Quote Originally Posted by BananaStand View Post
This is about what I would expect from one of the last men standing in this once populated forum. You have to understand that the live game is considerably different than online. And I see players with heavy online poker backgrounds struggle to make crushing win rates in the live game. That's because everything you've learned about frequency goes out the goddamn window. "balance" and "GTO" are completely fucking useless against the Level 0 thinkers in these games.

I see alot of players that think they're "good" because they understand things like frequency, and GTO, and what not. So they do shit like open 74s from the cutoff and semibluff/barrel, or 3bet A3suited from the blinds and shit like that. Except no one fucking folds pre-flop in low stakes live games, so you usually end up in a multi-way pot with a pretty low SPR. Semi-bluffs don't work, yet I see "good" poker players barrel it away with overcards and a backdoor flush. And no one ever bluffs, yet you'll still see these guys tank and make ridiculous hero calls. It's funny to watch them tilt when they make a huge river bet and some showdown monkey calls down with one pair. They say "you donkey, don't you know I'd have the nuts 80% of the time there!", but really all that happened was an idiot bluffed into a calling station.

Beating these games means playing a merged, not balanced, range and betting heavily for value. Raise 8-15x pre-flop, make good c-bets, play to win stacks, not pots. If it's 5 limps to you on the button with AJs, raise to 20x. You'll see a flop with a super low SPR along with a couple sticky idiots whose ranges are jam packed with J8+, and A2+.

The $10-$20 number I quoted was what I had recorded quite some time ago. At the time I was playing 1/2, days, in a casino, with people who know a thing or two about poker. The game I'm currently playing is 1/2 with a $5 straddle on nearly every hand. I'm playing nights. And it's in a local shithole full of extra bad regulars like I've described above. So I'm not sure what my exact win-rate is currently, but I'm supremely confident its much higher than a burger-flipping wage.
I don't want to take part in this conversation, it's completely my fault for starting it.

I've not played poker for a few years now and the only reason I post on here is boredom really. I will never put effort into getting any better at poker and I'd only ever play occasionally with friends but in all honesty I wouldn't even enjoy that. I suck at poker compared to people who are good at it, that being said I'm still much better than tonnes of people.

Literally no one who plays poker and understands frequency on any level does the things you're talking about. You're talking about people who have read two articles on poker math and think they understand the game to any degree so can crush live poker because it's "easy". The things you mention are all completely fundamental to poker and are shown perfectly by some very easy and perfectly simple toy games. The poker you're describing is just very basic exploitative poker people got taught to beat micro stakes years ago.

Also if you play live you literally never have any idea what your win rate is because you play about 15 hands an hour.