The Scottishben Dhammapada

I noticed Crapshoot's bible posts and opened them with the kind of excitement that a young child opens a present but unfortunately - whilst it does contain advise that will improve the game of many forum members - it was not any where near as wonderful as I had hoped it would be. Quite often there were sections where I could say "well fair enough but....."

Dhammapada (simplifying here) contains the key sayings and teachings of Buddha. My Dhammapada is both my repost of Crapshoot's bible posts and my companion piece to bibles so that hopefully a greater truth can be appreciated when the best parts of each are illuminated and the worst parts of each become exposed.

OK now the (hopefully) good stuff

Many of us have recommended particular books to new members. Books are excellent but 1) you cannot and should not adopt a style suggested if it doesn’t suit your game 2) most of the advice in the books that people seem to buy are written by people who play high stakes games. Much that is true of high stakes is less true of the stakes that most forumers play. That being said advice regarding pot odds, quality start hands (to a lesser degree etc) can be highly relevant and normally you should have a decent reason for departing from much of the advice that the better books contain.

I am not much of a MTT man and generally play multi table sngs NL. Just bare that in mind as you read what follows.

Everywhere it can be read that tight aggressive is the way to play NL holdem. I will accept that there are several ways of playing holdem profitably but if we are talking sub $50 tourneys then time and time again it has established itself to me that YES tight aggressive is a VALID way of playing the game it is not nearly as successful or $profitable$ in the long run as tight passive and sometimes loose passive when the blinds are low can be quite effective third way.

If you look back at StarlightCoast's posts you will see that I am not alone in this view that tight passive is the most profitable playing style for sub $50 NL tourneys online.

The bottom line is there are so many players online who 1)over bet, 2) call when they shouldn’t 3) cannot fold a big pot 4) are otherwise rubbish/ easy to get solid exploitable reads on that there are will normally be better chances of taking chips off these players without putting a lot of your own chips at risk (as tight aggressive involves) when you can be outdrawn by chasers (calling against the odds) or you force players to fold on the flop where they would have been quite happy to have called your A paired if the 8 of their bust hand got paired on the turn

Many of the players who play bad on the flop also play badly on the turn and river. Betting big on the flop to protect a top pair will find you sometimes being re-raised all in and having to guess on often insufficient information whether they have a hand or not. Even when this doesn’t happen you will often get chasers anyway and yes if they chase then you will have the best of it but they may well catch 30+% of the time and that could knock you out or leave you very short of chips.

Whilst tight aggressive can get you profit tight passive will find you making a much, much safer profit and I will be surprised if it doesn’t end up higher profit after 100 hands or so.

Tight aggressive is also very difficult to play well. It sounds quite easy but often you will find yourself with very difficult decisions to make. Also a lot of people try to adopt tight aggressive and end up overbetting premiums start hands on a flop that doesn’t help them or calling big bets from others in that sort of position. It takes a skilled player to play hands and make profit on them consistently when the flop doesn’t help them (eg. AK on most flops that don’t contain an A or a K)

My strategy at a table is to start tight passive and then adjust my style to see what works best against the other players at my table. As I develop better and better reads on my opponents i will be more willing to risk chips in the pot without having a very strong start hand preflop or on/post flop something near the nuts. People used to a tight aggressive approach might say "doesn't it bug you that you probably had them beat when you folded that pot" but it doesnt because it is a simple fact of poker that someone who has performed one audacious bluff on you will do it again (if someone else has not knocked them out first) and when they do it I may well have the kind of hand to take far more of their chips that they bluffed me out of earlier. Yes some players will call on flush/ straight draws but when these dont hit as they normally dont you will make money and when they do hit it has not cost you many chips when you fold to their bet. As my reads develop my play might resemble tight aggressive, tight passive, loose aggressive, loose passive but I really think of it as READ based- nothing else.

Crapshoot points out that in ring games you can 1) choose your opponents 2) wait and get solid reads before you sit down at the table. I would not dispute this it is true. However the blinds in tourneys start so low that they dont force you into acting in any pot so really by the time you are in situations where it matters you should have pretty respectable reads on the players involved. It doesnt always happen - someone can be moved from another table or something but much profit can be made from letting other players risk their chips against these players. There are very few players I meet in tourneys that dont have exploitable reads that become apparent after 20 or so hands. Where ever possible take the safe money.

TABLE IMAGE
Many players have difficulty talking about table image because for so many people their awareness of it is at some kind of unconscious/ semi conscious level. Many players are very good at exploiting table image but if say they swapped seats with their mate and played a few hands would find themselves struggling to make a profit. Their understanding of table image is totally linked to their normal style of play and how others perceive it.

There is some mythology that the ultimate opponent, the hardest adversary to face is the one you cannot get a read of - a chameleon of poker as it were. This is just simply not true. What you want is for someone to THINK that they completely have you down to a tee and know exactly what you hold when in fact they are completely wrong. Give people the impression that you will always fold an all in bet, the impression that you fast play AA etc - that you never slow play (or always slowplay) – and if you pick your moment all their chips are yours. Whats more they may not even realize that they have been outplayed. They may think 1) they have had a bad beat 2) you were very lucky in catching … on the river (when all the money was put in the pot on the river). Being a chameleon can actually be bad for your bankroll. I play in a style that is quite hard to read at times and I often find that I have more to fear from players who have no useful reads on me than other ones. They are dangerous because they cannot be relied on to act in a particular way so much. If they have no idea whether your all in play is a bluff or not they will sometimes call and sometimes fold but it will often be hard to get too strong assumptions on their play because it will be made with little assumptions of what your holdings could be. So it is much better for people to THINK they have a read on you that is exploitably incorrect than to have no read on you at all. It is true that some players can be dominated into folding whenever they are against you. This will result in profit for you but probably not the level of profit that could be had if they were less scared of you and played against you more. It will also avoid being in situations where you are only a 60% favorite (they call you) where you could get something better if they know you had a hand and folded to fight another day. It is less pleasing on the ego to be thought of as readable but it is better for the bank. At high levels of play exploitable misreads are harder to pull off so anything giving you a small edge is something but you should have a huge edge over your opponents if you play sub 50$ because most of your opponents will be 1) tired, 2) lazy 3)distracted 4)rubbish and small edges are when you find yourself up against a few unusually talented opponents or you are low on chips and the blinds are ¼ of your stake then you might need to take more chances.

I have written enough for now. More to come soon and I will try to bring up more issues not raised in Crapshoots posts rather than just critiquing his bible.