of flops you should be raising, etc. I've got a lot of thoughts on it but I don't want to post them.

Another thing I want to strike on, it's wrong to change your raise size to % of stack vs multiples of the blinds. That is wrong. No, you should not open to 7x with 300bbs. If you have 300bbs and you want to open to 4x instead of 3x, I think that is fine. However, increasing it too much based on the size of stacks is quite simply playing embarrassingly scared. There are a million levels and reasons to why this was wrong, someone may have hit them in the thread, I'm not sure. The bottom line is that it is incorrect in thinking, there are reasons, but I'm not going to post them because this thread has made it apparent that people in MSNL really don't understand a lot of basic concepts as well as I thought they did.

[luckychewy]

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OK I will clear up some of the arguing that has been going on...

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lol thx dad!

[Hiltonian]

Pokey explained it very well I thought. You can't make an arguement against that by saying "oh but no one will do that clearly unexploitable strategy in this situation because they think they're better than the everyone else and thus will play along to try and outplay". If I was ever in a situation like this where people were raising to 175 with a .50 bb, I can guarantee you that I would not follow suit and completely forget about the blinds, because that is absurd and clearly not the best way to play in this situation.

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Like I said one player starts splashing around, raises say 1$ out of his million dollar stack. Another player can wait for AA and make a profit, sure.

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You appear to have misunderstood the point. If you do raise to just 1$ out of a million dollar stack with .50 blinds then people can't wait around for AA because they will only win your $1 when they do. Now, if you raise to $175, then they can just sit back and wait and even if they only win your opening bet every time they raise (and they definitely could open more than just AA depending on how often you're raising), they will still make a huge profit with little to no problems.

[Requin]

I was discussing a scenario where there are NO blinds.
So was Pokey.