Card Dead for an hour what to do?
So when I say we are Card dead I really mean it 29o, 510s, K2o, 38s...
Extreme garbage about 7 orbits or so table isn't slow either decent reg players almost all i've played against before and a semi pro Texas Mike playing at 1/3 with his friend. Mike stack size is (440) is in gutter for around 2500$ worth of rebuys already and is making it around 25 to 40$ every hand just to see a flop most preflop hands are minimum 120$ pot sized. This is too good a table to leave because Mike gets it in basically any two cards and the list to get a table change to this table is a mile long. Do we open up our range here, tighten our range or continue our standard range and wait. wait.. wait...
4 Replies
Playing in this environment is going to involve a lot of ISO 3bing for a big chunk of your stack preflop.
So I would make an estimate of what Texas Mike's frequencies are and how the remainder of the table would react to facing ~$60-100 3bs cold. Then I would get a pen and paper and calculate some compound probabilities (eg: if Texas Mike raises $25 50% of the time from all positions, and he raises from UTG and you're in UTG+1, then someone will show up with a top 5% hand 0.95^7*0.9=38% of the time). Then I would play around with PokerStove (what hands are included in 2.5% vs 5% vs 10% vs 20% ranges, what are their equities against each other, etc).
Finally, I would do semi-bluff math for some example configurations and assumptions (we only have 3 players LTA, Texas Mike is actually only raising 25% from a certain seat, players are actually coming along more like 10% each rather than 2.5%, etc).
Learning what particular hands would be profitable given what assumptions is useful, yes, but even more important will be noticing patterns and proportions and such on how these inputs interact with the outputs. Whether that means gaining a "feel" for how these factors interact with each other so you can spit out some guesstimated outputs at the table, or better yet developing actual heuristics and approximate short-hands.
I don't really think there's any shortcut here, but to give you a free spoiler, I will answer your question and say that you're going to be "tighter" in the sense that your VPIP and PFR will be lower for each seat (and so you may be going longer stretches without getting involved in a hand), but the amount of money you commit when getting involved will shoot WAY up.
Your position matters a lot here, but in general, I keep waiting.
I believe that the biggest barrier between profitable and losing poker players at low stakes live games, is not poker skill, but the ability to fold cards for a couple of hours when needed. It's not difficult to play a tight, nitty game but many players simply can't handle boredom. If you attend a cardroom for long enough, you'll note that old nits are over-represented in the category of players that last for many years.
And the old nits I know still seem to get paid when they finally get AA! 😉
