Last year, before the gambling enforcement bill, I played on party poker like most of us then. All of the games were very soft and ppl who weren't even very good at poker were pulling insane winrates out. Shorthanded NLHE became really popular and Full Ring NLHE began to dry up.
The adage became "6 max is where its at." This was because of the various benefits of playing six max over full ring at the time:
- higher winrates (example, off the top of my head i think ilikeaces86 was winning 6ptbb/100 lifetime at midstakes six max and 3.5ptbb/100 lifetime at full ring, and was a stellar player at both)
- more hands per hour, people could endlessly multitable six max back in these days and play over 1000 hands per hour. Six max on party was just over 100 hands/hour and full ring was about 60.
- better game selection, there were probably 3 times as many 2/4 and 3/6 shorthanded games running as full ring on party. There were also a lot more fish at six max, because the game played bigger and faster than full ring, making more attuned to a degenerate gambler type.
At the time really the only con to playing six max over full ring was that the variance was a little worse.
Well, times changed and darkness descended. The bill got passed, party poker dropped all americans, and all of a sudden it became much much harder for fish to get money onto the gaming sites. The games got much worse as a result, but some other interesting results emerged.
To understand these interesting results, lets reconsider where the money comes from in Full Ring as opposed to Six Max:
-Full ring is about playing an overall optimal game and beating the field. You isolate fish when you can, and you very often can, but in general you look to make your money from weaktight players, winning a lot of small pots, and relying on the implied odds against these nits to win big pots.
-Six max is more about isolating bad players and taking their money. The structure of the game is optimal for this, as if you sit at a shorthanded table with a huge fish to your right, it becomes very easy to isolate position on him when he limps in, since you are always so close to the button.
So, at a glance, the big reason to play six max was to better isolate fish and play as many pots against them as possible. The winning strategy in full ring is to beat the overall weak tight field and gradual accumulate chips.
So back to the post-bill ramifications. Gradually after the bill was passed, the fish count in all the ponds (six max AND full ring) decreased significantly. The good (relatively) players started to break even and lose to the better players, and as a result they had to study the game and get better. This chain reaction caused EVERYONE but the few fish in the water to get better. Here's the part that most people don't know.
Only the six max regulars got a lot better.
There really has never been much decisive material posted about how to play full ring, whereas SSNL and MSNL on two plus two are constantly churning out content that everyone is reading and taking to heart. CTS makes a blog post about 4bet bluff shoving, all of a sudden the regs are autoshoving Axs to any 3bet for a few weeks. "Range merging" gets mention in a post on MSNL, all of a sudden regs are going for three streets of value with 88 on QJxxx. However, until fairly recently, there hasn't even been a full ring forum anywhere.
So as a summary, the bill:
-lowered the amount of fish
-caused the six max regs to get a lot better, the full ring regs got a little better, but in general were left behind due to lack of published content.
Now lets remember that the fish to reg ratio is was much much higher in six max pre-bill than full ring. This was one of the main reasons of playing it.
So why play full ring now?
Lets begin by debunking all the previous reasons why people played six max pre bill.
- higher winrates - NO ONE is heavily multitabling and beating these games for very high winrates anymore. A datamine from a few months ago of 1/2 six max on stars showed that of all the people that played over 50k hands that month, ONLY ONE was over 3ptbb/100.
- more hands per hour - this goes back to the multitabling issue. The games have become so tough, that one must play a very very exploitive style to win at a good clip. This unfortunately makes it impossible to play more than 4 to 6 tables for all but the elite.
- better game selection - after the bill, the number of fish decreased tremendously, while the number of tough regs, and the toughness of those regs, increased dramatically.
Full ring on the other hand:
- can be beat for a similar rate as six max. There are tons of full ringers who are doing 4+ptbb.
- can be 12 tabled without giving up a whole lot, since the game plays pretty slow and you can play very tight and still be a big winner. (fwiw 12 tabling full ring is roughly equivalent to 8 or 9 tabling six max.
- while there aren't as many fish as six max even still, full ring has almost NO GOOD REGS WHATSOEVER. The winning regs that you will face in full ring, generally speaking, are just really weak and tight, and since they play tightly, they manage to win.
This is the biggest reason to play full ring over six max in my opinion. There are simply very few good exploitive tag regulars. Everyone is just tight, and they win by folding more than everyone else. Obviously this sort of play is very exploitable.
TLDR
