New guy

Welcome to 2+2. Check out the sub fora. Poker strategy is for discussing hands, with separate subs for live and online. Staking takes place in the marketplace and has its own sub, but generally you're unlikely to attract any stakers as a new guy with no track record. It may take a while.

the vibe of this thread:

The goal of learning poker is simple:

1) Learn the strategy of the mean player at your rough stakes

2) learn value betting based on this — I call this "combo progressions", every bet, check and raise, with sizing accounted for, leads to us facing a new mean-player range. If you never value bet with less than 50% equity vs the mean player's calling range, you'd be better than 99.5% of poker players.

3) learn your own strategy in every spot by mapping it — which should be informed by GTO principles as well as item 2, many spots feature equivalent EV when value betting, checking, raising etc — 50 or so well-chosen archetype boards should do fine

4) learn to generate optimalish frequencies in every spot based on your range compositions. People who think they can produce anything close to optimal frequencies without knowing good approximations of their own ranges in every important spot are mostly deluded, which is almost everyone who plays poker. And

5) learn to identify statistically significant deviations from population play and how to modulate exploitation using the skills in item 4. In fact, this part really can't be done without first doing 4, otherwise it will be haphazard at best and itself wildly exploitable.

"Always do X" exploitative strategies may fly in situations that are effectively noniterative games, which is <50 hands vs anyone halfway good. But even fish will catch on that you're running them out of pots at every opportunity, if in fact that's what you're doing.

Will endless unstructured back-and-forth in some Skype group add anything more? Not in my experience. But mileage may vary.

PS: If you're not large overbetting in NL variants, you're doing it wrong