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

[mindless]

Dan made some good points and then got retarded. If the table is playing with 200BB instead of 100BB stacks, raising to 7BB instead of 3.5BB for the most part makes the game play as if it were 100BB stacks. There's a few other points that get complicated, but that's the main result. When you're "stealing" the blinds with deep stacks, unless you're scared/not as good as the blinds, you don't want to do this.

The primary advantage you have is position. Inflating the pot preflop reduces the stack sizes, which reduces the amount of postflop play, which reduces the the advantage of position. Position is less important in reraised pots because the stacks are shallower and you can't maneuver the pot/outplay your opponent as much. Why would you want to reduce your primary advantage when it's most important?

Clearly with deeper stacks and raising 3.5BB, the BB can call with almost any two cards. However, having to play crap cards OOP deep is even more difficult than playing dominated hands short. Wouldn't you want your opponent to play dominated hands if you could get him? Raising to 7BB discourages that. Seems silly to me

[aejones]

Also, if you know he's calling with bad cards, please just widen his range postflop and don't go broke as easy. Oh yea, and widen your range preflop like he is. Also, for the game to play "deeper" you want to have more money behind in relation to the size of the pot.

[Hiltonian]

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Please explain to me why you would want to raise more pf the deeper you are. That seems plain wrong to me as I don't see any specific correlation to you're stack size and the preflop raise. The size of the blinds are much more important to the amount you raise than your stack size, so unless the blinds are rising I see no reason to increase your raise amount.

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^ agree, and hi hiltonian

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Holla

[jrbick]

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AE I'd like to see you respond to what I've said here (which has been garnered from several very good players, but maye I've misapplied/misunderstood some concepts) --


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There's definitely a correlation to stack size and the amount you open to, however I think something missing from DB's equation is the type of player that is also deepstacked. If it's another nittish TAG at the table, then there pretty much is no point in doing so since you won't be playing many hands with him anyway. If it's someone who's a bit looser, and position on you and is going to play deepstacked poker, then you would want to adjust your opening size in order to lessen his implied odds. Otherwise, he can call you with a TON of hands if your bet is a mere 1.5% or less of his stack (in the case that you cover or you're both evenly stacked). In doing this, you also put a lot more pressure on the rest of the 100 bb stacks at the table and cause them to have to make adjustments. Don't know if you guys have noticed this but a lot of TAGish players are not very good at making good adjustments. Some inevitably will and you'll just have to watch for that, but the great thing about this is that it is more likely to induce tilt, looser play, etc etc. Obviously the bad players will also be more apt to get the money in with weaker holdings preflop, etc. Basic point is that you're going to be increasing the action and your open sort of acts as a live straddle.

If the other deep stack is a bad player then this should be a no brainer. You DEFINITELY would want to adjust the size of your open raise: isolation, action, profit.

Anyway... this is less than detailed but hopefully this gets the ball rolling. Good thread, DB.

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OK well first of all, if there is a bad player, he will not understand implied odds. He will say I have K 4 suited but it's just K 4 suited it doesn't matter that you opened to 3.5x and I have position and we have 300 big blinds, it's just K 4 suited.

Secondly, if he's on the level that he understands that and starts repopping you very light and/or calling you very light. Do the same thing in return from position. You should be able to notice right away "wtf this 22/18 is suddenly cold calling a lot from the button when I open from MP, I had not normally seen him calling that much." You probably won't even need to see him show down 9T off or 68s to know that he's suddenly trying to play a whole bunch of hands. Adjust to that. There are a few different ways you should be able to figure out to adjust, they're fairly basic.

In raising to 7x, you make yourself vulnerable to anyone who is decent enough to adjut. you make yourself vulnerable to any 100 bb stacks at the table and really allow them to play nearly perfectly vs you. It's just not correct, it's pretty basic I think.

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Thanks for responding. If you go back and read my posts (I don't expect you to do that) you'll notice that my framework is basically a 'perfect storm' where opponents aren't going to adjust to you.

I mean look I never play this way as most tables don't allow for it and the tagish players at my tables make a lot of mistakes postflop; constantly working at FPS-type plays. So, it's to my advantage to take as many flops as I possibly can.

[MDMA]

Jesus, this thread has turned so retarded.

[Pokey]

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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.

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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.


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...unless their opponents are smart, and play the simple strategy of pushing aces and folding everything else. (We are still talking about no blinds, remember.) At that point, the postflop skill advantage is completely nullified, and all that matters is that the money is going in with the original bettor having far-and-away the worst hand. The original bettor will lose a great deal of money when he gets play, and win NOTHING in the other hands: that's what makes the blinds so crucial.

Look at tournament play to see a good example of how the blinds drive the action: early on, people are very deep and still make small bets, because they have little to gain until some money is added to the pot. Late in the tournament, people are willing to risk their entire stacks on mediocre hands just to win the blind-and-ante money. The predeal chips are what drive the action, not the stack sizes.

Here's another way of looking at the question: if stack sizes (not blind sizes) determine the size of the optimal preflop bet, doesn't that mean that a short stack in a tournament should be min-betting, rather than pushing? If you've got an M of 5, doesn't this imply you should minbet and "play poker" postflop? Since the overwhelming majority of good tournament players realize that the opposite is true, perhaps there's something to be said for gauging our bets by the size of the blinds.

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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).


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Not at all -- in a real 10/20 game, there's always the threat of the looming blinds to create action. Every orbit, I'm paying at least $30 to play, even if I fold every hand. That creates action, since I don't have the luxury to wait. Furthermore, the $30 in the pot gives us something to fight for, and creates an incentive to bet and struggle. With no money in the pot, we've got no reason to fight.

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Pushing AA and folding anything else is unexploitable but hardly unbeatable.


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It's unbeatable, though not necessarily optimal (given the strategies of our opponents). When I say it is unbeatable, I mean that no counterstrategy can have a positive expectation against the "push aces, fold all other hands" strategy. To crystalize the concept, imagine we're playing heads-up poker with $1000 stacks (and plenty of rebuy opportunities). You open to $100 with a range that is wider than AA. I push AA and fold all other hands. How can you possibly expect to win money in this matchup? In that sense, my strategy is unbeatable. Now, if you want to add a third player who is willing to mix it up with you, then the two of you could wind up winning money from each other, but MY stack will inevitably grow, because I'll ONLY be putting money into the pot with far-and-away the best hand. The fact that other people are willing to make mistakes does not make the strategy appropriate.

If you play chess, you might know this one: bad players will often start the game by moving their A and H pawns to allow their rooks access to the board early. Against VERY bad players, this allows them to do significant damage and sometimes even win the game. That does NOT mean that moving the A and H pawns first is an optimal strategy, and a clever opponent can destroy you for making such a big mistake. Something similar is happening here: you're suggesting that a huge preflop mistake will be +EV in the long run because our opponents will probably make huge mistakes and nullify our error. That's seems like a very dangerous way of thinking, especially if our opponents are clever enough to adjust to our mistakes and take advantage of it (in ways that will be extremely obvious to them).

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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.


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You're right. Luckily, my point does not depend on being short-stacked, although I thought that might make it clearer. OK, so we've ALL got $1,000,000 stacks, the blinds are $10 and $20, and people are playing normal, optimal strategies except they are open-raising to $40,000 instead of $60. If I wait for rockets and open-push every time I get them, can you see how that would be wickedly profitable? If I get just one raiser in front, I'm making enough money to pay my blinds for 1300 orbits if he FOLDS, and I'm doubling up about 4/5ths of the time if he calls. I don't need to be short-stacked to exploit the bejeezus out of this mistake, and I don't even have to know how to play postflop, because there won't ever be any postflop action.

Is this a boring strategy? Sure.
Is it ridiculously nittish? Absolutely.
Is it profitable? WILDLY so.
Is it beatable by any strategy villain could come up with (other than shrinking his preflop raise back to reasonable levels)? Nope.

There's no way to recover from the mistake postflop if we don't let postflop action happen.

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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.


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OK, so infinities screw things up, I'll give you that one. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] However, with any FINITE stack, a standard opening raise that is a tremendous pot overbet WILL be easily exploited by an opponent who waits for the goods and then pushes over the top. You could even improve on the strategy by mixing in some game-theoretically optimal quantity of bluff-pushes (THIS fraction would depend on stack sizes relative to the initial raise), but even without optimizing we can clearly beat ANY strategy that is playing this way. That's got to make the play a mistake. Now, if your opponents fail to capitalize on the mistake you can get away with it, but that doesn't make the strategy good. All it takes is one clever exploiter and you're in deep doodoo. And when it becomes obvious to ALL your opponents that they can beat you while sleeping, they'll adjust, and THEN you'll be SERIOUSLY hurting.

I just don't like an argument that starts with "well, I make a huge mistake preflop but my opponents will be dumb enough not to exploit it, so I'll make it up post!" It doesn't take too many smart opponents before the trouble starts.

[LearnedfromTV]

I'm not even going to try to respond to all that bit by bit, but one thing I'll clear up:

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Pushing AA and folding anything else is unexploitable but hardly unbeatable.



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It's unbeatable, though not necessarily optimal (given the strategies of our opponents). When I say it is unbeatable, I mean that no counterstrategy can have a positive expectation against the "push aces, fold all other hands" strategy.

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When I say your push AA strategy is unexploitable but not unbeatable I mean that you are guaranteed profit but you are not maximizing profit (I understand your meaning, which is different). Other strategies beat it, (i.e. you can choose a better strategy), given bad opponents. This is the whole point and the reason to go through this if-there-were-no-blinds intellectual exercise. Losing players effectively ante a portion of their stack every hand and the game is competition both for the actual blinds and for these extra 'invisible' antes (oh hell here comes Sklansky). This is true in limit games too, by the way; it's just that there is a cap on the size of possible mistake there. In a NL game, with deep stacks and bad opponents (or just disparity in skill), the amount of money in play from losing players' mistakes could be large enough to make blinds irrelevant/unnecessary (at low stakes, compare standard 3-4xBB opens online to opening to a quarter or 30 in a live 2/5 game; yeah, you can beat the live game by tightening up, but you'll make more if you don't and the live game is softer than the game where you get to open to theoretically correct amounts). Playing an overly tight strategy in a blindless game is unexploitable and profitable, yes, because you have no blind pressure, but you are forgoing +EV opportunities every time you don't think in terms of the range of the opener and the amount of $ in the pot (as a winning player, the 'antes' you fight for are the losing players' mistakes; if you choose to opt out and wait for AA, you'll be giving profit to any other winners in the game).

I have a hard time understanding how people who are good at a game where implied odds plays so heavily into decisionmaking can misunderstand these concepts and the differences between theory and practice. If you play frequent pots 250BB deep against a worse opponent who will put in 7xBB preflop with the same range he would put 3xBB in if you were 100BB deep, the fact that you made too large of a preflop raise for the blinds is irrelevant; you make more profit. In practice, good players will be exploiting the mistakes each other make while engaging the bad players, and always opening to the same pecentage of stack size or something is clearly going too far. But when two very good, otherwise equal players are deepstacked in a hand, the better player for that hand is the one in position, and so raising a little extra in position with deep stacks, one of the main thing Dan was getting at, makes a lot of sense.

[LearnedfromTV]

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All of this is pretty interesting to me after I changed my preflop ranges. I run about 25/20/3.5 now, which I guess is lagtag to some, but really, its not for everyone. For the most part I stopped opening scs and friend until the CO, and added more hands (ie 58s 6ts etc) to the CO and Button. As a result, I open frequently, pretty much playing the lions share of mey hands in position. I think some tags (2p2rs) look at my stats and have all the wrong assumptions about my play. They seem to expect me to be a lot more aggressive preflop than I really am and generally play back far too much postflop in 3bet pots given my range (Whihc against many ppl, in most situations save for hu in the blinds is almost always something silly-tight like jj+ aqs+). I guess thats sort of a reminder that pokertracker stats only tell you the numbers, they dont tel you what they mean.

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For all the energy I've put into the silly blinds/antes theory stuff, this paragraph was by far the most interesting to me in the OP, particularly the idea that to effectively play against an opponent you need to think about their ranges position by position rather than assuming that everyone's UTG--Button spectrum is distributed the same way.

[KRANTZ]

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if you start raising to 7bb pre while deep, people will just fold all but premium hands. then when they realize (after a few orbits, probably) that you've just changed your standard opening size, they will adjust and play as normal. i don't understand how you could even construct an argument that says changing your pfr size drastically makes much sense. also, it's not as if the table will change its raise sizes - when you're not in the hand the rest of the players will be opening as usual. it's also rare to even BE at a table full of all deep stacks (or even more than 3, and 3 isn't even that common), so i don't really think much of that rhetoric is applicable

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One of your students advocated doing this and I assumed he got this from you. Maybe that student was FOS at the time and would now not advocate this. This was at NL200 or NL100 or something like that and versus another very deep donkey at the table. The dynamics were pretty interesting. I'm guessing that he didn't get this from you though based on what you just posted.

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def not from me

[felson]

this thread makes me wish Stars would spread a $20k min buyin game with zero blinds, min open $100.