What are all these posts about good regs at 1/3

Reg is really just a word people use to describe player(s) they think are good. Its heavily subjective to the skill level of the person using the word.

I thought a reg meant a professional player. How can they be all good regs and the whole table limps in? Most good regs don't play 1/3. Maybe mostly competent amateurs and some grinders would be more accurate.

I've found over the years that when people post subjective adjectives, you have to interpret them with the lense of the OP. In this particular case, the OP is saying that all the players are at the same basic level as everyone else, including the OP. What could be a winning player at 1/3 is likely to be a losing player at 5/10. The low stakes mods years ago agreed that we allow all posters express their honest opinions regardless as to the accuracy of their opinion within the guidelines of the forum (no trolling, no personal attacks). If you find the opinion of a poster to be inadequate for you, you can post a response or if it bothers you, ignore them.

I've always taken the term rather literally - ie someone who plays regularly/often as opposed to an occasional player. Which doesn't imply they're necessarily any good, but they might be better than average. Or that simply they're a player who IS better than average for the table - maybe not a world-beater, but good enough to be winning at that particular level. Purely subjectively from the point of the OP it could simply mean "a player who I think is better than me"

half the posters in the forum are convinced that they are playing against active high stakes regs in low stakes public games lol. some odd amount of delusion / ego combined with playing in player pools with no strong / competent / aggro players.

I prefer to use the term "reg" to mean "good player" or "pro." It's hard with low stakes live poker though because there are so many bad players that play all the time. There isn't really a good term to describe these players that differentiates between them and the bad players that play infrequently.

Also with live poker, it is really hard to figure out what other players are up to, especially if you aren't paying super close attention (something I myself am often guilty of). If you see a player raising and 3betting frequently pre-flop (or running big bluffs post-flop), you might assume they are better than many of the other players because raising and 3betting and bluffing are things good players do. But the reality is that this player might be a big loser, while the person at the other end of the table who is folding every hand for 4 hours is the real crusher. At full ring in call-happy high rake games, good poker is often boring poker.

I suspect it's a relative description, where the opponents being described as good regs are simply not as bad as the recs, making them better than average, or that the poster describing them as good has seen enough to have some respect for the opponent's game.

That said, the game does evolve, such that there may be more decent players playing low stakes than in years past, and some rooms may have more of them than others. It's a fallacy to suggest that there are no good players at low stakes, because if they were good they'd move up in stakes. Some good players haven't built a sufficient bankroll yet, or are simply content to play low stakes for fun.

"Reg" = Person I regularly see. They may even have a ton of experience, let's say 20 years. But it's going to be 20 years of repeating what they learned the first year they started playing.

You have to keep learning to do well in this game. Along with rungood, of course. Now, it's solvers that you have to learn, along with understanding why decisions are made the way they are, and how your game differs from GTO.

Where it gets funny, to me anyway, are all of the "pros" people play with. At 1-2 / 1/3, 2-5. OK...maybe Draftkings is down, lol.

I didn't read all replies, but I agree w/ moxterite and Nh, gg. When most posters say "reg" they seem to mean someone who plays regularly and is probably a slightly winning player at that level/location. If the yahoos I play with posted on 2+2, they'd refer to me as a reg. (I'd still refer to them as yahoos.)

It doesn't mean they are a hoodie wearing, earphone sporting 5/T grinder from Vegas who is slumming it in Wisconsin at a 1/3 game 😉

Always thought the term reg referred to regular at that poker room (or frequent grinder at that poker room).

I mean, I guess we don't really want to get into a useless semantics argument, but my take on these definitions:

A "reg" is just that, a regular, a person we see all the time and is probably putting in like ~400 hours +/- a year (or whatever) in the room. We'd probably know their name if we weren't so damn bad at remembering names. For me, this term doesn't imply anything regarding whether they win or lose.

A "good" player to me is simply one that wins in the game. Winning in any poker environment where there is a crapload of rake coming off the table is an accomplishment that very few in the room are doing. You could further delineate with "breakeven" vs "decent" vs "good" vs "crushing" but whatever, "good" is beating the rake long term at some degree. Also very possible for "good" players to be sitting in the lowest game in their room... obviously if it is the only game in the room, but sometimes just because they've decided those stakes are their sweet spot (between effort vs enjoyment vs stress vs winning).

IME, most people I sit with definitely fit the bill of "regs", although very few fit the bill of "good regs".

It's also highly unlikely that I'd state I'm sitting at a table full of good regs while seeing the whole table call a straddle preflop. Not because good regs can't limp/overlimp into pots (they can, get over yourself if you think that isn't possible), but because there's no way I'd intentionally be sitting at a table where everyone else is also a winner (slight exception might be if the whaleiest of whales is also at the table).

GcluelesssemanticsnoobG

This!
Couldn't have been better said.

I do agree it's super rare to be at a table full of the best action overall winning players and my posts from last week described that it was not a profitable table more of a learning new strategies for advancing your game.

I doubt everyone at the table was a good reg, but I’m used to seeing internet tough guys brag about how terrible everyone else is compared to them so it’s unusual to see people (especially at low stakes) give their opponents any credit.

Even some fish and breakeven regs will say that they are so much better than the other players.

I remember Sklansky is his recent small stakes book said in Vegas there would often be around 1-3 decent players at low stakes tables.

Why would you think reg means professional player? You’ve spent enough time in card rooms to know there are plenty of regulars that aren’t pros.

I can tell you with certainty the players at the table I posted about last week are long time on the higher end winner reg/grinders and it happened to be a full table of them which was worth playing at just to advance my game and try new things. However it is not a easy profitable table by any means playing against all solid players. These are guys that play 2/5 or 5/10 as well however sometimes on Friday and Saturday nights the 1/3 games get far bigger with more action then a 5/10. This table last week had around 10-13k at it played like a 5/10 for certain. When it gets later in the night people start table changing with their big stacks there are around 24 tables at rivers poker room.

So what things did you try and what did you learn?

If you can't think of anything in particular you tried or learned, playing at a tough table is a -EV activity.

"Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker."

So this table was prone to 3 bets and even 4 bets I was learning how aggressive activity worked against good players and if/when to 3 bet or even 4 bet said players and out play them. This table was not so much about your holdings and more so about playing the players. Which I think I did very well because when I went back to a normal table the next session I was running around 100$ roi per hour. I spent a lot of time learning how they played specific hands I got to see run to show down and out play them when I went into a pot.

There was one hand I had complete air and had main Villain reads pretty down pat and was able to bluff him off his bluffs for around 400$ pot. It was a very interesting table and I did find some new sizing strategies as well just by being observant.

It's all semantics, but I will give you my philosophy for profiling players.

We're are trying to build profiles on players that give useful information allowing us to better read their hands and play against them.

The clearest distinctions between a reg and a rec are the amount of preflop mistakes that are made. Recs are too wide pre, they don't raise enough, and they call to often. Here are some examples of recreational players:

- limping first in to the pot

- UTG opens 5x and rec in co cold calls with KJo (even KQo would generally be a losing call)

-rec opens LJ 5bbwith KQo and faces a 3b from to 15+bb CO and the rec calls

-LJ opens 5bb, CO 3b 15+bb, rec cold calls on button with AQo

-Never 3betting AK, cold calling with AKs, limp-calling AK

So, a reg is typically not going to do any of those things, in addition they are typically going to be playing more aggressive preflop, 3betting a lot with AQo+, ATs+, KTs+, A4s, A4s, TT+, and potentially much wider depending on positions. A rec reaches for chips to raise pre out of turn, only for someone to raise before they act, and most of the time the rec is going to call the raise. They don't tend to have a good understanding that a lot of they might have open raised when folded to should now either fold or perhaps 3 bet facing a raise.

Over the long term, a person displaying the preflop rec behaviors is going to lose money to the person displaying the reg behaviors. If you're a winning reg, you should generally think of recs as adding to the pool of money to be won at a poker table while the regs are typically one extra person to divide up that money, therefore shrinking your winnings.

Generally speaking, in online poker, a recreational play is a losing player a bad reg is slightly winning, losing, or break even depending on the lineup, a reg is a winning player long term except in very tough and or highly raked games. However, at an online poker, a 6 max table may have 1 or 2 recs.

At live 1/3, the skill level of the players is so much lower than online poker. The entire table might be recreational players. Even with 2-3 regs, the tighter recs are likely to be at least small winners.

In general, people overuse a couple of terms in the live poker forum. I don't care if someone has played 1,000 hours of poker every year for the last 10 years. If the play like a rec, they are a rec, and they will lose to any actual reg in the long term. The other terms I see thrown around too much are TAG and LAG, which are somewhat outdated terms.

Great post. Agree on the observation that a lot of players may have experience, but their experience is simply repeating what they first learned, ad infinitum. 20 years of doing the same thing they learned in the first few months, basically.

Replying to ask, "Why are they outdated, and what would you replace them with?"

Agree that it's likely all semantics. For me, most regs (i.e. REGular players) are recs (i.e. RECreational players). Even the ones that are winning aren't really playing the game for the sole purpose of making money (because what they can make at LLSNL pales in comparison to what they make at their real job); they simply find it an enjoyable hobby.

I remember when I first came over to the dark side (NL from Limit) and started hanging out in this forum. There was a discussion going on as to what to label the typical LLSNL opponent. Obviously very few of them qualified as pro's (players attempting to make their living off of poker). But calling a lot of them purely recreational players seemed to not quite fit the bill either. It seemed a lot of them we're obviously playing as recreation, but they were also really trying their best, and some were actually winners. IIRC, the term that was coined here was CRC = Competitive Recreational Cardplayer. The term didn't seem to stick.

GcluelessCRCnoobG

I was in Vegas a week ago. First time I've played there in many years, and honestly 1/2 and 1/3 felt like they did 15 years ago with the majority loose passive. I just didn't see much changes (perhaps marginally more folding); if you just follow Ed Miller's The Rules (which must be close to 20 years old), you're going to do just fine.

A reg as someone who plays regularly. It doesn't mean that they're Phil Ivey. A good rag probably does as well enough to cover the blinds overtime. She played in a smaller room enough where there's the same player pool you get to know who's decent.

I agree with this post and the distinctions Mlark makes between two core player types. The problem, however, is that semantics matter.

If the rec-reg distinction is used, readers will inevitably believe that recreational refers to someone who plays every so often and regular someone who plays all the time.

A simple solution might be to say "losing" and "winning" players, except that the former is too derogatory (like "fish" is).

Another solution is to be more specific, for example: "utg plays regularly but is a small loser in the game because he limp-calls too often preflop and folds too much postflop".

In other words, not using the rec-reg distinction would add clarity and depth to most HHs, so long as posters describe relevant players in sufficient detail.