Burning $30: How do aggressive players win like this?

When you're playing against fishes/whales you need to nit it up.

Aggressive poker only works for ppl who has a fold btn.

How is Rivers Philly lately? I played there a lot until about 2-3 years ago. I haven't been there since, and I hear it's been dead, to the point people think the room may close. Sounds like all the in-city action has migrated to Philly Live. I've been exclusively playing at Parx or in home games.

GreatWhiteFish gives me $hlt about being too value-oriented when I take aggressive action, but I mostly play 1/3, and hands like this are typical of the player pool. It can be hard to get a bluff through, but generally easy to get value.

My observation is that low stakes opponents are often very price INsensitive pre-flop, and get more price-sensitive on each subsequent street, as more equity is revealed. For many, if not most, the stakes aren't high enough to make bad decisions painful enough to learn from them.

I routinely see low stakes opponents torching $100-$300 buy-ins, immediately reloading, and then going right back to torching by playing absurdly loose and passive.

Not critiquing your line here. It's a speculative raise with 87s on the BTN, but not terrible. If the blinds aren't squeeze-happy, we can over-limp more on the BTN. If the limpers will fold to a chunky raise, we can raise more. If the limpers won't release, we can over-fold.

Years ago when I was playing regularly at Foxwoods, there was a guy that showed up and just ran over the table one night. He was aggressive and won multiple buyins. He was there for hours. I made note of him and a couple weeks later he was back at my table. This time, he used the same strategy but the deck didn't hit him. He burned through multiple buyins and was gone from the room in 45 minutes. You see people like that when they are winning. You don't see them when they are losing. Don't assume that they are winning players long term.

Many players are inelastic about calling hands pf. They'd prefer to limp in, but if was callable for a couple of bucks, it is callable for 30. Don't try to push them out. Accept you are going to play multi-way on the flop.

Just limp behind in position multiway.

The flaw in your thinking:
You raise 30 with 87 mostly as a bluff
It doesn’t matter what the flop is you are playing like you have aces & BET accordingly. It’s a mindset.

You may have to adjust on the turn, but if you don’t plan to look, act, play aggressive, then DON’T raise pre-flop. What if you bet $90 on the flop? Did you give them a chance to fold?

I’m not saying this is the way to go, but it is if you’re going to raise pre-flop.

You could call for 3 and play fit or fold. I assume the limpers are bad players, but to really advise you it would help to know their playing styles.

Or believe it or not you could fold that hand

- playing marginals require a plan
You’re looking for favorable situations, not just firing because you think you should.

C-bet bluffing into multiple opponents is generally not good. The more opponents, the worse it typically is.

Beating these games is *trivially* easy, imo. Overlimp speculative hands for cheap in position. And otherwise value bet relentlessly when we have the best hand.

You're likely being very results oriented when you see the occasional laggy player run like god, raise everything preflop and hit it postflop, and then get stacks in postflop... stacks that are short enough that they likely would have gotten in with an overlimp anyways... and meanwhile you don't notice the sessions they don't run like god and are down gobs from their continual 10x preflop raises with cheese. ETA: What V said.

GcluelesssuperboringpokerstratnoobG

It's not even running like God - a maniacal LAG is going to win in an average session because the strategy wins tons of small pots and loses big pots when they get called down. Even if their strategy is badly minus-EV, it's comparatively likely that you observe a winning sample in an hour or two of live play.