$25----->25k Bankroll Challenge on Ignition

I don't think going that big is inherently better, you don't want to isolate yourself against better hands and 4bets. Nitty regs will even fold pocket pairs to huge squeeze sizes and him calling suited overcards vs a larger squeeze size isn't a big win. The EV of all pocket pairs comes from flopping a set in these games (save the super premiums).

Anytime we play face up against this player type we will lose some EV imo.

For example, in another hand I had AK in the BB and made it $25 vs a bunch of limpers, the first limper called, everyone else folded and the guy in the SB folded 44 (we talked about the hand after). I think most of the players get very skittish vs preflop aggression.

It was actually $75 into about $130ish but bet sizing works differently live from my observations. Even though though this isn't even a 60% pot stab it is actually much stronger than it would be online. It's because players don't understand bet sizing theory that well so as the pot gets bigger, they size down their bets unless they have a very strong hand. Anything over 50% pot OTF in this spot is going to be stronger than it should be.

I saw multiple cases of this, for example one guy had QQ and 3bet preflop. The flop came 874tt and the guy just overbets flop in a spot you should be checking a lot/never overbetting.

Another spot some guy tried to bluff me and the nuts changed OTT and OTR and he bet big on both streets which you would never do with a real hand (classic bluff sizing tell here).

MDA works a bit as well but it's mostly on turnover cards and also the R-B-B line seems to be overbluffed. I had flopped a set after raising preflop and intentionally went around 15% pot vs a more aggro reg and he raised me (you always just call vs the reg). The turn completed a flush and then he went very big OTT (again makes no sense for most of his range). I called. I hit a boat OTR and check and he overbet again (nuts changed again so going huge makes no sense).

I think bet sizing is probably the number one indicator for bluff/value lines and the biggest leak most live players have. More specifically, how their bet sizing interacts with board runouts.

I was assuming CO/BTN were likely very wide/fish. Definitely harder to profile at $1/3 given the speed, and the "regs" are so bad they can be close to indistinguishable from fish unless you see a limp/ridiculous hand at showdown

Do a lot of live players basically just use 50-75% pot though? And some of them probably don't know what the pot size is exactly.

Like online I find it more fun to play against decent regs who I know have block bets and overbets because I'll get in spots with a bluffcatcher where I'll fold to the block, raise vs medium, and call vs OB or some variation of that

Yeah I'm basically just using reg/fish labels as relative to the pool. The regs are more aware of their hand postflop (although still unaware relative to online players).

I think most of the players don't think in terms of % of the pot, they think in terms of dollars. So if the pot is $130, they just think they have a $75 hand so they use that sizing. They don't think okay my range should be stabbing small here. I'm pretty sure even most of the regs don't think in terms of range vs range or if they do it is misapplied.

Playing vs good players is more fun for me as well but it's not very profitable. It's more satisfying to beat good players but it's also interesting to try to figure out how not as good players think about the game. Another thing I've noticed is there's a lot of image/ego in live poker, a certain % of the population will just show up and buy in for the max and put their sunglasses on while " waiting for 2/5." It's almost like they care about people thinking they are good more than actually making money from the game.

why are we checking 874 boards with QQ after 3 betting when T8 is in their range and they think they flopped the nuts

You're an authority on poker so you tell us.

Can't wait to learn

please show your work where i claim to be an authority on poker

i very clearly say I'm sure you're better than me since i retired from it over a decade ago

what i am an authority in is making an actual living from gambling, but this is not about your life choice of poverty, it's about poker, hence why it is was a question and not a statement

but since you're confused by the question, i'll elaborate

in all of your 1/2 hhs i think you're never giving opponent reads, you're treating them like a population - which is strongly indicative of your mindset here where you're creating hard and fast rules whereas live play is all about player profiling and adjusting to the that profile as you gain more information on how they play

in short, i think you're giving your opponents way too much credit but it's hard to say since you never give any details on the villain

this isn't "based on the opponent it was always a check" it was instead "you should be checking"
you should be deviating play/strategy so much at $1/$2 live that it's absurd to even consider having a "you should be doing" thought as you can play 3 hands in a row and one is against someone who 3bet blind preflop and told you he's only going to look at his cards if you bet more than half pot, the next hand against an old man you haven't seen play a hand in the last 2 hours, and the third hand facing a guy covered in prison tats who has never open folded in a non raised pot preflop

i think you're so scared of getting stacked that you're missing spots for value on a lot of hands and dragging far fewer chips each pot than you could be dragging - this is also why you buyin short stacked, because you're more focused on roi and loss prevention than actually extracting max value

i just think you are underestimating just how wide a range over half the table are calling pre-flop and just how wide they'll call on the flop

if tt was supposed to imply it wasn't a rainbow flop (did you mean to type dd?) then it's even worse to check the overpair vs certain players

if it was against a good player then sure, you can have a rule about "you should be checking here a lot" but good players are a rare entity at $1/$2 in new england

i've played around the world, online and offline, including the infamously crazy and loose macau games, nowhere in my life have i ever witnessed any player pool anywhere close to how wildly reckless and stupid as the american $1/$2 live scene

ya but what if you check raise the QQ wouldn't that be fun

Yes they are wide preflop but putting hands like T8s isn't that realistic, they usually limp hands like that not RFI.

Also just because they are wide preflop doesn't mean they are calling down 3 barrels light. I don't have a super strong opinion on the QQ hand but it seems clear that you gain more information by checking to them than betting considering how face up they play.

tt = two-tone.

What "reads" are you talking about? I would love to see some examples of your reads because from my experience this whole obsession with reads is just a crutch for not knowing how to play the game.

As for being scared of getting stacked, I only buy in short if the fish are short. If the fish are deep I will buy in deep.

there we go, now we're being productive 😀

thanks for the tt explanation - had no idea if you meant to write board but instead wrote flop or what was going on with that

as far as reads go, they are pretty easy to get, if you don't have a very good inkling how people play after an orbit or two then perhaps llsnl is not for you - and majority of your hands will be played after you've seen several orbits so it's just kind of silly to discuss a llsnl hand without disclosing both your perceived table image and your perceived image of the villain

those hh's where they say "first orbit so readless but villain is MAWG wearing coors light tshirt" isn't for flavoring up the hh with their prose, it's because simply knowing age/sex/race of the villain and how they dress can easily help you profile someone

ie you clearly understand that and have a knack for doing population profiling with you "we can assume he's a fish because he cold called" story arc back in season 1, so now that we're in season 2 and mixing in live games, it feels like a huge leak that you're now ignoring that stuff

key to llsnl play is simple, they don't like folding, and their ability to fold increases with when there's fewer cards yet to be seen - there are people at your table who look down at K7s and say to themselves "finally a good hand, let's raise to play a big pot" and their memories of poker are not of the many times they just donated 15 bbs doing that and then missing and folding but rather the times they do that and they win a big stack

yes, there are players out there who won't raise T8, but plenty will and you'll be very hard pressed to find anyone willing to fold to a normal sized 3! if they were the person to open

i never said anything about 3 streets either

but even if we can isolate them to a typical decent player rfi + call range - the flop is the street to attack imo

let's say they have AK-AT, they would be willing to float the flop but won't call anything on later streets unless they improve - why are you both giving them free equity to improve and missing out on value when they call and don't improve?

give him a tight range and we still crush that flop

we are extremely unlikely to improve our hand ever, the villain is, the villain is also far more likely to call down light on the flop whereas they only call hands that beat ours on later streets

i could easily be wrong, hence why it was a question and not a statement, but the flop definitely feels like the point to attack and to check it feels wasteful - it feels like we're deciding to give up control over the situation, give them more outs to beat us, and then turn our hand into a bluff catcher for no reason

but nearly all the players at 1/2 are fish pretty much

Yeah so I basically disagree with this whole post.

The whole "charge draws" narrative on two-tone boards doesn't work, a flush draw will always be positive EV for the caller. That isn't why we bet. Solvers show us this, there is never a 0EV continue from that hand class (when the opponent has flopped a flush draw.)

I'm never taking cues from the llsnl forum, have you actually been to that forum? The general advice in that forum is not very good if I'm being polite about it.

Also the whole "llsnl is simple" is just a ridiculous statement. Poker is a game of near infinite complexity, there is no "simple." If you think it is simple then you are missing out on a lot of the deeper strategic elements of the game.

I buy in short because my edge is bigger in theory, it magnifies in practice because a lot of players don't really understand how to play vs 30-50bb stack sizes.

i don't go to the llsnl forum, i mentioned llsnl because that's the stake you're playing ldo

frankly, i find it insane how much credit and respect you're giving the llsnl pool - like you're talking about solvers when it's just pure exploit based on player profiling - the thoughts of what is solver approved shouldn't even enter your mind

that pool is infinitely worse at poker than nl2

i still occasionally dip my toes in and play 1/2 for fun, despite not being studied or up to date i do very well in that pool, i honestly don't think i could beat nl25 right now without spending a few months to study first - and going back to the solver stuff i mentioned earlier, that's probably why my skills still translate to the modern llsnl game but probably wouldn't online

i understand what you're saying about bigger theo edge in shortstacking, i acknowledged that on day one when i first entered your shitlist with the "i don't think you should short stack live"

the reason is we are limited to the amount of volume, need to also factor in commute time, bathroom breaks, mental health stretching and walks around the casino, etc so we need to be focused on the biggest hourly, not the biggest roi, especially since you need to clear 7bb/hour just to reach minimum wage (10bb/hour if we include all the breaks mentioned above)

I think you lose a bunch of ev by not making some pretty basic assumptions about the difference between 200 live and online. The player pools are polar opposite.

Honestly, the reason QQ is mostly a bet at 200nl live is because the player pool is almost entirely fish or bad regs who just make infinite mistakes in these spots (unlike 200nl online). They call 3 bets too wide pre, they float flop far too wide, they don't semi bluff their draws enough ip when they miss, there are a lot of good reasons to bet this hand at 200nl. May be higher variance but I would be incredibly surprised if it wasn't also highest ev to bet when readless (overbetting is not a great size though).

Just to clarify. If your read is that 200 live has far better players than I am assigning to it then things swing back in favour to checking more, I just don't think you're going to have enough "good" players at 200 live to make this the case though (but i may be wrong).

I mean I feel like checking flop is fine with QQ, if they make all these mistakes they're also going to stab way too much vs a check probably and then not fold because they feel they're commited

Maybe my read is off but the majority of fish/bad players tend to be way more on the passive side than aggressive. I think it far more likely a bad player checks back a bunch of hands they would call a cbet with and it's a far wider range than the one they would also stab with when checked too. Although am happy to be wrong about this. Checking is obviously fine but I still think it misses a bunch of ev at these stakes. I guess it's how we all view the player pools.

Are you saying this is a good result for AK in BB squeezing v multiple limpers? It seems so if you got to be HU. I'm curious about squeezing from the blinds v multiple limpers in these games. 5-8 limpers is a relatively common scenario in LLSNL. If you're considering flatting TT in the SB v HJ and BN, then I imagine your squeezing range versus, say, an UTG RFI and 5 callers, to be very narrow. Can you see yourself, for instance, ever flatting QQ from the BB (100bb effective) in such a scenario?

taking down the blinds is the highest ev play in poker

again, when you play live, hands are much more finite and it's more about setting up to take stacks not take a few bbs every couple dozen hands and 24 table

taking the blinds is obviously a good result, but never the optimal with premiums

there's good reason why people are often disgusted when they open AA and it folds around

Yes, especially when they are so many players limp-folding. In some games, we can almost squeeze with any Kx or Ax. But since 4betting ranges are so narrow (aside from short-stacks/tilted players etc.), we should be more polar than linear. If we squeeze 8-12x with 88-QQ/ATs-AK from the BB to an UTG RFI and then auto-fold to a 4bet, are we ever losing EV compared to calling? I assuming here that players are not adjusting to the fact that we are squeezing at higher frequency than most (i.e. bluffing sometimes) and are not widening their 4bet ranges versus us.

Not optimal with QQ+ or KK+ maybe but optimal with every other hand including AK, pretty much.

I've heard this stuff from a lot of live players and never really understood it. Finding a few extra squeeze spots per session can easily add $5 or $10 to a long-term winrate which is absolutely massive. Picking up 8 or 12 bb on the spot with a squeeze is hugely valuable.

I think old-school live only players have often times settled into their habits and think they know the "right" way to play. Take the QQ spot - betting is completely fine, and you know it's good and can remember winning many large pots like that, so you come here and make your case that betting is correct.

Do you know how your villains react when you xr QQ on flop? Do you know how your villains react when you xc flop xj turn? How about xx flop xr turn? Or have you never even conceived of alternate lines with your overpairs because you consider them "good hands, and I must bet my good hands right now against these recs."

In llsnl there is a lot of low-hanging fruit you can grab at, but that doesn't mean you're taking the highest ev lines. I agree with Xeno when he says it's all about how you view the playerpool (and individual villain, to be sure).

I think most live-first players have a lot of this dogmatic stuff built into their game and probably could learn something from how flexibly solver plays its hands in a lot of spots.

Haven't seen it mentioned, but we need to take into account how people are raising to larger sizes preflop.

SPR is usually around 3 in a 3bp using your typical solver sizings.

But it can be < 2 in a live game due to how people size up and/or don't always have a full stack.

Another consideration is how we're constructing our 3b. If it's a more narrow, linear range, we'll always want to bet QQ on 874tt. But if we have a slightly wider range with more bluffs, then we have to check a bit more often. When we do check, however, it's with the intent to XR or XJ.

One last thing is how often IP will float their AK and AQ. Let's say they only continue with combos containing the suit of the FD on board. In that case we would bet a high frequency with our entire range.

lol.

higher than a table of intoxicated billionnaire recs deepstacked with a premium hand on a Saturday night?

how are we check raising the flop when we're in position the overwhelming majority of the time in the scenario where villian opened and we 3! and it's isolated to two of us?

and what hands is villain going to stab with ip on the flop instead of checking back for a free card

again, this is all moot because it's readless

i agree it's possible that check raising is perhaps better, that's why we discuss instead of dictate, but how often do we get a chance to x/r vs just cbet?

When we're ip, we should be more inclined to bet for sure. But you might be surprised that there are plenty of spots where checking back overpairs on the flop is a completely fine option. If you never check back overpairs ip (or only ever check back overpairs on absolute nut low super scary boards), I think you're making a clear strategy mistake and not just from a gto perspective.

Asking these questions shows that this line isn't really in your strategy at all. The answer here is plenty of hands, though fish ip strat is pretty different than solver.

But even if villain checks back, having overpairs in flop xx 3bet pot is completely good. Yes, I would be more inclined to start tripling myself as villain gets more loose passive. But bet bet bet isn't the only way to play good hands against recreationals lol.

Because we can 3bet from the blinds.

Here's a sim where we are in IP.

BTNvCO, low SPR (<2) to replicate a live game. Our 3bet range is close to GTO and villain's calling range is much wider.

In this sim, our overall range wants to check, but QQ will mix. Overbets aren't a thing.

Spoiler

Show

Same sim, but against a much much wider range. Now we are betting more overall with our range and with QQ. The problem with this, however, is that most live players will be limping a lot of these hands over open raising them.

Spoiler

Show