Miller, Ed. Smallll Stakes No-Limit Holdem

of his hands. He might 3-bet with 35 percent of his hands, call with 50 percent, and fold only the worst 15 percent. He can play so loosely because he has position and because you’re playing every hand.

Against this loose defending strategy, raising all of your hands would be disastrous. You have to tighten up. Depending on how strongly and aggressively your opponent plays postflop, you might tighten up to about the 30 percent range from the discussion about stealing from the cutoff:

22+, A2s+, K9s+, Q9s+

JTs-54s, J9s-T8s

A2o+, KTo+, QTo+, JTo

So, like stealing from the cutoff, you have to play fairly tightly when conditions are bad for stealing. But, unlike stealing from the cutoff, you can open 100 percent of your hands when the big blind is tight. Because your strategy from the small blind can vary so much, pay close attention to the player on your left and know which strategy you’ll employ before you get into a blind versus blind situation.

Putting It All Together

Because online 6-max games tend to play fairly tightly preflop, blind stealing is extremely important. Indeed, an aggressive blind stealing strategy can improve a player’s overall winrate by 1.5bb/100 ($3 per 100 hands in a $1–$2 game) over a tight or weak strategy.* A good

* How much is aggressive button stealing worth? Poker success can be measured in big blinds per 100 hands. Suppose you are a solid winning player in $1–$2 who makes 4bb/100 hands. You open 30 percent of your button hands (e.g., 22+, A2s+, KTs+, QTs+, JTs-54s, J9s-64s, A9o+, KTo+, QTo+, JTo-54o). A little less than half the time you have the button it is folded to you. So in a 6-handed game, about 8 times per 100 hands it will be folded to you on the button. You raise 30 percent of those hands, or about 2.4 hands per 100.

48 SMALL STAKES NO-LIMIT HOLD’EM

percentage of your opponents will play tightly enough from the blinds that you can profitably open 100 percent of your hands from the button and from the small blind. Stealing from the cutoff is more dangerous, so even under good conditions you should typically avoid opening trash from the cutoff.

When your opponents defend their blinds by calling then playing a fit or fold strategy postflop, you can steal with a wide range of hands and rely on taking pots away postflop. When your opponents are looser, more aggressive, and less willing to fold, you have to tighten up on your stealing. But often you’ll be compensated for the lack of stealing opportunities against these players by making more money on your good hands.

Now suppose you expand your raising range to 80 percent of your hands. Of the times it is folded to you on the button, you are now raising an extra 50 percent of the time. This is 4 extra hands per 100. Against blinds who fold 80 percent of their hands to a 2.25bb raise, you win immediately roughly 64 percent of the time. This nets 0.15bb per steal attempt not including any money you make when you get called or reraised. You win 0.15bb and freeroll on postflop play. Now suppose you are against blinds who do not 3-bet often. Say of the 36 percent of the time either blind calls or reraises, they reraise 12 percent of the time. Even if you fold every time they reraise, 24 percent of the time you will see a flop with 5 or 5.5bb in the pot. If you win just 1bb of that on average, you net an additional 0.25bb per hand. This is a quite conservative total of 0.4bb per hand. At 4 extra hands per 100, the successful pro earns an extra 1.6bb/100 by expanding his button opening range from 30 percent to 80 percent of hands against tight blinds. This yields a 40 percent increase in overall earn.

Stealing from tight blinds is a tremendous source of profit. It is also an easy strategy that does not require great play to be successful.

Profiling Opponents Using

Stats

If you play online, you should use tracking software. It is tremendously useful, and there’s really no reason not to. As of the time of this writing, the two most popular tracking software options are PokerTracker and Hold’em Manager.

These programs gather all of your hand histories automatically. After the software has digested all the hands you have played and stored them in a database, it slices and dices all that information in numerous useful ways. It tells you how much money you and any of your opponents have won or lost in hands you have tracked. It tells you what percentage of the time you see the flop, how often you raise, how often you play from two seats off the button, and so forth.

Some time ago, the tracking software packages added a heads-up display (HUD). This allows you to superimpose the statistics of your choice for each player in your game over the table as you play. So if, for instance, you wanted to know what percentage of the time each of your opponents sees the flop, you could tell the HUD to show that statistic, and then you’d see that percentage next to the name of each player inside the table window.

Using these statistics in combination with a HUD allows good players to play many tables at once. Instead of watching each hand intently to gain insight into their opponents, a HUD user can display a few telling statistics and gain immediate insight into each player’s style. In this chapter we’ll talk about a few important statistics and how you can use them to profile your opponents and gain insight into their decision-making. Even if you don’t want to play with a HUD, learning to profile opponents using stats is an extremely useful skill.

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The Three Basic Stats

If you read any online poker strategy discussion group, you’ll see people using three basic stats to offer a quick outline of their opponents’ play. All major tracking programs will calculate these stats for every player in your database. These stats are:

1.Voluntarily Put Money In The Pot Percentage

2.Preflop Raise Percentage

3.Aggression Factor

The first two stats measure only preflop play, while the third measures a player’s aggression over all streets.

Voluntarily Put Money In The Pot Percentage (VP$IP) measures the percentage of hands a player plays preflop, excluding hands where the player checks from the big blind, but including hands where the player limps in or raises and then folds to a raise or reraise. This stat measures how tight or loose a player plays.

In a 6-max game, this stat generally ranges from 10 percent to 80 percent. A player with a 10 percent VP$IP plays exceedingly tightly, likely playing only pocket pairs and perhaps AK and AQ. A player with an 80 percent VP$IP is extremely loose and plays nearly every hand.

Most online 6-max players tend to fall in a range between about 15 and 30. Players with a VP$IP over 40 tend to be loose and bad players, so you can use the stat to aid in your table selection. For example, if you were choosing between two tables, one where everyone had a VP$IP under 25, and one where two of the players were over 50, you’d want to choose the table with the two loose players.

Preflop Raise Percentage (PFR) measures the percentage of hands a player raises preflop. PFR is never higher than VP$IP, because every time a player raises preflop, they are voluntarily putting money in the pot as well.

Most good players have a PFR within a few percentage points of their VP$IP. For instance, a solid player might have a VP$IP of 24

and a PFR of 20 (written 24/20 from now on). This indicates that the player raises most of the time that he plays a hand, only occasionally limping in, cold-calling a raise, or calling from the blinds.

Aggression Factor (AF) measures how often a player takes an aggressive action (bet or raise) versus a passive one (call). Checks and folds are ignored for the purposes of calculating AF.

This stat, unlike the previous two, is calculated using actions on all four betting rounds. (Some formulae exclude preflop play and include only the three postflop rounds.) It is calculated as a ratio—the number of aggressive plays divided by the number of passive ones. Because it’s a ratio, the values can range from 0 (if the player in question has never bet or raised) to infinite (if he has never once called).

In practice a player with an AF between 0 and 1 is fairly passive, tending to call more often than bet or raise. And a player with an AF of 4, 5, or more, is quite aggressive, betting and raising far more frequently than calling.

AF can be a difficult stat to interpret correctly. First of all, a high AF is more significant for a player with a high VP$IP than it is for a player with a low one. If you play 50 percent of your hands and you still bet and raise 4 times more often than you call, you are necessarily betting and raising with a wide range of very weak hands. Whereas, if you play only 15 percent of your hands, betting and raising 4 times more often than calling doesn’t suggest nearly as reckless a style.

Also, AF measures play across all betting rounds, and therefore two players with an AF of 3 could play very different styles—one, perhaps, focusing on flop aggression, while the other focuses on river aggression.

In recent years this stat, once a staple of player profiling, has lost some of its importance because newer versions of tracking software packages have provided easier to interpret stats based on street-by- street play. Nevertheless, you will still often see this stat used as one of the three basic stats to describe an opponent’s style.

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Using Stats To Profile Opponents

Poker players can adopt any of a vast number of possible strategies. They can play tight and aggressively preflop, aggressively on the flop, and back off on the turn and river. Or they can play tight and passively preflop, passively on the turn, hyper-aggressively on the turn, and back off on the river, and so forth.

Strategies are composed of numerous variables and, theoretically speaking, players could mix and match these variables at will to create their unique strategies.

In practice, however, no-limit players tend to adhere more or less to one of a handful of strategic archetypes. Out of all the vast possiblities, the overwhelming majority of players tend to fall into one of just a relatively few categories.

We aren’t going to speculate on why this happens. But we’re going to take for granted that it does and show you how to draw fairly reliable conclusions about an opponent’s entire approach to the game by looking at just a few stats.

We have developed these profiling methods through experience and observation. Again, there’s no underlying reason why this sort of profiling has to work. It just does, at least in today’s online $1–$2 6- max games.

We said above that AF is losing importance, and it’s for good reason. Therefore, we use just VP$IP and PFR to define our profiles.

Let’s look at some stats-based profiles. Note that these numbers are specific for 6-max play. In full ring play, expect all archetypes to play a few points tighter due to the extra seats in early position. Also make sure your HUD is using only 6-max data when it compiles stats for your opponents. If you play both 6-max and full ring games, your stats might be tainted with data from full ring play.

The Setminer: 9/7

The setminer’s stats are extremely tight and aggressive. A typical stat set might be 9 for VP$IP and 7 for PFR, henceforth written 9/7. Obviously, an individual player might differ from this standard by a point or two in either of the stats. A setminer plays an exceedingly

rigid strategy: wait for pocket pairs preflop, and maybe (if feeling frisky) take a flyer on AK. After the flop, try to get all the money in with a set or overpair and fold otherwise.

Setminers will usually open the pot for a raise, but will sometimes flat call a raise with a small pocket pair. Thus, expect their PFR to be two or three points less than their VP$IP. After the flop they do very little calling because they fold their marginal hands.

The formula for beating a setminer is simple. Don’t play big pots with them unless you have the nuts, or can at least beat their likely set. Steal their blinds with wild abandon. When they do see a flop, most likely they will have a small or medium pair and will miss their set. So make a continuation bet on nearly every flop. Usually they’ll be in the mood to fold. When they don’t fold, surrender to any resistance.

Setminers don’t make a lot of money, but their strategy can be profitable, particularly in microstakes games. Often they make up for their relatively small edges by playing massive numbers of tables simultaneously. Because of their tendency to play up to 24 tables, don’t expect them to surprise you much. They have almost no time to think about any of their plays. Just keep stealing their blinds.

The Nit: 13/9

Setminers turn into nits when they’re all grown up. Nits take a general approach that’s similar to the setminer, but they play a few more hands preflop such as KJ and JTs on the button in unraised pots. Because they play more big card hands than the setminer, they’ll hit the flop more often (though not as hard on average), and they’ll generally be more willing to get all-in on the flop without a set.

Your general strategy against the Nit should be roughly similar to your strategy against the Setminer. Don’t pay them off in big pots, and steal, steal, steal.

Nits don’t build big pots without big hands. If a Nit bets the flop and turn and then shoves all-in on the river, you almost never have a tough decision. Either you have the nuts, or you fold because he has them.

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One of the authors (who shall remain unnamed for dignity’s sake) once played the following hand against a nit (stats: 12/9).

It was a $1–$2 6-max game. The nit had $200, and the author had him covered. The nit opened in the cutoff for $7, and the author called on the button with A♠K♥. The big blind also called.

The flop came A♥5♣3♣. The nit bet $18 into the $22 pot, and the author called. The big blind folded.

The turn was the T♣. The nit bet $58 into the $76 pot, and the author called.

The river was the 6♦. The nit shoved all-in, $117 into the $192 pot, and the author called.

What mysterious, entirely unknowable hand did the nit hold? He had K♣J♣—the second-nuts. Who could have guessed?

Without a flush, most nits would slow down on the river. Even with a set of aces, most nits would play the river cautiously in fear of a flush. Top pair/top kicker is often a good enough hand to play for stacks in an online 6-max game. But in this particular hand, the decision to play for stacks by calling the final river bet was horrendous because the nit would never make that bet with a hand worse than AK. Indeed, the hand was botched from beginning to end.

What’s the moral of this story? There are two. First, do not pay off nits in big pots. If they seem to want to get the money in, they have a very good reason to do so. Get out of their way. Second, everyone screws the pooch once in a while. Next time you do something really dumb, remember this hand and cut yourself a break.

Nits, like Setminers, are quite vulnerable to stealing. Since they won’t get their money in without a big hand, and they will rarely catch a big hand, you can steal the majority of the pots you play against them. Steal their blinds and lean on them after the flop. You won’t beat them in the big pots, but you can swipe most of the small ones from them.

The Nitty Tight-Aggressive (TAG): 17/13

The Solid TAG: 21/17

The Loose TAG: 24/20

Most of the winners in online $1–$2 6-max games play a TAG style. These styles can range from a fairly nitty 17/13 style to a looser 24/20 style. Unlike the Setminer and the Nit, no simple strategy will beat these players. You can’t just avoid their big hands and steal their blinds like you can with the Setminers and Nits because TAG players tend to steal back.

You can assume that players with TAG styles are trying to play well. They’ve likely read a few books (perhaps this one), and they think about their play. That doesn’t mean they play well. Many TAGs make plenty of mistakes. Numbers such as 17/13 and 24/20 just describe preflop play. Some TAGs play a serviceable preflop strategy, but end up lost once the flop comes. If you master the ideas in this book, you should be able to find the weaknesses of your TAG opponents, both before and after the flop, and exploit them.

Having said that, avoid games where all of your opponents play a TAG style. Even if you can beat TAGs, if you look around you can usually find games with at least one weaker player whom you can beat for more profit.

The Thinking Loose-Aggressive (LAG): 29/24

Thinking LAG players can win a lot of money also. Indeed, if you play roughly as we describe in this book, you’ll likely end up with stats that place you in this category. One main difference between a Thinking LAG and a TAG player is that Thinking LAGs take more shots at stealing the blinds. For instance, if you try to steal the blinds as often as we suggested in the first section, you’ll almost certainly end up with stats that are looser than the TAGs you play with.

As with the TAGs you play against, most of your Thinking LAG opponents will have weaknesses. For instance, you can frequently convince them to try to steal pots that they have no actual chance to