Bless + Destroy

Boom goes the dynamite.
imo.

I finally cracked the 500 in one day mark today. It was a really great feeling. Its nice to rebound so well after having a devastating day a few days back.
Most of my profit came from one player, who sat down at my 3/6 table with $500. Now, for those who don't know, thats a LARGE buy in. the standard buy in is $60, and most decent regulars sit with 120-180. I sit with 150. We played an epic long session, almost 400 hands, and I managed to have him part with his entire 500. I kept about 380 of it, and Full Tilt Poker kept 120 for allowing us the privilege of sitting at their tables. I really feel like the rake is too high for low stakes Heads Up Limit Holdem (HULHE), but I can't control it, so i have to deal with what i see.

Anyways, I wanted to discuss how this player played and some of the adjustments I made against him to exploit him. First, he was very passive preflop. He raised 5 times on the button, and 3bet me from the BB 10 times in the entire match. Second, he was folding to my flop bets around 10%. Again, thats very very low, and he never raised me on the flop unless he flopped the nuts. So it meant that on the flop he was peeling with all his pairs, and all of his air. He made some of the most random peels I have ever seen, to be honest. So, my counter strategy to that was to value bet my strong A and K high hands and all my pairs, and to give up immediately with some of my non-showdownable hands, like 47 on a QT6 board. he was never folding, and i dont really have anything to continue with. He also made the river quite easy, as he would bet if checked to with almost his entire range (except smaller pairs) and would only raise the river if he had two pair plus. and even some of his two pairs didnt get raised.

The result of his strategy was I was constantly getting max value from all my marginal and strong hands, while i was able to check back and put in minimal action with my weaker hands causing him to get no value. our won at showdown % was almost identical, so noone was getting lucky or running hot, it was all a factor of me putting in action when i had the best hand (or was likely to have the best hand).

On a different note, GrantKropf and I are planning to make a video to put on DeucesCracked that will focus on super shortstacked play and how to counter it in the HULHE games that we play. We are also talking about doing some stuff on 6max and how playing against super short stacks can affect your decision making there as well.

I think it will be a really interesting video and we are going to look closely at PokerStove to find ranges and equities to give us the best approximation of how to play optimally against people with 4BB or less.

Look for an update this weekend that may have more information on this video and when it might be released. I'm pretty excited about it.

LQ

Currently Listening: Swollen Members - Balance