Loose vs. Tight play versus weak players...

I am currently reading SSHE,and it says to go ahead and play the loose guidelines until I see otherwise. What I've realized when playing on PP (.50/1.00) is that I rarely, and I mean rarely, see more than five people regularly see a flop. The problem is that the people that are seeing the flop are still playing too many hands, and the reason why there aren't a lot of people at the flop is because people are raising with hands they shouldn't be raising with. Has anyone else experienced this? Should I go ahead and play the loose guidelines anyways, knowing that most of them are loose players, when only four or five people regularly see the flop?

[@bsolute_luck]

IMO: this is a good, but dangerous question and one i'm working on as well. the danger is misapplying and playing too many marginal hands and be paying a lot to play with.

what it does is lowers your 3-betting hand requirements. and what hands these are can be figured out by a few thoughts:

1. how light the villain is the villain raising? ie: A5s UTG or constant blind stealing from MP3 and later seats.

2. what position are you in relation to the PFR and the rest of the table? ie are you UTG+1 against an UTG raise- not a good idea to get frisky here simply because there are a lot of people behind you. or are you MP3/CO and the raise is from MP1?

3. the rest of the table. do they cold call frequently. how straight forward are they postflop.

4. the PFR: their postflop play. if you have 88 and 3-bet and the flop comes AT3 and he bets into you- would he bluff or bet second pair or draws? how straight forward are they.

..at least that should get some thoughts/discussion started.

a suggestion for a study would be to hunt down a 6-max starting hand chart and, based on the answers to the above questions, 3-bet the hands that are indicated when facing a raise.

[aargh57]

If you have Poker Tracker you can track a bunch of tables for ten minutes or so and see VPIP of them before you pick the one(s) you sit at. I agree with you, though, that for the most part the tables don't fit with the loose games guidelines. I've been told here that SSH was written with B&M games in mind, most internet ones play tighter.

have you tested this? seems like it could be quite the expensive mistake to misjudge.

My personal opinion in these types of games is to raise the value of your top pair hands and lower the value of speculative hands. Play your big broadway hands and be inclined to raise more with the big aces and maybe KQ. Raise back with TT and up and don't play hands like suited connectors and small pairs unless there are already a few people in. In my experience people raising with weak hands tend to go broke before long when confronted by dominating hands all the time.

You will experience a lot more variance if you want to mix it up so if not find a milder table or sit tight and wait for big cards and attack with them. Don't try limping in with weak cards that don't stand a lot of raises and need to see cheap cards to improve.

My .02

[bozlax]

It's been said fairly regularly in the past few months that the "tight" starting chart from SSH is more appropriate to the online game. I agree with this, until you ahve enough hands under your belt to be able to objectively judge the table by observing the play, and then adjusting your starting hands accordingly.

And, don't, as someone suggested, go by table VPIP exclusively. Two LAGs at a table of TAGs will inflate the average VPIP, and when you sit down you become the 3rd donator. Similarly, a table full of rocks will have a very low average VPIP, but can be very profitable for stealing blinds, and running them off hands on the later streets.

[IIAce]

How do you do that using pokertracker?

[stlip]

Agree that the tight chart is best for most online games. The loose chart is for live games where apparently the social aspect makes everyone a little more likely to join in a pot, while at the same time making them chummy so that they don't want to be raising too often. Sounds like paradise, except after getting used to the pace of online games and being able to multitable I'm afraid I would be absolutely bored out of my skull just sitting at one table and waiting for the next hand... and waiting... and, oh boy maybe seeing 30 whole hands in an hour and hoping that I might get to play 5 of them.

[BluEsiNsOuL]

For micro-limit like 0.5/1, especially on party skins, as long as you are confident in your post-flop play, playing some marginal hands can be profitable. The main reason for that is your regular LAG opponents usually go too far with their hands, once you make your monster hands, you score big. That being said, I would suggest you to start with tight table chart if you just start playing.

For I'm not playing at PP, I don't know how it exactly works there. But the keyword is "datamining". Google for it and you'll find an answer. Basically it is auto-import plus opening several tables and not sitting at them, letting PT import the hand histories.