Playing Online Tight-Weak NL Games

[shipitfish]

I paid my backer another $250 or so this week -- his 33% of my approximate $800 in winnings. I've been steadily beating both live games here in NYC and online.

Because I was chasing some bonuses on a few sites, I've been playing on sites that I generally felt in the past were "bad games". Some of the higher bonus sites online tend to attract bonus hunters, who are by their nature, low-risk, tight players. Like most players, my optimal game is a loose-passive one, where my value bets get called and I can play the best hand and win with it. Generally, I still feel that such players are the most profitable opponents for limit games, since the best hand is usually shown down.

However, on many sites, there are many more NL HE games running than limit. As such, I've been playing a bit more online NL HE than I used to, and am discovering that the tight-weak style of the classic "bonus chaser" or "correct player" makes for profitable NL HE games.

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Open Raise Blind Steals

First of all, in these tight-weak online NL HE games, only between a quarter and a half of the hands see the flop, depending on the player mix. This means that the blind steal becomes a profit center. Each time, if you raise three times the BB, you are betting with odds at 2-to-1 that the blinds will fold. Since the "true successful steal odds" are very close to that when people are playing this tight, it's worth raising with almost any hand when it's folded to you.

Of course, I don't raise with purely any two cards. However, when it is folded to me in middle or late position in a tight-weak game, I raise with any two big cards, suited connectors, one-gaps and two-gaps, and any ace-high. I've found this leaves me raising about two times a round, which seems to be just the limit that keeps people from thinking I'm stealing. I generally appear to my somewhat unsophisticated opponents as a tight-aggressive guy catching some cards. I help this along, when I get a good hand every two rounds or so. I show in frustration my AK, as if to say, "Why can't I get any action?" My guess is that my opponents sit and say: "Boy, this tight play is good. I had KJ; I could have gotten in trouble."

It's just an interesting aspect of NL HE. More than any other form of poker, you don't need good cards to win a small pot. These players have focused only on memorizing starting hand requirements, figuring out how to make good folds, and how to keep variance low. I introduce a tiny bit of variance for these small raises I'm making, but it allows me to pick up a lot of blinds, which really does add up.

Note, however, that just one person in the game willing to make preflop calls with marginal hands can cramp this style of play. Occasionally, these games will have one or two such players, and I just situate myself so that I am in middle and late position when they are in early position. Even they are usually tight enough that they don't limp much from early position, so, with the marginal-callers already folded to me, I can continue to make the steal raises with near relative impunity.

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Stealing on the Flop in Limped Pots

Many of these tight weak players can't fold easily when they start with a premium hand. I've seen them call down with QQ when heads up despite an AKx flop. It's as if they've focused on the starting hands, and then forget what the board cards are when they have a strong preflop holding. I made a terrible error the other day bluffing into just such an AK board with JJ when I was 80-90% sure the fellow had QQ. He called me all the way down. It reminded me that "preflop tight-weak play doesn't mean someone can't be loose-passive in heads-up pots with position."

However, I've only seen such situations come up in preflop raised pots, indicating that one of these tight-weak players holds a very strong hand. I let these pots go, unless I have a huge hand myself. Limped pots are a different story.

If tight-weak players have just limped in, they are usually holding smaller cards or weak big card hands (KJ, QJ, etc.). When the flop comes low, they sometimes have top pair, but their kickers are weak (i.e., 78s on an 8-high flop). They show this by making "feeler" bets of half or a third of the pot. If I have any sort of hand, even middle pair, or bottom with an overcard, or any strong draw, I simply come over the top for about three times their bet. I'm thus putting in about a pot-sized bet, but I win doing this more than half the time. We all know that in HE, it's tough to hit a flop really hard -- with two pair or better. Tight weak NL players, seeking low variance, don't want to gamble much with "top pair, weak kicker". In these unraised pots, this is most likely their holding when they make these small or medium sized bets.

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Every Once In A While, Someone Flops a Boat, Right?

I was telling nick_marden about this strategy for these tight-weak games, and he questioned how much it worked. He said: "Every once in a while, someone flops a boat and you get bitten, right?" Well, the truth is that after a thousand hands or so in these games, it hasn't really happened. I don't mess around with paired flops, suited flops, or flops that make a straight for a suited connector. If you just pick your spots to push people around, when it is highly likely they are not strong, you win two ways. First, you win more than your share of pots. Second, you reinforce their playing style, for future attacks. My theory is that they sit and congratulate themselves for their "good folds". I only make these flop plays maybe ever three orbits or so, when the situation presents itself, so they err on the side of the "solid play", and click fold on their winning hands.

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The Party Is Over When You Show A Few ...

My goal, frankly, is not to flop a big hand with some goofy holding. When I do, and I do end up against some other strong holding (i.e., These tight-weak players they tend to pay off with top pair, top kicker, even when you make it obvious you have two pair), I'm forced to show it down. Sure, I win a big pot, but the party is over. These players are tight-weak, but they aren't stupid. When they see you show down some goof-ball hand, they put it together. "Hey, he's raising with crap." Then, your blind steal percentage goes down, you get called more, and you can't just run over people on the flop, for a while.

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... But They Might Not Be Experienced Enough To Adjust

When this happens, though, I don't leave the game immediately to find another group of tight-weak folks to run over. Instead, I watch and see how they'll adjust. In my recent experience, only one or two people know how to adjust well, by coming over the top for small raises preflop, or by performing would-be delayed steals on the turn when I get too aggressive on weak boards on the flop. Most players can't make these subtle changes. Instead, they seem to decide: "dammit, when I am in the pot, and he raises, I'm going to move all in. That'll teach him." Suddenly, they start moving in on me for huge overbets. I had a guy, at a .5/1 blind table, moving in for $50 almost every time I raised. I knew what he was doing. He was fed up, and taking any Ace-high or small pair and forcing me to have a hand.

So, I didn't disappoint. I kept up my usual steal-raises, along with standard legitimate raises. He picked up $3 from me about three times, and then, a few rounds later, I open-raised from middle position with AKo. Here he came again, with $63 from the button! Without any context, I wouldn't think of calling such a bet with AKo, because it very well might be a coin-flip at best. However, I knew he'd make this move with any small pair, ace-high, and maybe some king-high hands. I called, and he had ATo. The board came lucky and gave me Broadway.

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Know Who Is Paying Attention

Like many poker games, people don't read your adjustments well. In that hand I just described, a T had flopped, and it came runner-runner QJ. Someone typed in the chat window that "you got lucky since you didn't have a pair when all the money went in". What I realized was that he had been distracted. He must have glanced back at the screen when the flop was sitting out there, and concluded that the all-in happened on the flop. Since I'd been playing a while and been forced to show down some of my over-aggressive bluffs, he figured I bluffed big into the guy, who had called me with top pair. Further chat confirmed this was likely correct; the guy pushed me back into the mold he'd created.

So, strangely, the one time in that game that I really caught someone when I had the best hand was read, at least by one inattentive player, as yet-another big bluff. To pull off this "run over the tight-weak players" routine, you have to know what perception people have of you. You're actually playing loose-aggressive, but it doesn't work if people know you're playing loose-aggressive. They have to think you are as they see themselves: a no-frills tight-aggressive player. If another player gets a hint of your looseness, and you've added an opponent that you need to avoid. The fortunate thing is that you can always switch tables. Since so many people want to play baby NL HE games online, it's easy to find a table full of tight-weak, "I'm good because I know how to fold" folks to run over for a while.

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So This is What Doyle Was Talking About

I never much liked Brunson's chapter on NL HE in Super System. I always felt that he was endorsing a hyper-aggresive style, and I'd found that most NL HE games of my era were loose-passive. Indeed, I've watched players with that hyper-aggressive style crash and burn in NL HE games. Their final verbal exchange for the night goes something like:
Opponent: "I know you have my top pair beat, but I just can't lay it down. I call."
Hyper-Aggressive: "No, you are good. I have two outs."

But, there's a cornucopia of NL HE games to choose from, and some of them exist, usually online on the sites with the best bonuses and the highest number of poker celebrity endorsements, where the players have read enough to learn how to fold, but not enough to learn how to promote marginal holdings. These must be like the games where Doyle cleaned up all over Texas, and why he got that image that he was such a gambler. He was always picking up those small pots, and occasionally got slapped back, but not enough to make it less profitable.

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Who Really Relies Most on Luck?

As a final thought, these situations led me to think about how the loose-passive player needs luck to win, because they have to catch those few cards in the deck that give them the winning hand. For this reason, we always think of the loose-passive player as the most luck-centric of the weaker opponent styles.

However, in some ways, the tight-weak player needs even more luck to win than a loose-passive one. Constantly, loose-passive players are putting themselves in situations where they are relatively big underdogs versus the pot odds, but they run those situations a lot. They lose over the long haul, but they can have huge wins when the cards fall their way. They need only to hit seven or eight three-outers of the dozens they play to have a winning session. In other words, they take the worst of it, but the short-term luck can easily be in their favor.

However, tight-weak play is the slow drain. Sure, these players don't lose much, because they almost never take the worst of it. But they leave money on the table over and over again, when a saavy player comes in and steals their blinds, or bullies them out on the flop with their top pair, weak kicker. Over time, they need more luck than the loose-passive player, because they need to (a) pick up lots of good starting hands and (b) connect with flops. (Remember, AK misses outright two-thirds of the time.) Any time in poker when, in order to win, you are compelled to catch cards that are hard to catch, you're in a tough spot.

I'm very glad I'm working on adding this type of play to my repertoire. It allow me to explore a side of my play -- a bit loose-aggressive -- that I had stamped out because it wasn't profitable. It can be profitable, if the right game is selected and if your opponents don't actually know you are playing that way. I miss the flamboyance of my old loose-aggressive style, but the nice side of it is that I'm now experimenting with a style/table-image dichotomy, which is a key skill in tougher games.

Comments

Great Post!

[frankieriver.livejournal.com]

Awesome insight into the evolution of online poker and the adaption of the 'good' player into the 'pro' player. I have recently gotten back from an awesome trip to Vegas and allll of the 'pro' NLHE players exercise a similar strategy as described above. The high limit NLHE played out their is something that I from my limited experiences have never seen before - I learned more about successful NLHE in 2.5 weeks than my previous 3 years of playing. Absolutely incredible - a lot of which is summed-up above. The 10/20 NLHE games out there are a mind-fuck - cards are inconsequential. It's a dangerous game, but arguably one of the most profitable to sit at if you can play. Switching your game up, knowing when to do it, and successfully executing it is what turns you from good to un-real. I for one am constantly working on various ‘player-types’ and strategies – the hardest part is to switch styles mid game. Keep these great posts coming because I for one am absorbing it. I am currently going over note after note of my play in some of these absurd games and working on re-vamping a couple of player types in my own game - trying to improve, increase profitability. Thanks Bradley...

Well said

[nick-marden.livejournal.com]

I am just getting to the point where I am trying to understand what differentiates break-even players (me) from winning players, and I have slowly been circling around exactly the conclusions that you write here. It's funny how long it can take a dunce (me) to figure this stuff out - I have been playing for almost two years.

It would be an interesting follow-on post to talk about how you judge when a pre-flop or post-flop situation is right for stealing.