A clueless noob reaches 1000 hours of live 1/3 NL

How often does the raise pf and cbet to win happen if you're in position earlier than HJ?

Good point tho that by not playing too many SRPs, the really small pots (< $20) and the biggest pots are most common and that's where rake is minimized as a % of pot. $10 pre with one caller and $2+2 rake/bbjp is the nut low situation rakewise

I believe the money comes from the players that play too many hands and end up having to fold their garbage. Since that is almost everyone, that is why the GG method is so effective. People play more hands than they admit.

I think that's true....& also puts them into a position where they call down too often with marginal hands

IMO, folding is the key. Yes we can play our value hands really well for max value. But being a good folder is by far the best way to protect your winnings.

I think that's true....& also puts them into a position where they call down too often with marginal hands

IMO, folding is the key. Yes we can play our value hands really well for max value. But being a good folder is by far the best way to protect your winnings.

obviously that comes from impulse control, not tilting, having a great mindset etc etc and IME that's also where a lot of peple get into trouble. Their A game seems really good & they have advanced play 'in them'. But too often they play a c game & below.

I think if I have one strength it's that I'm capable of playing a B game for a long time. I'm not sure I even have an A game.

One of the overlooked benefits of the LRR method is that any pot taken down without seeing a flop isn't raked.

So, if I raise to $15, get 4 callers, and take it down with a flop cbet (not a bad result?), my take of the $60 is actually only $60 - $7 (rake) - $1 (BBJ) - $1 (highhand) - $1 (tip) = $50, so I was taxed 16.5%. But if take down that $60 preflop with a LRR, I'm only paying a tax of $1 (tip) = 1.5%. I mean, pros and cons (could I have made more in general postflop OOP against the world?), but at the very least this benefit does help offset any "horribleness" associated with the method.

GcluelesshorribleplaynoobG

To be honest, most would also accuse me of doing this too. I play what I like to call "Mullet Poker" (all business up front but party in the back). So while I'm insta folding QTs in EP, I have no problem overlimping 75o on the Button if given the opportunity.

Git'spossiblethisisaleak,butifitis,it'saverysmallone,imoG

+1

I have another phrase that describes my method, which is simply "Folding my way to victory".

+1

Another huge strength at these levels is to simply have an ~ok enough method (mine is a B at best), but the key is to always be able to play it (and I'm fairly good at this too, although obviously on hand reviews in my head after a session on the drive home I always find a couple to beat myself up about).

GcluelessconsistentmediocritynoobG

Fun Fact: The Riceman himself has made 5 posts in this thread. By that association alone, I feel like I'm almost semi-famous. 😀

FWIW, unlike the tire-fire thread crew, I don't have any hate towards Rice, even though he was fairly critical of me in his posts (which is kinda ironic since I'm assuming our styles are fairly similar).

GcluelesswhackpacknoobG

where i am now, i exclusively play 1/3 instead of 2/5 or higher for the simple reason that you can't bet more than $300 so at 2/5 and up it creates some weird dynamics that kind of make it so the big pots all play out very weirdly

but... the 2/5 games and others do play bigger, people buyin for more, people raise for more, i would be making more money there in theory

but the handful of times i sat down at those tables, i found a similar situation of there not being nearly as many obvious donators and even the bad players were significantly better than the average players at a 1/3 game (but the average player at 1/3 is horrific)

if i was depending on this for income, i would certainly still play the higher games, really drill down and study and find some novel concepts to exploit a game where you can't bet more than $300 on any street

but for now, it's just so much easier to play 1/3 and never really ever find myself in uncomfortable situations where i can just easily play against players for whom it's very easy to accurately hand read based simply on the size of their wager and whether they checked or bet

as for "where does the money come from" you absolutely see people who are otherwise beating the game periodically sit down at -ev tables and proceed to give back their profits

early in my time in macau it was mostly recs, normal game, easy to find soft spots at almost any table. then black friday hit and the place filled up with pros from everywhere who had nowhere else to go. you'd sit down, take a few orbits, and slowly realize there's no fish. everyone at the table is a pro

and nobody gets up. it turns into a dick measuring contest. everyone thinks they're the best player at the table and everyone's waiting for someone else to blink first. quite a few of those guys came to macau, got into those battles, and literally jumped off a bridge

same thing played out in dfs. it was not uncommon to get the same 10 guys, who all called themselves pros on twitter and rotogrinders and pointed to their cashes as a sign of skill, all joining the same daily 10 person $530 50/50 group - you would think that over time at least 2-3 would start bowing out, realizing the field is too strong, but while that occasionally happened, by and large it was the same 10 people day in day out and unlike live situations, it's harder to delude yourself into believing you're a winner online because you gotta keep on funding the account

the true sign of a pro was to never be the 10th man to join one of those groups, to ensure there was overlay and not get into the dick measuring contest, i always hated the guys who joined last second before lock, was always upsetting

now for some i think it's possible they were winning in other formats so only looked at net positives and didn't notice they were dumping piles in cash, or they had streaks of good variance convince themselves they were long term winners and just had to buckle up for this bad run, or were just allan kesslers, they loved the live, would be doing some other degen stuff instead and were happy to slowly bleed out a 44% win rate in 50/50s, losing $630 a week at that rate

just remember, for every allan kessler we know of, a guy who loses every year and lives off the generosity of his wealthy business owning sister, there's several more who fly better under the radar and others think are genuine winning poker pros

also super common for people in sportsbetting to have deep insights, real knowledge, enough chops to talk about it convincingly, convince others well enough to literally move markets when they release a play, and eventually be busted for not actually betting anything they promote

one guy on twitter who just got a novig partnership was busted for accidentally forgetting to crop out the bet size of his wager all the way (new platform) and he showed that he made a $1 wager on it

those are the guys people look at and say "oh this guy knows his stuff i should pay attention" but even he is not beating the market despite that when he releases his college picks he'll move the market by a full point because enough money will follow

GG thank you. I really appreciate what you bring to the community which is an alternative approach; given that Low Stakes is highly exploitable, there is certainly more than one way to win at low stakes. While I think you trade some EV for less variance, you employ a legit strategy, and I don't have any doubt that your results are genuine. For those who doubt it, there's a reason those OMCs on Social Security you see play every day - at worst they don't lose much, and I expect many are net positive.

Moreover, we don't talk enough here about employing strategies that folks are comfortable with. I am generally pretty tight, though more TAGish than you. Every time I get more agressive, I just don't feel as comfortable. It's not a money thing, I am pretty comfortable financially, but I just feel more at home playing tighter, and not running many bluffs or opening or 3-betting wide.

GG - One thing I am curious about is how often you run bluffs and the type you run. My guess is you don't run many, and most of the time it's c-bets with air or semi-bluffs where you have good equity *and* you know the player has a fold button, but I'd love to hear about what/when you bluff.

I think this might be the most overlooked piece of the puzzle when it comes to winning at poker (or even doing ~ok at most things): the importance of putting *ourselves* (not the solver, not the YouTube crusher, not the crushing poster on the forum, not the hand chart, etc.) in a position that *we* feel comfortable/confident in (because it is *us* that will have to play out the whole hand over all the streets). So everyone will have to sorta figure what works and produces ~ok results for them... and it won't be the same for everyone.

Honestly, in my overall loose gambooley game which often features a lot of relatively smallish effective stacks, coupled with my tight and LRR style (which produces committed spots versus very multiway spots, both not awesum bluffing spots), I don't find a heckuva lotta bluffing opportunities. Not to say they don't arise from time to time (once or twice a session, maybe?), and I do my best to try and keep myself aware of when a spot is presenting itself, but I don't force them and I make sure they tell a credible story.

GcluelessbluffingnoobG

Alright teach me how to gg...
I was playing 1/3 at a table where raises were common +3 and +4 seats from me. It was a card-dead day and I was stuck slightly, sitting with a stack of $150ish (50bb). This seemed like the right conditions so I limped KK utg and then Utg+1, a taggish player raises to $12. The +3 calls and BB (also a laggier player) calls. Back to me and...?

Well don't fold, or call.

Stack sizes for the others might matter.

Pot is ~$36 and you have ~$150 ... Any raise announces you have a good hand and is almost the same as all in, but maybe $72 wins a bit more than shove? I think even $62 or $67 is worse. I probably just shove and hope.

Also curious what the goat recommends.

First,I would attempt to sit directly to the right of the +3/+4 raisers (which will often get us more dead money in the pot for those LRRs).

I think so long as we don't fold / flat / minraise, it's kinda hard to **** this up at this point. One of the reasons I don't respond to 1/2 NL posts in the forum (other than quarantining my AIDSy posts to 1/3 NL threads) is that I don't really have a handle on raise sizes / stack sizes at 1/2 NL. But, just eyeballing things, I think you could argue for like almost anything north of $50. The small end of things at $50 leaves us with a ~PSB shove for the flop HU, anything more an even easier shove. And if I'm often going to be jamming stuff like AK/AQ/KQs and semi-worried about balance then jamming our monsters sometimes is also fine.

GcluelessLRRnoobG

Alright sounds good. I shoved the KK, pfr gave me the side eye and eventually folded, the others folded pretty quickly. I thought "well, $36 without a rake or a flop is not a bad outcome" but felt a little regret that I didn't get a chance to double and salvage a bad sesh.

Earlier I had QQ and pulled a LRR in the SB on a straddle, only the +3 guy called after limping. Got half the stack in preflop and bet the rest on Axx flop, he folded.

Yeah, that happens sometimes. Not the greatest result when we have KK, but a fairly awesome result when we have KQs, so we just have to take the meh with the good.

GgoodluckG

winning 36 might not seem like a great outcome, but if you compare it to the alternatives, it's not bad.

If you had raised, what do you expect would happen?

Is your image super tight and everyone folds because you almost never open raise? Then you got less than $36.

Is your image so tight that a $9 - $15 raise will never get a reraise from anything less than KK? At the average 1/3 table you're still going to get 3 or 4 callers and the odds of winning with KK go down fast. Your wins will be bigger but your losses will be more frequent.

If your image is LP and your open is likely to get reraised, you made an error by not making it $9 and expecting to jam.

On a table where I'm perceived as an OMC, I think the limp/jam strategy is best even tough I'll take a lot of hate for that here. If an OMC raises big, he gets no callers so that's not a good option. If the OMC raises small, the whole table wants to play for the opportunity to pick him off. That's why you see so many OMCs get pissed off from going broke with AA.

Sometimes I'm the most active player and my raise sizes will be all over the place, so I can get away with a $21 raise that will still get one or two calls and I've still got room to play poker. My raises will also have been 3B a few times because people got fed up with me. That's a good thing.

Somewhat LAG is how I want to play most of the time but sometimes card dead is really card dead. What's most important is that you understand how you are perceived and use that to your advantage by being something else.

Not to step on GG's golden toes, but a helpful rule of thumb can be 15% of your stack plus whatever is in the pot (size up a bit if you are OOP). If's it's more than half your stack just jam.

If get callers, then usually jam flop if you're close to SPR 1, if not close enough then use geometric size on flop to get stacks in on turn.

I started about 630 on this thread and I guess I’m gonna have to shock some that know me and limp a little up front. It’s not like I’ve mastered OOP play, so why not. But I’m not playing shorthanded, I can’t hear that noise GG.

Did I miss some good stuff at the beginning, kinda just found these long posts?

IMO The main thing with GG's strat. is that he doesn't split his range. So if you plan to limp or fold the first two spots 9 handed ... I think there's a decent amount to copy/learn, but if you want to limp some hands and raise others then you need to be a lot more careful and don't blame GG if it doesn't work.

Another significant advantage is that (AIUI) GG doesn't play deep, so take that into account if you are 300bb+ and limp/3bet UTG.

There's a bunch of his strat. near the beginning (along with his advice in other threads) ... but I think after that it's a lot of people being confused, saying they know of better players when they are talking about that one guy who played 1000 hours for $35/hr and then moved up to 2-5.

So, welcome, and look at the pretty graphs with despair while (mentally) bowing to the 1-2/1-3 goat.

I'm assuming you mean shortstacked?

Yeah, if you can master deeper stacked (both in terms of skill as well as being able to handle the mental roller coaster of variance) then I think your winrate could potentially skyrocket.

GcomfortablyputteringalongintheslowlaneG

Yeah, so if you run good, double up - do you quit and come back short or play deeper for awhile?

If I run good and become a deeper stack, I start doing the following:

- I never sit OOP deep to a difficult aggro player (something I actually prefer doing when shortstacked as it plays nicely into my LRR strat), so I seat change appropriately (typically attempting to get across the table from them)

- if there are a bunch of difficult aggro deepstacks on the table (again, something I actually prefer when shortstacked), I look to table change, mostly to a table with shorter effective stacks / non-difficult deepstacks

- my current average session lengths nowadays is about ~5 hours, so if all-of-a-sudden I find myself deepstacked at hour 4 and none of the tables look that good for me, I might just leave slightly earlier than planned

- otherwise if it is early in my session and I still want to play (as I only get ~2 poker outings a week) I just do the best I can until hopefully conditions improve

To be honest, the sad fact is a large percentage of a lot of sessions are simply spent nursing the shortstack (which I constantly top up after each hand) or a stack that is just slightly larger (but still reasonably short). So it really isn't something that constantly comes into play, but when it does I address it as best I can.

GcluelessshortstackingnoobG

You know when to quit!
Say no more
The secret to all success
-
I enjoy your perspectives
In the beginning I had to learn that players didn’t think like me and played worse than I thought. But I totally absorb the thoughts of good players like you and others on this forum that have different views.

The process is constant: fine tuning, tweaking something here & there, being open to trying new things, and always with a focus on the fundamentals.

When I taught ‘tackling’ it was broken down into carefully thought out technique. No one knew more about tackling than I did. I gathered all the info possible to find. We started in shorts, and learned it step by step, practicing it until it became automatic.
Form tackling kept us healthy & won us games

I want to know poker that well
The fundamentals and when to deviate