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Old 11-25-2004, 02:17 PM
Mat Sklansky Mat  Sklansky is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Posts: 145
Default Small Stakes Posting Guidelines courtesy of bisonbison

The Small Stakes Forum Guide v1.0

Welcome to the Small Stakes (SS) Forum, 2+2's biggest and handsomest place to post. If you're new to 2+2 or small stakes, please take a moment to read through this quick guide. It'll help you fit in and keep this hectic place a little closer to fine.

This guide covers 4 basic things:
1. Where should I post?
2. What goes in the SS forum?
3. Keeping SS Readable
4. Hand Posting Etiquette

The short version:

1. In the appropriate forum.
2. 2/4 - 15/30 limit hold'em ring games
3. Be sensible. Be clear.
4. Reads. Details. No Results.

The long version:

1. Where Should I Post?
2+2 has more than twenty subforums, and while the options can be a little overwhelming at first, a moment's thought can keep these subforums from getting clogged with repetitive or off-topic posts.

The basic rules:
1. Each forum has its own domain of topics.
2. Each forum has a population that wants to keep the noise level low and the signal level high.
3. It is each poster's responsibility to figure out where their post should go.

If you don't know which forum covers what, you can A) Read the descriptions on this page , B) Use the search function to find similar topics, and/or C) Lurk more until such wisdom is revealed to you. When in doubt, search. I know that 2+2's search function is kind of wonky and hard to use, but it does work. The FAQ for the Internet Gambling forum has some helpful tips on using Search (3rd item from the top in the FAQ).

Failure to put forth this basic effort will be met by one or more of the following attitudes: 1) contempt, 2) disdain, 3) pity, and 4) non-interest.

If A, B and C fail you, you can make a post in the Beginners forum asking "Where should this go?" or "What does this term mean?" If you're met with attitudes 1, 2 or 4 in the Beginners Forum , rest assured that the responder is being a jerk and you are in the right.

That having been said: the Small Stakes forum is for discussion of fixed limit Hold'em ring games with stakes between 2/4 and 15/30.

What about: 1/2 and lower? Microlimits
Higher stakes? Mid/ High .
Short-handed games? HUSH
Tournaments? 1-table Tourneys , Multitable Tourneys , and The WPT and TV Poker
No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold'em?
Here


2. So What Goes In The SS Forum?
Well, like I said: fixed limit Hold'em ring games with stakes between 2/4 and 15/30.

Now, there's a lot under that umbrella. The forum's bread and butter are posts about the play of specific hands (This one time, I had AKo in a 2/4 game blah blah blah); but we also cover more general questions about how to approach, say, middle pair heads-up against an aggressive opponent or a weak draw in the middle of a raising war; as well questions about moving up; table selection; opponent reads; evaluating your own leaks and so on and so forth.

We're not all business here, but off-topic posts that aren't explicitly labeled (off-topic) in the subject line tend to get a very negative response. To save yourself some anguish, you might want to entertain these kinds of questions before you hit "Submit":

If I am posting about PokerTracker, why not post it in Books and Software or on the official PokerTracker forums ?
If I'm posting about table selection for hold'em, is it really specific to Micro or SS, or would it be better suited to the General Hold'em Forum?
If I have a question about sample sizes and my win rates, shouldn't it go in the Probability or Poker Theory If I don't know what X is and everyone else seems to, shouldn't I either ask about it in a thread or make a new post in the Beginners Forum?
?

The other kinds of posts that are frowned upon are those that have been covered here, in depth, a hundred times. Most of the regular posters here have been playing hold'em seriously for several months or more. None of us care if your pocket aces lose to 72o or if you made your first straight flush. No one thinks that Party is rigged, and no one wants to hear about your affiliate program. The things we prefer to discuss are: "Am I thinking about this the right way?" and "Did I play well, given what I knew?"


3. Keeping Small Stakes Readable
Poker is thriving right now, and small stakes games and the SS forum have never been busier. Since 2+2 doesn't have moderators for content, every poster is responsible for keeping SS readable and usable in these boom times.

We're not asking a lot. If you're making a new post, it really helps if you keep an eye on titling it clearly. We all enjoy the occasional snappy reference to Salma Hayek at the top of a bankroll thread, but everyone will appreciate it if you take the ten seconds needed to ask "Will this make any sense to anyone outside of my own head?"

Some people browse in "flat" mode, where every response in a thread is displayed at once in chronological order. Others browse in "threaded" mode, where replies are displayed one at a time with different linked branches of replies and sub-replies. These different views can make it hard to track the flow of the discussion, so it helps a great deal to title your replies informatively if you're digressing or making a new point. And if your reply is a response to what someone else has written, include the specific text you're responding to (either with the UBB quote function or by putting the text in question in quotes or italics).


4: Hand Posting Etiquette
There are a lot of different types of threads, but the backbone of Small Stakes is discussion of specific hands played live or online.

You'll probably notice that a lot of the hand posts here look alike. Many have been formatted using bisonbison's hand converter . All you have to do to convert a hand is take a hand history from one of the supported sites , paste it into the top box, hit "Convert Hand" and paste the contents of the bottom box into your 2+2 post.

Despite the converter's popularity, there's more to a good post than a pretty face. A good hand for discussion has four things: context, text, a prompt, and no results.

----------
Context
Poker is a complex social game. It is not played in a vacuum and your opponents, aren't cardboard cutouts sent to shovel you their money. Context is vital to proper play. Context means reads.

If you don't understand that reads can change the play of even the simplest hands, then you're going to be forever shrifted on good advice. That's it.

So tell us what your opponents are like. Qualify it as needed, but give us something. "Bob seems tight after two orbits" is a read and is much better than the damning "NO READS".

If you've got nothing to share about your opponents, tell us anything you know about the table: how long you've been there, whether it seems aggro or passive, whether it was a Friday night or Monday morning, etc, etc, etc. Give us something. Make an effort beyond clicking the post button and hold others to the same standard.

Text
The meat of a hand post is the hand itself. It doesn't need the converter to be a good hand to talk about, but it does need a certain level of detail.

In order to give you decent advice on any reasonably close decision, we're going to need to know the following:

A. your cards (ranks and suits, please)
B. Your position at the table.
C. the board cards for each round (ditto to A)
D. the number of opponents still active for each round
E. The size of the pot.
F. Any betting action that affects D or E.

If it's folded to you in MP, you can just say it's folded to you. If all the active players call, you can just say that everyone called, but if you bet and get two callers on the flop, it's vital to know which two callers. It matters whether it's the CO and the Button or the CO and the BB. So be precise.

A Prompt
The prompt in a hand post is often implied. Post a hand and you're basically asking "Does this look alright?/Did I mess this up?"

However, if you've got a more specific question, don't be shy about shaping the whole post around it. If you're not sure you did the right thing on a given flop, stop the hand text at your last flop action. If you're not sure about a fold, STOP at or even before the fold. Don't taint the interpretation with info you didn't have at the time of the decision. Put us in your baffled shoes.

No Results
When you post a hand and either include ("Button shows 9h 9d, three of a kind nines) or indicate ("Should I slow down anywhere here?" "Any place I can fold this?" "You won't believe what UTG raised with") the results, you tell the reader to ignore certain possibilities. You provide information that wasn't available to you at the time of the first round, the flop, the turn or the river. You lock responders, however subtly, into the the hand your opponent did have, instead of the ones he could have had. And you'll never know whether the advice you've gotten is really what others would have done in your place. So don't include results.
----------

Finally, if you want to include multiple hands for discussion in one thread (which we discourage), please post each hand in a separate reply (Hand 1 goes in your original post, Hand 2 goes in a reply to that...) to help keep clear which hand is being discussed.


Conclusion
No one's going to ban you if you fail to live by these guidelines, but they were designed through long public conversations among the SS community, with the goal of keeping the forum as useful as possible. Many people, myself included, have 2+2 to thank for their success at the poker table and new members are always welcome here. We just hope that these guidelines will help make your entry a little easier.


thanks go to: the posters of the 2+2 forums. sup champs.
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