Promised 1k Hours Post

So this is the promised 1k hour post. I don't know that what I have learned over this is anything earth shattering or different then what can be learned in other forums or live player blogs but here it is anyway. Before that a little background is in order though.

Before black Friday I was primarily an online player. I wasn't a huge baller or anything but I earned enough at the tables and through rakeback to make it worth my time. I had some good months, had some not so good months and even a few stinkers in there. I also was learning a hell of a lot of fundamental poker that would serve me really well when I ramped up the live play post BF. 

When I started post-BF I was sort of wandering around trying to figure out what and where to play. MD casinos were, of course, not an option. I played some 1/2 home games, some casino games at DE Park and in AC. I played mixed games, NLHE, PLO, jumped around in stakes, etc. I was pretty all over the place. At some point in mid-2012, I finally just committed to playing 2/5 NLHE and played a bunch at DE Park and Charles Town. I would occasionally play PLO or Limit O8 still but I was mostly playing 2/5 with the hope of moving up to 5/10. Finally in spring of 2013 I started shot taking 5/10. The results have been mixed but they only represent 90 hours or so of this sample size. Anyway here are my results in text and graph form:

 



As you can see, the beginning of this time frame I was sort of a marginal winner not really sure what I was doing. Eventually I found my footing and have run pretty well over all since. For frame of reference this is approximately the time spent at each stake/game represented in this chart:

2/5 NLHE 500 hours
1/2 Mixed (mostly PLO8, Big O and PLO) 150 hours
1/2 NLHE 100 hours
2/2 and 5/5 PLO 100 hours
5/10 NLHE 90 hours
Misc mixed limit games (Horse, Stud 8, O8) 70 hours
5/10/25 PLO/PLO8 10 hours

So What Have I learned?

Most Live Players aren't Very Good If you are reading, this fact is probably obvious. Most live players (particularly at 2/5 and below) are playing for fun or a night away from the wife or whatever. Most have very poor fundamentals and are really just playing their own hands. Some still think poker=pit game and don't really distinguish between gambling by playing poker and gambling at the craps table. Understanding this obvious statement should help you improve the next fact.

Player Types

So the core of playing poker is reading your opponent and trying to stay one step ahead of him. Opponents generally play too loose and too passively. They call too much and don't raise enough. This is particularly true at lower stakes. Players simply play their hands in most cases so they are easy to play against. Where I see internetty players struggle is that they are constantly trying to force the action, 3 betting wide ranges, stacking off light, etc. What they are failing to account for is the simplicity of their opponents thoughts. I struggled with this too. Hey I would play XX this way so I guess he would too. It just doesn't happen. Most players ch/call their draws not c/r flop with them. Most players love to "trap" since they saw Phil Hellmuth do it. Often times the lines opponents take make little sense when trying to analyze them through the prism of a more fundamentally "correct" approach to the game. Once you accept this fact, the next part of the game becomes easier.

Ranging Opponents

So we have established that live players are generally not too good. We have also established that generally below 5/10 they tend to be on the passive side. We have to account for these facts when we start ranging our opponents. Obviously the more we can narrow an opponents range the better decisions we can make and the more we profit. But in order to do this we have to be honest about our ranging. The tendency I initially had (and frankly a lot of regs have) is to find the hands they can beat and put that in an opponents range. This gives them justification to make a thin calll or whatever and then when they are shown a winning hand we hear things like "Well if he bets AQ there it's a pretty easy call against his range". More often then not the likelihood that those hands are in their range is extremely small. Until an opponent shows me he is capable of betting thinly or playing wide ranges in certain spots I simply assume they are not capable of it and can assume I am up against a much narrower range.

Bet/Folding

I mean this is the core of beating live low stakes no limit. It just is. When you have a TPGK type hand or better your general instinct should be to bet until you are "told" not too. If we accept the premise that LLSNL players are passive as a whole then the logical response is to keep betting while they are calling and fold when they start shoveling money in the pot. To be sure this can be hard especially when the pot is offering us a great price or on the river when the we have a large portion of our stack in the pot. But in the end it doesn't matter. We simply aren't going to be exploited enough by the average players to necessitate a change in approach. Bet/folding is the most useful theory I have learned to date in beating and prospering against most 2/5 and below lineups.

Regs are generally pretty bad

So I have logged ~250 hours since MD Live opened 3 months or so ago. Given the size of the room there are quite a few regs and semi-regs that are there a lot. Funny thing is that other than 8-10 I have played with they really aren't all that good either. Many are entirely too nitty, bet or call in spots here they can't possibly expect to be good, have tilting characteristics and generally are probably break even to marginally winning players at best. They are easy to identify and shouldn't provide too much trouble if you are paying attention at all. Which leads to the next.

PAY ATTENTION 

Above all else pay attention! Most players are complete tell boxes throughout the hands. They give away a ton of info not only in their mannerisms but also in betting and bet sizing patterns and their willingness or unwillingness to bet/raise in certain spots. dgiharris did a great write up in the 2+2 LLSNL chat thread a month or so ago that says it all better than I could so here it is:

Quote:

Originally Posted by dgiharris  Table selection is easily responsible for 25% of my winrate... So suffice to say, table selection is VERY IMPORTANT. The ability to switch tables, get a quick yet accurate read, and act upon those reads is a crucial skill pros and winning players need to have. You should be able to get a decent read on a table after a couple of orbits. You are looking for whether or not players: #1 Value bet (or don't value bet) strong hands #2 Value bet weak hands #3 Bluff missed draws #4 Don't bluff missed draws #5 Semi-bluff draws #6 C-bet #7 Float #8 Double barrel #9 Triple Barrel #10 Preflop raises vs positions #11 Sizing tells #12 Donk Speak like "I know you have nothing" followed by a fold or "I know you have me beat" followed by a call #13 Calling off 60% of their stack preflop and flop merely to fold bricked turns #14 Incorrectly set mine or draw when don't have the proper odds All of the above will give us 90% accuracy and confidence in getting a good pulse on our villains competency and table dynamics... And all of the above we can discern within two orbits if we are paying attention to every hand. Again, this skill is CRUCIAL for winning players to have. The otherside of this equation is the ability to recognize when your table has gone from super juicy to bone dry. It can happen in the blink of an eye. The super donk busts out followed by the whale racking up and leaving the table and all of a sudden, your table has gone from an action table to a rock garden. The sooner you recognize this fact and leave this table in favor of a better one, the better your winrate will be. And this goes double for when you spot the loud action table across the room where everyone is drinking, laughing, and lots of chips are flying around.... There have been times where I have tipped the floor $10 or even $20 to get me on THAT table. I can't overstress the importance of this skill. Could literally mean the difference between you grinding 8hrs for a buy-in vs you stacking donks for 5 BIs within 3 hours...

Just read this again and again and it says 90% of all you will ever need to know about paying attention to opponents, understanding them, etc. I am slowly coming to the realization of the importance of table selection though I don't know that at MD Live it is as important as he believes. Still you can't go wrong with any of this advice as it is pure gold. 

Other things I have learned include: importance of shot taking, importance of keeping good records and importance of maintaining a separate poker bankroll. I do all three and feel that without doing so I would stagnate as a player. Obviously it goes without saying that staying connected to the poker world through forums (2+2 being the most important), etc. and constantly thinking about/discussing hands is critical to growing as a player. There are always people out there that can look at a hand or a spot in a different way that maybe you hadn't considered. Doing that with an open mind can only improve your game. 

I'll follow separately with hat I still think I need to work on to get better and move up in stakes.