Benefits of a LAG image part II

Just played a short session, but you know the player who had seen me play very loose and got it in with JJ overpair against my aces? Played another hand with him tonight. I'm not going to upload the HH as I don't want to be nasty since overall his game seems ok other than spewy post flop tendencies. He obv likes to get the money in light, unless he just sees me as a superfish. Anyway, standard raise from the cutoff; I have 99 and get called from villain in the small blind. The board comes A98 and he leads into the pot. Obv that is good from my perspective and I was unsure what to do. I decided to play my hand weird - my usual line would be to call. I raised a little less than pot where he then minraised me. That usually means that someone wants to play for stacks so I pumped fist and thought lets get this shit going! Well, the money went in and V had AQo. This guy must be seriously pissed at me now. I expect to see an awful lot more of him too since he has been on here every night that I have. Unfortunately I played a little tighter this evening so he may start adjusting. But now I should have more fold equity so might try taking one of these lines as a bluff. What I am doing though, as you should too, is mix up my play. On the AAvJJ hand, I actually checked behind on the baby flop hoping to get action from his range and did. So he might have labelled me as a slow player and immediately thought that my raise in this hand must be bluffy... Anyway, confuse the regs and they'll spew. Fact.
EDIT: Just been checking over my history with this player, I'd got him to fold in alot of big pots that I couldn't remember through multitabling memory loss. He really must have viewed a pair of aces as the nuts against me. This is the HUGE benefit of image and must be why the loose players make so much money.

Overall in the session we finished about 33 dollars up as I took down some more pots aggressively on the other tables. All that for not alot of work...

ok ok ok

we didn't have a great day, finished a buy-in down. wierd day, hit loads of hands, got a fold every time. Every time I felt I had good bluff equity, they didn't go away and played back. Sigh, it happens. Never the less, I actually made money from non showdown winnings, so once again I'm doing things the right way in terms of stealing. The hands I lost were mainly where I had the favourite on the flop and turn and the loose players got there on the river. I also made two loose calls but blah nevermind. I just need to get some hands paid off and our graph should start to climb again nicely. For the first time on any site, there is a few regulars that I have got several hundred hands on. None of them are super aggressive but a couple look like they're reasonable and there's two or three bad regs too. So I'll try and take notes on these players and try and pick up their tendencies and exploit exploit exploit. GG

Latest News

The benefit of a maniacal image
Sat at a table with one of the players who I'd been playing with when I'd been raising nearly half the hands as the table had been so tight. It's not often that I believe it's profitable to play like that - that was just one of those times. Anyway he'd obviously remembered because he called a four-bet when I had AA and got in a 200bb stack with an overpair of JJ. That's the great thing about playing in this way, the players assume you are a spewtard on every street. Not just the first one ;)
Tomorrow...
I have a day off and want to put in a long session. Plan on spending a couple more hours on flop combinations first (since my hand reading seems to be improving immensely by doing it)and then get stuck in. I'm a bit unsure how to proceed at the moment. Playing as much as I can while the games are this soft is just a given, but do I play as many tables as I can to maximise hourly or concentrate on playing four really well? This may be one of those situations where more tables might just be better. The play is so bad and one dimensional that the tricky spots don't come along much. I think two buy-ins per 1000 hands is easily achievable at this site at these stakes - and that's without taking into account rakeback. So hopefully I'll win around 50 bucks tomorrow. Will strongly consider moving up stakes very soon also but will try and finish my combinations work first so that multitabling decisions become easier.

Just had to say it

I am so glad hardly anyone reads this blog. Absolute games are so soft I really cannot quite believe it. Even at fishy microstakes, I've never known games like it. I played a few hundred hands on two tables tonight. One of them was nit city - no player was playing more than 15% of hands. So I was playing like 40% and raking in pot after pot after pot. The other table was the opposite. Players seeing like 60% of flops and folding every time to a c-bet unless they had the nuts. Crazy, easy money. I have seen maybe two players that looked like they knew what they were doing in nearly 3000 hands. Jees, I guess the scandal really did put the regs off. Oh well, let them have their tough stars games. I'm going to be enjoying making alot of money!

A Common Hand Reading Mistake

This is certainly a weakness in my own game that I am currently addressing. Here's what happens: We get to the river and all of a sudden our opponent shows strength. Say the board is 4682J. We suddenly think, "oh no our AJ cannot be good he must have a suited one gapper for the straight". But actually, since the player is only playing 15% of hands preflop over a sample of a few hundred hands and has played his hand from under the gun we cannot reasonably include any low one gap hands in his range. We are acting on the river in a general sense without thinking about all the information we have. I was made aware of this mistake by poker pro/coach [vital]Myth from the cardrunners videos. He's a great coach and I highly recommend listening to what he has to say, you'll learn alot. Anyway, what this advice has led me to do is to create some rules of thumb for general play.
A player who plays less than 12% of hands will usually not have any suited connectors in his range. This is why good players often call in position against these "nits" since if we flop top pair on a 652 board, we'll have the best hand most of the time; or we can take the pot away if low cards flop.
A player who plays between 12% and 20% of hands will usually only be playing suited connectors without a gap in. So on the first board we can pretty safely rule out straights when making our decision.
A player playing more than 20% of hands can usually have any suited connector and many Ax suited hands so nothing can really be discounted. This is part of the reason why most of the top professionals play 25-30% of hands. It is hard for most opponents to figure out their hand.
edit: A player who plays over 30% of hands will actually have quite a large percentage of bluffs in their range and so we can safely start to call more lightly and give them less credit for having it, despite it being within their range.
Important Note
Unless the hand sample size is really large, these rules should only be used lightly. It may just be that someone has been dealt 73o 50 times in a row.

No play today

But I haven't been idle. Spent the day looking at combinatorics and poker... Basically I feel that I need to improve my hand reading. So I have studied some maths and numbers that should help me in this regard. Basically if you can give someone a hand range in a certain situation, then for the pot odds calculations it would be a huge bonus if you could estimate the percentage of villain's range that is likely to be a bluff. Right now it's just a guess for me. It's likely not a bad guess, but if I can do this more accurately it will allow my decision making to improve which is what we are striving to achieve, is it not?

Loose aggressive play

Well, I have been given some advice to loosen up a bit since the low stakes players mostly play so straightforwardly or badly after the flop. Back to the Steal and Showdown concept - maybe I am underestimating how much equity I have with certain marginal hands against weak opposition. So today I played considerably looser than I normally would and managed to get paid off when players started adjusting badly to my image. When we can get 5 people to play a big pot when we have QQ+ it has to be a good thing. Anyway after 2k hands at Absolute I can confirm that the play at these stakes is much fishier than other sites I've played. Added to the rakeback which is accumulating nicely I think winrates of 10 PTBB/100 are certainly achievable. That's two buy-ins per 1000 hands to those who don't know what I'm talking about. After 2k hands my non showdown winnings is still in the profit - which is awesome! My increased and selective aggression is paying off. Although of course against weaker opponents this was bound to be the case even with previously more passive play. So, things going well. If I keep up the good work I should be ready to move to the higher limit by the end of November. My ultimate goal currently is to be able to win a buy-in every thousand hands at 50NL which could earn me $18250 in a year if I played 1000 hands a day. Money that certainly shouldn't be laughed at. Providing there isn't a huge leap in skill between the current limit and there, sometime next year I hope to have achieved this goal. Onwards and upwards, as they say.