roadtorobusto

10/20 game a few days ago. I open with 6s6d in LMP, the SB 3bets. He’s a tough aggressive player, but seems to spew a bit at times. Is certainly capable of moves. I call.

The flop is Qc8c5c. He bets, and I call quickly. My RIO aren’t all that great on this sort of board if I intend to showdown a lot but I feel comfortable that I can sometimes bluffraise clubs and sometimes showdown and sometimes fold the turn or the river, just depending on what comes. If a T-A comes on the turn and he bets I’m mucking, if a 4, 7, or 9 comes I’m making him bet both the turn and the river.

The turn is the 7c, putting a 4flush on board. He checks after thinking for a few seconds (we were multitabling together, so this could be a timing tell or could just be multitabling whatever). I bet pretty quickly, and he thinks again — not very long but long enough to notice that it wasn’t automatic for him — and raises.

I 3bet without hesitation.

I know this isn’t quite in line with other posts that I make here (microlimit hands), but a lot of my hands that I’ve been playing at the FT games have been vs. very aggressive opponents who have flaws in their game, but still can play quite well. I’m hesitant to advise anyone to try a play like this without realizing the consequences and how spewy it will be often, but at the same time, I do think it’s important to be able to take your reads on your opponents to the next level and act accordingly. Sometimes that means entering that zone where you either fuck a hand up royally or do something that feels brilliant. Sometimes it’s right on that thin line. I dunno. I’ll try to post more of these sorts of hands in the future as they happen for RoadtoRobusto videos (I’m uploading a new one right now!), but for the time being, you’ll have to settle for this.

I’m going to be talking about this in an upcoming video, as soon as I can figure out why my PAHUD stats never show up on my videos, but I think it’s worth posting about as well. At this point in my poker career, I don’t really think too much about seat selection — I can just look at a game and a few players and tell whether or not it’s going to be worthwhile. But when I was looking at a few microlimit tables the other day, I realized that there’s a lot that goes into the calculation of whether or not a table will be worthwhile, and it’s just become automatic for me — so I’m going to try to talk about it here and dissect it so you can follow along.

Here’s generally my process. I sit down, and see who I recognize. Generally I’ll recognize regular players, who are often “TAG” or at least have a semblance of understanding of how to play preflop, first. If the table is populated by them, I won’t even bother sitting. But if there are a few spots I don’t recognize, I’ll often sit down, assuming I can get a spot on the left of any of these unknowns. This is going to be true moreso if I recognize any of the TAGs as being decent at table selection; if there are two or three TAGs playing together and two unknowns, and I can get a good seat (more on this later) on the unknowns, it’s very likely that the TAGs who are sitting together are in that game because of the “unknown” players.

If, through datamining or just through playing for a while, I have stats on any of these unknowns showing them to be loose and predictable in any fashion (this includes both very loose-aggressive — 50/20+ in PT parlance — and loose-passive), then I’m going to immediately lock up a seat and play as much as possible. In the golden days of online poker, the entire table would be filled with players like this; nowadays, it’s much more common that you’ll only find one or two really weak spots at a table otherwise filled with seemingly competent players.

It’s been covered a lot in posts by lots of different players, but I’m going to give a basic outline for why you want these players on your right and tight players on your left. It’s pretty simple, once you think about it, but a lot of people don’t practice it as well as they think. The first concept is what most people refer to as the first right of isolation. When a bad player enters the pot (often by limping) and you have a playable hand, like A9o, or QJo, KTo, etc., you’ll often want to get head’s up vs. their range of worse hands with position on them. This is usually the case with decent offsuit Aces and other offsuit broadway hands; your hand will play well head’s up and because you are up against a predictable player, it is easy for you to extract bets when ahead and not lose much when behind.

It’s probably better if I illustrate this concept in example form:

Situation #1: Bad player openlimps in the HJ. You have position on him, and are in the CO with A8s. Your hand has good equity vs his range of hands, especially when you get it head’s up, so you raise; the tight-aggressive player on your left (the Button) is now forced to fold the vast majority of his hands — even ones that are playable vs your specific hand (KTo-KQ; A8-AT, QJ&JT, etc.). Now you get the benefit of having the best hand and having position. Even if the blinds enter the pot, you’ll have good equity often and initiative, allowing you to take down a number of flops where you normally wouldn’t be sure of “where you are” (Q62, K73, etc).

Situation #1: Roles reversed. Bad player limps in the HJ. TAG player raises next in. You’re on the Button. Now your range of hands that you can play is severely limited; you can’t overlimp with 55, you can’t isolate with 66 or 77 or JTs — you have to fold a lot of hands that would normally be very playable vs. a bad player.

I’m really only briefly touching on this but I think it’s very important for people to learn: when you have a predictable player in a game, you will almost always want immediate position on him. You want tight players on your left so that your Cutoff and Button steals can be somewhat more liberal, where you will always have position on them if you get into a blind war.

While there are a lot of factors that have an effect on where you’d ideally like to be seated in different sorts of 6max games, the basic idea that I’ve mentioned here — get on the left of bad or even unknown players, and on the right of TAGs and TPs — will get you through many a 6max game that would normally look less forgiving had you not understood seat selection.

I played a few interesting hands, but for the most part it was pretty routine. Overall now through my play (short sample alert!) I’ve put in 750 hands and am running at 5.5bb/100, statswise 32/28/2. It’s really not important, but for those who are following, I figured I’d post it. When I hit a few thousand hands I’ll try to post a PT shot of the hands I’ve played — today I was mostly lagging it up trying to get some hands in and trying to get PAHud setup for a series of videos that I’d like to do on datamining, game and seat selection.

Here’s one that I wish would have been in a video. a 26/18/2/2/9 (yes, river aggression of 9) player through ~100 hands opens in the CO. I 3bet AsQs in the SB and he calls. The flop is 922. I bet and he calls. The turn is a J. I bet, and he pauses for a while and calls. The river is a 5. I check, he bets, and I checkraise…

I’m trying out some new themes for the overall look of the site. If you have any comments let me know — I’m trying to look for something kinda bright and cheery from themes.wordpress.net.

But for those following stats or whatnot. So far, only 250 hands or so of play. I’m running at 22/19/2, and am up about 5bb. Yay. Even with a limited sample I can say, fairly comfortably, that even with the prohibitive rake that is charged on these sites at this limit you could still easily beat .5/1 for 4bb/100+. Also, if you’re playing on these sites without some form of rakeback, you’re nuts. Check out deucescrackedrakeback.com for rakeback offers on any skins that you might not already be setup on if you aren’t; at these limits, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that the rake is costing around 6-7bb/100 (this is just a guess, but I’ll do a post on the impact of rake later, after I have a few thousand hands). That means not having rakeback is costing you about 1.5-1.8bb/100, at least — a pretty sick revelation for some of you, I’d guess.