After watching Pokey’s Art & Science of Poker videos from StoxPoker I was keen to try out some of his ideas.
There were two things that caught my eye – firstly preflop betsizing, and then targetting villain categories (ie nit, maniac etc).
The preflop betsizing was something I’d seen before from his posts in 2p2, but his videos made it much clearer. Essentially he opened 4 or 5x BB in early position, and then reduced the size as it approached late position, with the button only minraising. There’s a lot of discussion on 2p2 about this kind of thing, with fairly polarised views. The camp that goes the opposite way claim that since the btn is the most profitable position, it should open with the largest raise in order to profit more. Pokey’s view is that a) opening large UTG helps reduce the number of callers, b) minraising on the button has two advantages, firstly that players who were going to fold will fold anyway, and secondly a 3bet will be much smaller, reducing your loss while giving more possible responses.
His idea is based a lot around stealing really, but it also made sense generally. Unfortunately I think possibly it’s not that applicable to 10NL. He was demonstrating on 25NL, and so I figured it would be partly transferrable, but a lot of it depends on how tight people are playing, and at 10NL it would seem that enough people are still playing too loose to make it worthwhile. Minraising on the button actually encouraged people to call, and I faced more problems holding marginal hands postflop than if I’d carried on with 3xBB steals.
So the session went wildly wrong and I rapidly lost about 1.5 buy-ins. It was all stuff where you ended up multiway with hands that just weren’t worth the effort. I might as well be limping in with the rest of them.
So I switched back to my regular style of 3xBB open raises, and I was able to recover my losses, ending up $6 up.
I still like his ideas though, but perhaps I’m not ready yet. Maybe it’s like a golf or tennis lesson where in the short term the coach totally screws up your swing, but in the long term you do improve…
i do make bigger raises from early position because a)with small raises more people will tend to call and then some smartass will try to squeeze the pot and b)my range from early position is very tight so I need to make pot on the flop as big as possible(to reduce SPR), as I’m only playing hands that make top pair or an overpair on the flop.
on the button in some cases (quite often) i open “any 2″ so obv i raise less. but if there are few limpers i raise much more.
so, yea, i like this idea
what about minraises on the button?
His best point about that was that if someone defended with a 3bet, then the 3bet would be a lot less than if you had raised 3xbb, and you have a lot more options, while in terms of stealing those who would fold would still fold.
However since everyone just plain called every time, it didn’t seem to work for me.
but otherwise yeah, I still like 4 or 5xbb from UTG & MP.
if they only call or fold then just raise for value, i.e. raise more with hands that have some potential and raise less with total garbage if blinds are tight. calling from the blinds (OOP) is almost always terrible so extract value from these guys
Button min-raises.
When applying a concept like this, find out why he’s doing it.
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/69/micro-stakes-pl-nl/video-pokey-two-tabling-25nl-252810/
I think it’s in the video above that he did for 2+2 that he describes why he’s min-raising from the button.
Basically, he’s doing it so that he can outplay, with position, anyone postflop who either flat calls or makes a standard 3x-4x re-raise. He’s only really concerned about people who adjust quickly and start coming back over the top of him with 8x-12x re-raises.
At micro stakes, people very rarely adjust and most people don’t have the postflop skills to follow through on Pokey’s technique to start off with. You have to learn a lot more about post-flop and, funnily enough, min-raising the button helps you with that (more flops = more tough decisions)
As with all techniques like this that push slim edges, you should be sure that, unlike me, you are playing poker properly anyway and are fairly regularly beating the limit you’re playing (i.e. don’t get yourself too confused too fast).
That sounds very true. My postflop skills are better than they were, but perhaps still shaky enough to be in too many awkward situations with that technique.
Interesting that you said it would help improve the postflop play – there’s a really old 2p2 post by pokey where he was completing the SB a lot, and he was talking about how it improved his play. I don’t think he’d recommend that now
You’ll see more and more marginal situations and, hopefully, learn a great deal about how to deal with them. Being taught works up to a certain point and then you really need to actually get your hands dirty in order to complete your learning. Plus, you have position and this makes learning a lot easier.