Diabolical poker advice
Which commonly used poker advice drives you totally nuts with its utter lunacy?
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I’ll go first.
‘play ABC poker’
F me. What the flying F are you talking about there bro? ‘JUST play ABC poker’ – oh right, yeah, two minutes I’ll JUST learn the entire f-ing fictional alphabet of 6max and be right back at you, hang on.
Idiot.
Seriously, if by play ABC poker you mean ‘play normal GTO’; well, you realise that will take an entire human lifespan to learn, right?? It’s not good advice to a beginner. It’s not even good advice to a pro. It’s literally MEANINGLESS.
If you meant to say, ‘look… no, no, just play straightforwardly, don’t stray too far from GTO, be very selective with extreme adjustments blah blah’ etc etc. Well, ok, that’s slightly more logical. But it’s still, ultimately total BS - isn't it? Playing un-straightforwardly is the absolute lifeblood of poker profit. Adaptation is king in almost all circumstances/even moreso at lower limits. Even within this added context I think this phrase fails miserably and helps no-one improve, ever.
It’s backwards talk. An expression rotting from within.
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Ahhh, well that sure feels better.. !! Feel free to disagree, vehemently ofc; it's a deliberately triggering thread. Subjective polarisation ahoy.
Vibe: speak your mind/get it off your chest.
What do you consider some of the most beyond useless poker 'aDvIcE'?
Play ABC poker doesn’t mean the same as play GTO. Quite the contrary. Playing ABC poker usually means raise your strong hands, bet flops where you hit and fold when you don’t. It is just very straightforward and obvious poker. It means NOT doing things that GTO says you should (like 4-betting A5s preflop as a bluff or making hero calls with bluffcatchers against large river bets). We play ABC poker to beat loose passive types who call too much and raise too little - a very common player type at micro stakes.
As A.I. developer, I have, truly, functional GTO poker play, and no:
1) Playing "ABC" vs general field is more profitable than playing GTO, because GTO tends to mix as well and often it's isn't necessary
2) GTO is more profitable when you play vs strong opponent that tends to adapt vs you or you have a good rush
For the sake of argument (that's an example not true GTO example, but the GTO works in pretty similiar manner even if is more articulate).
If you have 2 hands:
- AA, that you call 30% of the time and raise 70%
- T9s, that you call 70% of the time and raise 30%
vs. common field or fish is pretty stupid don't raise 100% of the time AA
I would like to take this opportunity to issue a formal and public apology to user MR ABC POKER.
Nothing personal mate. I don't know you at all.
I love learning poker. It’s brilliant. But at the end of the day, it is quite a dry and blokey environment. Lots of very drrrrrrrrrry and technical bro talk about basically maths at various scales of understanding. There will naturally be advice that you think was overall quite silly or detrimental to your development over time, or bugs you for some other random personal reason... not least because we lure each other in with such shortcuts, ‘just do this pal’ etc, when all they can ever be are giant masks for relatively high level theory.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s valid though, really. I thought maybe more about it just being ok to say it. Somewhat free of judgement but of course we are apes so that’s not incredibly likely...
Blockers.
Don't understand why the solver is doing something? Blockers! Similar hands mixing in different ways? Blockers. It's this catch-all excuse for not understanding solver outputs. That's not to say blockers are irrelevant, but there's a lot of poker theory misattributed to card removal that can actually be explained by much simpler concepts.
Here's a classic example. The top comments all say it's due to blockers. But 8c actually has bad blockers in this spot.
ABC to mean is standard poker. It's standard to overbluff lines where population overfolds, overcall where they themselves overbluff etc etc. Simple, logical play basically, not randomizing anything vs an unbalanced weaker pool etc etc.
Which I don't think is a bad advice at all.
ABC to mean is standard poker. It's standard to overbluff lines where population overfolds, overcall where they themselves overbluff etc etc. Simple, logical play basically, not randomizing anything vs an unbalanced weaker pool etc etc.
ABC poker is even more basic than that. How is a beginner supposed to know what spots are overfolded, overbluffed, etc?
ABC poker basically means that you play the strenght of your hand. Zero big bluffs or hero calls. The only frequent bluff will be the c-bet.
Just get money in when you have a strong hand or draw. Otherwise, don't build big pots.
This is enough to beat soft tables.
I always understood ABC poker to mean only getting involved with reasonably strong / playable starting hands pre, and mostly playing fit-or-fold post, like "no set, no bet" type of continuation logic. Little to no multi-barrel bluffing, over-folding to aggression, and few if any hero calls.
Basically, we just out-play our fishy opponents by playing a more fundamentally sound game, where we don't get out of line, and just look to capitalize on the common mistakes our fishy opponents frequently make.
As far as bad poker thinking goes, my personal most hated is "betting or raising to see where I'm at", or "betting / raising for information". This has to be one of the most bone-headed bits of bad logic that somehow manages to persist in the game.
Also, courtesy of Phil Gordon, "big hand, big pot, small hand, small pot". It seems to make sense on the surface, but avoids any effort to range opponents and size our bets appropriately. It's just "I haz big hand, so I betz big!" and vice-versa.
Any more definitions of 'ABC' poker out there? 😀
This one used to drive me la la when i was new:
'Snap'
Snap?! Oh right yeah snap aye
Snap fold? Snap.. call? Snap your fingers off if you don't indicate which way you intended to play the hand there squire?
Honestly... you'd never catch me saying useless shorthand shite like that. No sirie
...
ABC poker is even more basic than that. How is a beginner supposed to know what spots are overfolded, overbluffed, etc?ABC poker basically means that you play the strenght of your hand. Zero big bluffs or hero calls. The only frequent bluff will be the c-bet.Just get money in when you have a strong hand or draw. Otherwise, don't build big pots.This is enough to beat soft tables
Yes, this was the old definition of ABC poker, and I guess it used to be enough to beat online games as high as NL50 15+ years ago. Any advice that would have to be rewritten from your memory in no time (unless you want to be a losing nit) is a bad advice in my view.
No, a beginner is not supposed to know any of the things I mentioned, my definition of ABC is meant to be used by already experienced players that still play the micros or smallstakes and want to actually maximize their winrates and move up faster.
ABC is a construct
Someone posted
on the poker_theory subreddit the other day.
Someone posted
on the poker_theory subreddit the other day.Thank you for posting the article:
"Essentially to play ABC means to play straightforwardly without frills....nothing fancy etc. The problem is that everyone has a completely different idea of what that looks like, depending on experience and the type of games they play."
'So now we know that "ABC poker" is a total misnomer should we call it a day right now and all go home early? Not at all! Let's try and create an ABC poker strategy for the lower limits anyway!'
That's the spirit!
Thank you for posting the article:
"Essentially to play ABC means to play straightforwardly without frills....nothing fancy etc. The problem is that everyone has a completely different idea of what that looks like, depending on experience and the type of games they play."
I think you could just say "play within your own ability" whatever that may be.
I know I should donk some combos on some board but I have spent 0 time looking at it so instead of figuring it out mid hand I'll just check.
Seriously, if by play ABC poker you mean ‘play normal GTO'...
Seriously, if someone who's been posting forever doesn't know the difference between ABC and GTO, maybe Go Fish is more your speed?
Friend. In a word: wooooooooooooooooossssssssssshhhhhhh
"They can have strong hands, never bluff them here"
Seriously, if by play ABC poker you mean 'play normal GTO'...
Seriously, if someone who's been posting forever doesn't know the difference between ABC and GTO, maybe Go Fish is more your speed
His PGC (the first one from a few years ago) explains more or less why Ceres makes the type of posts he do hehe.
Although there was a period I remember he actually being more serious, at least when commenting hands in the online NL subforum.
This post about ABC poker was food for thought nonetheless.
I get irate when people tell me 23o isn't a good bluffing hand, and you should fold it.
Low equity hands are excellent bluffing candidates because every time they succeed you're stealing equity from the other player. Don't bluff call stations, or pot committed players.
People yell 'no, if you open 23o you're an idiot!', and I just can't take the level of basic they are on.
I have a lot of leniencies for people saying play ABC poker because it doesn't mean don't bluff unless low stakes are saying it. If it's high stakes, I assume they mean 'GTO base'.
I always understood ABC poker to mean only getting involved with reasonably strong / playable starting hands pre, and mostly playing fit-or-fold post, like "no set, no bet" type of continuation logic. Little to no multi-barrel bluffing, over-folding to aggression, and few if any hero calls.Basically, we just out-play our fishy opponents by playing a more fundamentally sound gam
See, I always took it as GTO base unless it was a fish saying it.
I think context matters here fellas. If Jonathon Little types say 'play ABC poker' he means 'Play GTO base'. If a fish at the local 1/2 says 'play abc poker', they mean 'don't bluff, play good hands, lay down bad hands'.
I'm probably wrong, but that was my interpretation.
Hungry Horse Poker raises to see where he is at in all his videos. He's a better player than me. It seems to be highly effective at 1/2 and 1/3.
