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Refutation to Abdul preflop tactics

Hi All,

I purchased Wilson's Turbo Texas Hold 'Em (TTHE) earlier this week and have been running some experiments. One particular thing I was interested in doing was to test some of Abdul's conclusions on preflop strategy. In particular, I wanted to test Abdul's conclusion that it is frequently best to limp with good hands in early positon. You can read Abdul's stuff here:

http://www.posev.com/poker/holdem

Abdul supports his conclusions by running a variety of TTHE sims. Abdul's sims are meant to reflect the EV of various strategies playing UTG against Tight Aggressive opponents.

Description

I decided to recreate the simulations, but instead of putting us against a lineup of TAG's, I instead attempted to re-create the conditions of the Party 15/30 game as accurately as possible. The Party 15/30 game features a mix of tight aggressive, loose aggressive, and loose passive opponents of varying quality.

After a lot of trial an error, I was able to come up with a lineup that I think is pretty well representative of the typical conditions you'll encounter in this game. A UTG raise in this lineup will rarely steal the blinds (only about 5-6% of the time), and will typically result in 3 players seeing the flop. A UTG limp results in about 4.3 players seeing the flop, often for a raise but not always. I also used the 10/15 blind structure and the (favorable) rake structure that this game uses. I deliberately put one of the looser players in the small blind to reflect the fact that the blind structure encourages a lot of semi-cold calling from the SB in raised pots.

I watched a couple hundred hands with the cards face up and am convinced that I've rigged the sim in such a way that it recreates pretty well the typical *preflop* action in the Party 15/30 game. Players do not generally play complete trash, but they limp and overlimp too frequently in EP, and cold call or 3-bet too frequently after a raise.

I was *not* quite as satisfied with the postflop play, which tends to be straightforward and even tightish. TTHE players do not do a great job of protecting their hands, semibluffing, taking free cards, or considering pot size when determining whether to make a marginal call. They also miss some check-raising, slowplaying, and value betting opportunities. While their play is not terrible - the better players would certainly be winners in the "real" 15/30 - it's probably best to think of the sim as a hybrid between the Party 15/30 (preflop) and a Vegas B&M 20/40 game (postflop).

I did not allow UTG to limp-reraise. TTHE is a good piece of software, but I don't think that is sophisticated enough to handle limp-reraising. I did allow UTG to dump some of his more marginal hands if it came two bets back to him.

Results

I am not going to publish a complete table of results. The clearest conclusion that emerged, however, is exactly the opposite of Abdul's. Given these game conditions, there were essentially no hands for which open-limping was materially better than both open-raising and folding.

The "best" open-limping hand was 66. That hand shows a profit of +0.02 BB with an open-raise, versus +0.08 BB with an open-limp. This was the only starting hand for which open-limping was at least 0.05 BB better than both raising and folding. Certainly, even if this result were known to be 100% accurate, you would not be giving up very much by always raising (or folding) specifically 66 when you had it UTG.

A number of hands that 2+2ers commonly open-limp with UTG were in fact profitable to limp with against this lineup. However, in most cases, they were as profitable, or more profitable to raise with. For example, QJs returned +0.17 BB per hand from open-raising, versus +0.10 BB from open-limping. 88 showed a profit of +0.18 BB when open-limping, but +0.31 BB when open-raising. A9s was worth +0.08 BB with an open-limp, and +0.18 BB with an open-raise. These results are *not* largely an artifact of blind stealing, since blind stealing in the simulation was rare.

AA, KK, JJ, AKs, AKo, KQs were each at least +0.15 BB better when open-raising than when open-limping. AJo and KQo were discernably better when open-raising (and both were worth playing UTG).

I do not know how valuable or how accurate these results are. They are merely provided as a contrast to Abdul's.