Good morning TPE. As many of you know Thursday nights are study nights and last night was no different. I have been reviewing some HH's and working for the last week or so on developing my play out of the blinds better, as I feel that I am just unnecessarily (I hate spelling that work and have come to grips with the fact that I will never spell it right) coughing up money from this position and can make better use of my time there. Okay so what am I doing from there to make better use of this position, well a couple of things.
1. You need to focus more on paying attention to the players that are opening on your blinds and then how all of the remaining players tend to act.
2. You need to understand how the BB will tend to react and decode his style so you can appropriately manipulate it.
3. Develop a plan for exploiting the tendencies and then implement
4. Adjust to how the players will react to you, because they will react and they aren't going to be happy about what you are doing (this we will talk about a lot later as it is going to be the part of this strategy that is the most important because not adjusting correctly will cause you to forfiet all of the benefits of what we are doing here).
Okay so lets start working through the ideas above and talk through what we are going to be doing. So what are we looking for situationally here is soemone at the table, prefereable someone who is a couple to our right (so that they will be in the HJ, CO or BTN) who loves to open waaaaaay to much. What do I mean by way too much? I'm looking for someone who opens at least 50%+ from a position. The BTN and CO players are perfect targets as they in theory will be opening a ton from those spots (should be 80%+, but with most micro players it is probably closer to 60-75%). That is the first criteria, the second criteria is we are looking for them to fold out the overwhelming vast majority of their range to a 3bet. The idea character is a BTN who opens something like 75% of hands from this position and folds 70% of them to a 3bet. We DON'T want to play the pot out of position and we don't want to play pots past the turn without the absolute nuts, otherwise we are going to spew here and that is the opposite of what we are trying to accomplish. So fit n fold players who open to much from LP are the critical first step. They are at every table, find them. Second part is to observe and understand the players left to act. What we want to find is what do the players between them and us do. Ideally like I said we like to have this guy in the BTN or CO to minimize the actors as if this is someone in MP it is going to get dicey and I would advocate not trying this as the number of variables becomes to significant to wrestle with and the addition of the other irrational actors makes it -EV for sure. We want to avoid this strategy if there is a TAG guy between us and he decided to get involved. Why avoid a TAG? They are inherently a pain in the ass to play against. In general if they are a decent TAG player their range is disguised at best and highly polarized at worst, neither is a good situation for us as we aren't going to quite sure of where we are at and we are going to be playing a lot of hands that are value hands for them (Q7s, J5s vs the TAGs KQs, AQ, AJ type hands). We want LAGs and Nits in between. Nits are the ideal, they don't count. Ignore them. As far as poker is concerned if you have a Nit at your table you can fundamentally ignore him as a human being. If he has it you'll know. They are incapable of hiding it. If they don't they fold and we happily move on. The LAG in between is the interesting case. Why do we want a LAG in the way you ask? Well the answer is actually pretty simple…Dead Money. Think about what a LAG player is fundamentally interested in, seeing a ton of flops for as cheap as possible and then stacking someone when they smash a non-obv flop. What are we going to be doing…making it expensive for him to see a flop frustrating the hell out of him, snagging the dead money in the process. As a side note, if you have a calling station in between that has an obsession with seeing showdowns, this isn't the strategy to employ, these guys are going to monkey wretch it all. If they are there, try Plan B (we'll have to figure that one out in the future).
Okay, second bullet point in this one, we need to understand the BB and understand his style well. Why? Well this is key for the same reason as above with one minor adjustment. We want to pay specific attention to whether or not our BB friend is squeeze happy. If he is squeeze happy we are going to make some adjustments to do more trapping and appear weak. If he isn't then we can play according to the same theoretical guidelines as above, avoid TAGs, ignore Nits and punish LAGs.
Okay so now for the base, what do we do when we have found the player we like and the actors between are favorable? 3bet the hell out of him. What should we 3bet? What should our 3bet range look like? The answer is simple, we should 3bet if we get cards. Just that simple. As long as the sitaution looks favorable (the actors we want are in play and the ones we don't are out) we should take him to value town, because he is going to fold either pre-flop or on the flop a ton and if he plays back he will have it (remeber the guy we wants folds out everything but the top of his range).
Now for the most critical aspect of the strategy and the one to spend the most time understanding and thinking through, proper adjustment. Let me be clear, the player (or players) you are doing this against are going to get pissed off. You are going to be 3betting like 25-30% of the time if things go fairly standard. They are going to get sick and tired of your shenannigans pretty fast. What we want to do is make sure we understand their adjustments to us and then use them to our advantage. We'll cover how to adjust properly if this starts to happen to us in a minute, but lets cover this part first. How are the vast majority of players going to react to this, pretty easy… Spite Shove. You are going to start to get 4bet into oblivion. On the face of it, this is a nerve wracking development and would intuitively cause us to tighten way up in order to take advantage of it. Wrong. Bad. Stop. This is the exact adjustment we want. Why you ask? Think about what he is going to start to do this with. He is going to start to 4bet you with a very wide range. A range that will start to include a ton of value hands for us, so we need to tighten up some, but we don't need to get nuts. What am I talking about here, try this. You are 3betting the hell out of the BTN and he starts to shove. What hands does he start to do this with, A2, K3, Q5, J7, T5 that sort of junk, get a high card in and just ram it down our throats. What do we want to adjust with, well we can start to call with KT, QJ, JT, T9, QT. We are going to be getting it in most likely in a dominating fashion, not just a race condition. We are breeding a highly favorable condition to work with. We build value for our range, but forcing the villains to widen their range in an attempt to get us to stop. The key is to make sure we monitor and manage the adjustments. At some point they will start to get pissed enough that they may start to show you cards just to rub in that they made you fold. Take notes on those hands, that is the information we need and want. They are going to telegraph what our value range is. Write it down, use it. Stack his ass. Now the proper adjustment and the one that we want to be careful of and ramp down the strategy on is if they start flatting the 3bet in position. This is going to basically cripple the strategy as unless we smash flops we are going to have a difficult time proceeding against an incredibly amorphous range. This is the perfect counter to the 3bet if you run into someone who is doing it to you a ton, flatting in position as you are going to force them to make all of the hard decisions and use their chips to decode where they are in the hand and your ability to bluff and take down the pot becomes huge.
Well something to think about there at the very least. Time to start working on what to do with the BB now! Well hope you enjoyed the read and I'd love to hear what folks think. This is the Gman signing out!