Live Poker Poker Forums

Hey all new member here and loving deuces cracked.

So me and my close poker circle we're discussing live low stakes nl and I brought up a point that seemed to spark debate. I have been grinding regularly $1/$2 nl at my local casino and am pumping out a solid $20/hr. that being said, I noticed that most of my losses are big and my wins are big as well. It's rare that I get one of this average $50 sessions. This brought up my point as I have been "coaching" a close friend of mine:

It is nearly impossible to have a positive red line (non-showdown winnnings) at $1/$2.

Since our strategy in llsnl is to put ourselves into as many profitable situations in position post flop for the cheapest price we either miss and give up or we get to showdown. The stack to pot ratios that are created in live $1/$2 are so small because of the large pre flop raises and the multi way pots that our ability to outmaneuver our opponent is reduced accordingly.

That being said; a lot of dead money is created in the sense of limps, strattles and passive opponents. I am a firm believer in raising to collect the dead money but this tends to create large multi way pots which our opponents do not like to fold in. This reduces our ability to win money without showdown.

If the above is true, our graphs at $1/$2 should be very swingy with big wins and big losses for when we run bad and when we run good. The fact that we are able to value own our opponents so easily helps us to have more big wins than big losses which allows us to get out of llsnl more easily.

Understanding this has allowed me to really brush off those inevitable downswings because as long as we control our red line losses to a minimum we should kill our money won at showdown and therefore our bankroll.

The fact that there is no way to tell how much money is won/lost without showdown at $1/$2 creates a decent debate for this point.

Really good post.

The player pool at 1/2 tends to call waaaaay too much. They'll call too often preflop (which is why our isolation raises won't work as often), and they'll call too often po-flop, too. Po-flop errors are more costly than pre-flop errors, so we make the most money by putting ourselves in situations where our table mates will make expensive po-flop errors.

Betting hard with the idea that we'll get them to fold is like beating our head against a wall. But, seeing cheap flops with hands that can get nutty is like printing money.

Thanks for posting about your win rate. My win rate at 1/2 is about the same (ok, brag, it's a little better) with a just over 600 hours.

So does your graph consist of large wins and large losses (but obv more wins than losses)? This is how mine has been and I don't see very many small win sessions or small loss sessions.

I don't have a graph (I keep an excel spread sheet, not HEM or Poker Tracker).

There's a lot of -$250 days, and a lot of +$400 days. I think my winning sessions outnumber losing sessions about 2:1. It may be closer to 5:3, I'd have to look closer at the spread sheet to be more accurate.

It can be difficult to have huge days when 2/3 of the table is sitting on only $100.

Yeah that's about how mine is. I have a lot of +$450 days and a lot of -$300 days. It's rare that I'll have a +$55 or a -$75 day or anything. This leads me to believe that the swings are from the large amount of times that my sessions are defined by my showdown winnings. Which is what got me thinking about how my edge at these stakes is nothing more than just learning how to value bet really well.

So that being said, our ability to outmaneuver our opponents is reduced dramatically because we have to have the best hand in order to win.

The way your "graph" looks is completely irrelevant since the sample size for live poker will be ridiculously small.

That said, since the average pot size in low stakes live is much larger, the variance is gonna be higher. Higher variance leads to bigger swings.

Yea, wouldn't worry too much about what your "line" looks like as long as you are booking wins. You said, it, it is about winning more at showdown with the winning hand, and losing less at showdown with the second best hand. Value bet the rec players to no end when you've got it.

Red lines and blue lines seem more player dependant then anything. Some people call large raises pre and CF flops, I seem to have a redline no matter which game i'm in. Which might be a leak...