A Question About Marginal Hands

[W. Deranged]

I tend to disagree with this sentiment.

The fact is, I can't play 30 hands without seeing one of my opponents (whether a rock, a lag, or anything in between) badly misplay a premium hand. Players often lose tons of value by slowplaying As, fail to properly value bet obvious good hands like TPTK with AK, fail to protect vulnerable holdings like a JJ overpair, and so on.

One thing I've noticed, particularly about rocky players and players that think that tight play is all their is to poker, is that such players lose TONS of value on premium hands. This, in my opinion, is one of the major reasons why such players aren't the kinds of winners that they assume they should be because they play tight and try to avoid getting into trouble.

[adios]

I think that your point is that we all get Aces, Kings, Queens i.e. the premium hands as often as our poor playing opponents and that we win approximately the same amount of money with them. Probably not though as a good player just makes better decisions about raising, calling and folding so I think it's fair to say that a good player will show a higher profit with the premium hands than a poor player will. I think you're making a point that most players throw away the trash hands so good players don't necessarily gain any edge there. I realize there are live ones and there are really live ones though [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]. SSHE has a decent graph of how fast starting hands start to deteriorate in profitibility. Lots of hands go -EV fast. Sometimes those hands that are close i.e. marginal are worth playing because the situation is favorable for one reason or another and sometimes they're trash and should be thrown away. A good player is able to evaluate these situations accurately alot better than a poor player so the good player gains there.

After the flop, many boards get scary and many good starting hands turn "marginal" after the flop. Good players evaluate these situations much better than poor players and thus win more money to make a long story short. In my mind what you're saying is that when you try to stay away from marginal hands you try to stay away from situations where your hand after the flop is iffy ( Axs in early position when you get raised and you may or may not be dominated as one example) and thus you won't have to make as many difficult decisions after the flop. If I'm right in what you're stating then I think the answer is that reading hands accurately before and after the flop and taking the correct strategic line are what will swing the slightly unprofitable hands (in the aggregate given no developed skills in reading hands or thorough knowledge of sound strategy) into profitable ones. Hope this makes sense and is helpful.

[SeaEagle]

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Probably not though as a good player just makes better decisions about raising, calling and folding so I think it's fair to say that a good player will show a higher profit with the premium hands than a poor player will.

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Agreed. Most of the profit comes from playing good hands better post flop. If I were to take a stab at quantifying this, I'd say:

If a good post flop player w/ VPIP15% can make 2BB/100, then that same player might move up to 2.5BB/100 by playing 3-5% more hands.

But a weak/tight (read: poor post-flop) player who plays those same 15% of his hands will only break even, and will lose money if he plays 18-20% of his hands.

[BigBrother]

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So my questions are:
1) Do you agree that most of the profit in limit holdem comes from marginal hands?
2) Do you agree that it is actually a bad preflop strategy in limit holdem to play too tightly preflop, because if you don't play enough marginal hands it will be difficult to make a profit?

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1) No way. Most of your profit comes from your premium hands. Period. A good player will win more with the premium hands than a bad player. The good player bets/raises for value when her hand is good, and finds the discipline to fold when it's obvious she is beat.

You are going to be playing your premium hands 100% of the time...but even AA is only 2 cards of 7. Reading the board, reading your opponents, and understanding the situation will make a huge difference. Your AK will miss the flop 2/3 of the time....how you play it from there will make a huge difference.

2) It depends. Playing tight preflop in a loose game, you can still win, but since you are not involved in many pots, the variance can get you in the short run. Still by playing tight your losses will be limited.

Once you have mastered your postflop play with premium hands, you can profitably add marginal hands...and playing more marginal hands will improve your earn on your premium hands because you will get more action if you are in more hands.

Loosening up a bit preflop CAN increase your earn rate, because you give yourself more opportunities to outplay your opponents. But you need to do it wisely, with the right types of hands in the right situations depending on the table texture. Also don't forget the more hands you play the more variance you will experience and the more you will see the effect of the rake.

[econ_tim]

A number of posters have already meantioned that given premium hands are more profitable than given marginal hands.

This is true, but it's not enough information to say which group of hands is more profitable. If we get premium hands 5% of the time and marginal hands 15% of the time (I'm just making these numbers up) then the average premium hand could be 3 times as profitable as the average marginal hands and both types of hands would account for an equal share of our profits.

I don't know what numbers to plug in, but I think the premium hands still account for most of the profit even after considering their reduced frequency.