When others comment on how tight/nitty you are

Euros get action 2 ways:

Open Light, 3Bet Tight
or
Open Tight, 3Bet Light

Don’t have to go crazy, but lots of ways to open up your game a little.

Also, should point out ‘angle shooters’ that are trying to get a call by accusing you of tightness in the middle of a hand.

If you get caught bluffing, people remember that for hours. It’s not such a bad thing to happen once in a while.

One old timer & one young lady are the only true nits I’ve ever known. Most considered to be nits are still playing too many hands.

It’s a tough game. There are some very good players out there that are not winners.

We've had a bunch of "people said I'm a nit" threads before ... nothing has changed so I tried to stay away.

tl;dr Solvers would be labeled as super nits by almost all 1-2 fish, and it's not because they are bad.

Saying that if your 1-1 pub game has no rake, few raises and almost no 3bets ... you can probably limp along a bunch of suited whatever, esp. in LP. Also get drunk and have fun.

But you have to understand that you'll be training yourself to be a bad reg. at best, if you ever get into a real casino game with rake. (insert sub's recommendation of playing online, to train or similar).

While it's difficult to tell from your few posts ... you seem like a dunning kruger poker award winner, and OP would be better getting advice from literally anyone else.

Make jokes, talk to them about sports or anything else. You want to entertain everyone else. Nobody will care if you're tight if you're friendly and fun to talk to at the tables

First off, I'd say if people are showing up to have fun and goof around and you exploit them and take their money in a way that is not fun or challenging, they are within their rights to talk some chit and even alert other players to what you are doing.

But you can play how you want and if this is how you're learning the game you can't play badly just to appease them.

Some good advice itt both about laughing at yourself and opening up a bit in position and stuff like that.

The limp rr bluff is nice. Especially is spme guy folds tt face up and you show a4s

As another said, if no rake you can limp in a bit too.

It is valuable to look like a rec, make the game fun, have fun yourself, learn from interesting spots etc.

I limp in sometimes even in a raked game because if you pick the right spots and have a skill advantage it might cost you a few pennies. Meanwhile, it encourages limping and is great for your image and you get to play a hand.

A couple options:

1. Make a ridiculous bluff against the guy who always calls you a nit. When he folds (because he thinks you're a nit), say, "nice fold, jackass, " and show the hand.

I added the jackass part, but you could get a good laugh by bluffing the guy who always calls you a nit and it would improve your image.

2. Play into the nit stereotype and find lots of profitable bluff opportunities. Never show but just keep bluffing if they're going to fold. This is actually a very effective strategy, especially if you are just tight preflop. People will assume you're also tight post flop and you can print with big bluffs on later streets.

Why do you think that? It’s probably easy to be a winning player with a 10% vpip. What are they gonna do about it besides steal our big blind?

Fish still pay off nits, that’s why they’re fish.

Possibly the most brutal put down I've seen here!

I once let this really affect me because it came out of nowhere from someone I didn’t expect. Blew off a good chunk of a big win, quit a great game early.

Normally I just laugh and say “Aces AGAIN, I can’t believe it!”

At the risk of stating the obvious: Red liners benefit from a nit image; blue liners don't. Most LLSNL winners are blue-liners, so you are effectively, mostly, but not necessarily correct.

You can't win poker with that level of passivity. And no, gobbledygeek isn't running 10/5/1. That'd mean KK/AKs aren't automatic 3bs, meanwhile gobbledygeek is out here l/rring as a semi-bluff lol.

Again, at the risk of stating the obvious, where gobbledygeek differs from OMCs is...all the hands he plays different? And all the strategic lines he takes that OMCs would never dream of?

The tightness is whatever. FWIW, 10% VPIP is basically equilibrium for 10-handed poker, but that assumes you're facing a bunch of raises and 3bs cold, not predominantly facing limps in LP where your VPIP should be at least 20% (also few enough rooms even spread 9-handed cash games anymore, so you'll be luck if an average of 7 people are dealt into every hand).

So you can definitely at least breakeven VPIPing 10% of the time, though you'll very obviously be severely under-leveraged playing at a 7-handed table full of fish who open limp pre as you would at a 10-handed table facing constant raises and 3bs cold from players with zero postflop leaks. And again, your spreads will usually be something like 10/8/4. gobbledygeek's unorthodox strategy is probably more like 12/6/5 in terms of spread, but I'd guess the numbers are even larger in practice.

IDEK WTF the point of this argument is. If ideal play nets you 40bb/100, then you could be so nitty that it costs you 40bb/100 of EV and still breakeven pre-promo bucks; you can also spew 40bb/100 and still breakeven pre-promo bucks.

It seems like people are trying to optimize least amount of brain-power used to technically still be able to tell strangers at a party that you're a winning poker. My posts tend to define optimal as most EV you can reasonably capture from a game with a ~1-minute shot clock per decision and no real-time assistance.

From that perspective, taking advice from a mediocre LAG who goes through cycles of busto followed periods of being a fish on a heater who posts dunning-kreuger nonsense about ISOing fish with napkins to take it down with a cbet is no better or worse than taking advice from a 10/5/2.5 with a 45% WWSF and 55% W$SD and -10bb/100 WWoSD.

3b with AK? It’s a drawing hand. Kings? They’re magnets. I have played with plenty of OMCs who barely raise pre and are winning players cause they still get double ups from bad regs when they flop sets.

take it personally and make it my mission to ruin their lives

realistically get better at poker. i think a big misconception not great players have is that tight is right and good players are very cautious and that couldn't be further from the truth. the thing is too is especially when ranges are wider (earlier streets) the ev of all options is very close for most reasonable hands so you can probably find a good balance of playing looser / more aggressively there without giving up much, even if you're not at a point either competency of financially to be putting in a bunch of stacks marginally

if you're looking for high bang for your buck spots, i think you can 3b just about anything profitably otb (dont get carried away postflop), and i think you can squeeze just about anything from the blinds as long as you make it big and don't target someone who's clearly not going to fold. also u can call the bb closing the action in most spots with offsuit lower connectors and bunch of kxss qsxx and the bottom right hand of the hand ranking chart (think 52ss 64ss 85ss stuff).

also just like find some spots to put some money into the pot. there's going to be a ton of spots the low stakes pool as a whole is going to massively underdefend. take a couple of them and people will be shaking in fear of you

The quoted is saying gobbledygeek doesn't play 10/5/1. I think 10/5/1 is a perfectly fine definition for an OMC.

On what basis are you asserting that the OMCs you're playing are winning players? Beating the rake and blinds with such narrow win conditions is just a very steep math problem.

Again, not that I think it's an important argument. Just repeating myself at this point, but I'm no more interested in who's torching 40bb/100 of potential EV by being too passive than I am in people who are torching 40bb/100 to spew.

I 100% agree on the being "very cautious" front.

To the cautious point, when you're playing 200 hand sessions of 200bb poker, whether or not you're up or down inevitably comes down to a margin slim enough that winning/losing your biggest pot of the night was the difference. So then that gives your intuition the impression that winning at poker is all about getting stacks in good and never getting stacks in bad.

Obviously it's true at the macro level that you should win more stacks than you lose, lol, but that's different from the last sentence. The intuitive impression is that you should really loathe to shove a nut flush draw because, in the cases where you play for stacks, you're a 2:1 dog. Same thing with making crying calls for the rest of your stack.

So then every 2/5NL- HH on here is some variant of "Could I have gotten away from bottom set postflop / could I have gotten away from QQ preflop / how do I play this hyper-nutted draw without risking my stack?"

I don't entirely agree that "tight is right" is a misconception. Tight is ... fine.

You'd have to be pretty LAG to play 20%+, and any LLSNL player who's doing that is probably doing it poorly. So then you're left splitting hairs over where your VPIP is from like 12-17% or smth lol. Even postflop looseness can be limited by the prevalence of multiway pots that are functionally protected pots given the sizings beginners are limited to capably deploying.

The prevalence of fairly neutral EV opportunities cuts both ways. You are going to capture the overwhelming majority of EV playing the top 2/3s or maybe even 1/2 of your range, so long as the way you're playing your range as a whole isn't effecting (which TBF is the subject of this very thread.)

My brain is hitting a bit of an error message having this argument with some of the same people in tandem with the "should you always set mine" thread because the brunt of neutral EV hands are PPs, SCs, and other darlings for the implied odds Stans. I just don't think people know what 10% VPIP in a passive game actually looks like, lol.

Nobody's biggest leak is VPIPing too infrequently in a scenario where they haven't yet put money in the pot and they have no realistic chance of scooping the blinds. Apart from passivity and under-polarizing, people's biggest problem is probably being too inelastic across scenarios. (This is arguably the biggest leak for every poker player across all player types?) There are common scenarios where you should VPIP 5% or less and ones where you VPIP 30%+, and people are probably getting to 12-15% by VPIPing a very stable 8-20%, rarely open folding their favorite hands and basically never playing anything worse than ATo.

It costs 5bb/hr to fold every hand. So youÂ’re pre-rake win rate starting point is -5bb/hr.

Nits are winning small pots that are obliterated by rake, or losing small pots when they miss the flip, way more often than they are getting the nuts and getting paid for it.

There arenÂ’t as many fish or legitimate whales relative to how many nits there are, there are way more.

Conceptually I get the impression, they rarely have huge losses, everybody claims to be a small winner or break even player. But the math just doesnÂ’t support it. In a decent 1/3 , the rake is pulling 70bb/hr off the table, nits are not profiting in games like that.

tight doesn't just mean preflop!

almost certainly the way to play these games based on what people post here is to play tag with v high 3b (because of rake and pool's inability to 4b light) and fight very hard for every single small / medium pot post. we exist on a very odd forum where everyones posts skew into extreme weak tight or button clicker territory yet everyone is a massive winner in their games in the year 2025 of our lord.

Yeah, but if you're involved in a bunch of multiway pots against people whose biggest leak is being too passive and everyone (including yourself) only knows how to B75, then your postflop frequencies are probably gonna be pretty tight too.

is hard to figure out what a reasonable wswf would look like given multiway, but something like 1.5 or 1.55 wswf rating seems doable if you avoid over the over limp trap

Agreed*, but I'm talking in absolute terms. If you're open folding more than 4/5s of your hands and only continuing to multiple bets postflop with TPGK+, then you are functionally tight as far as any externally observing fish is concerned.

Which I think is more pertinent to what we're talking about?

I don't know, I self-banned from these types of threads years ago, I don't know why I ever let myself start clicking on them again.

*I think. 1.5 sounds high, but I don't use WWSF rating myself so I'll defer to you.

1.5 is extremely high (in online environments). i started using it because i was playing predominantly plo at that point in time and most flops were multiway

tbh i feel that way about every thread on here but yet i am a dopamine / external validation addict

I don't know if everyone else's fish raise less, but at least in my room it's not terribly unusual for me to VPIP maybe 10% (honestly I don't track it) even 8-max because at least here there are plenty of fish who know what open raising is. They're raising (and especially overcalling too wide), but that doesn't really help me play the part of LP range that's supposed to opened because it plays well against the blinds.

Pulling up a range chart by percent I'm guessing it's slightly more than that (both my EP open range and typical 3b-versus-fish range seem to be around 10%, and I do sometimes get to RFI from LP). But it doesn't take too much downward variance in being card-dead for someone to make a remark about me folding so much... and then call off my 3b with complete trash. At least IME, the people who remark on your low VPIP are action players who are not going to start folding to you.

3bs are what are really going to nuke your VPIP--both because you can't flat as much in front of aggressive 3bettors and (most especially) facing a 3b cold makes your VPIP practically nil.

Without actually bothering to put numbers into my Opportunities & Cases spreadsheet, I imagine facing a lot of single-raises is going to be fairly neutral for your VPIP. In order for people to do it enough to significantly impact your RFI (or limp ISO) opps, they need to raise so much that you can 3b them 10%+ (which it sounds like you're doing, so good on you for that). And if people in front are flatting or folding and people behind aren't 3bing aggressively, then you'll be able to employ a lot of mixed flatting strats that the sims wouldn't dream of, which will also increase your VPIP.

Of course, PFRs are a precondition for 3bs, so more PFRs are necessarily going to lead to more opponents 3bing, even with relatively tame 3b ranges.

Realistically speaking, I imagine every percentage point of extra passivity your opponents have on any branch is going to increase the number of flops you see. It won't be a linear relationship, but I think you'd have to strain so hard to come up with a scenario where players doing more limping/calling than a table full of bots leads to lower VPIPs that you're starting to get into thought experiment/toy game territory. Hell, even people's prevalence of calling 3bs rather than 4bing or even folding is going to make you the star of a 2-3 person show in a medium+ sized pot more often.

And again, I believe most cash tables are 8-max these days, so with an average of 1 person dealt out, even theoretical VPIPs are going to be in the high teens. Honestly at this point I'm talking myself into the fact that you should probably have 20%+ VPIP as a standard.

Sorry sub, I didn't mean the things I said when I was binging LLSNL. I didn't mean to call you that.

unless you are playing 10/20 vs euros or 100/200 vs the macaus i believe you are making an astronomical error in approach given your posting quality as a whole

if you are good at poker and everyone in your games is underaggresing, i find it difficult to accept you cannot make vpiping ~30-40% quality hands otb in some capacity work if folded to you vs a fish open (at the very least breakeven). i would at bare minimum (again assuming you are not playing upper mid stakes / high stakes bc lets be real we are posting here!) start looking at ante ranges and implementing those and assume that skill differential and opp's lack of skill in general will lead to you narrowing a fairly small ev loss pre. also it gives you a great excuse to get good. obv caveat if its 50-100bb fest or whatever or the mega opens that get posted here sometimes

i am aware this goes against a good amount of the advice i post on here re pre

So I am actually a little curious on the theory side - for simplicity let's say everyone else at the table is opening 20% from all positions, 3-betting JJ+/AK/AQs, and overcalling the rest of the 20% range (and calling 3-bets too wide and 4-betting tight too). What's the right strategy for Hero in LP? I've generally been 3-betting slightly under 10% of hands and flatting vs overcalls in front with smaller pps and suited aces. It feels hands like A7o, JTo, 86s, Q8s are still folds here but I could definitely be convinced that 3b even more or playing multiway more IP is profitable.

Obviously actually villains vary a lot more than that, so it's table dependent and I am adjusting my strategy based on the session, etc. My home room has a very weird dynamic due to local law; there is a $100 bet/raise limit and so they only spread 1/2 (as 2-100 spread limit, technically, and it does substantially alter deepstack antics) and the game gets a super wide range of player abilities since the only meaningfully higher stakes games available are 2/5 (still 100 limit) Omaha that runs occasionally and the higher-stakes fixed limit games.