WOW. We've turned gotigers into a nit.

lol.

Anyway, yeah, now that you're playing tight, you can afford to start loosening up selectively I think, if you do it gradually you'll learn a lot from it I think, just make sure when you do add more hands that you open, you open them aggressively - add a few combos at a time, and resolve to always raise with them, never cold-call, at least at first as you introduce them.

How are your positional stats? How many hands are you opening from each position. BTW I believe you play only full-ring right?


MadMojoMonkey - you ask excellent questions. Here's my shot at them:

Scenario: You're sitting at a NLHE table, you've been playing for a bit and you find you are involved in a hand against a villain who is playing 13/9 pre-flop.

Scared money. Probably folds a lot to cbets, since he plays fit-or-fold. Not likely to bluff-raise like ever. Probably if I'm OOP he'll station down if I fire at him and he has a decent piece of the board. Very unlikely to play back with a good but not great hand like TPTK, so I can basically potcontrol from OOP to at least some degree, and prevent myself being put to difficult decisions.

If he's playing back at me, I'm folding without the nuts.


Challenge: What does their pre-flop play tell you about their big-picture strategy? What are their motivating goals and fears? What is a good range to put this opponent on? How would you adjust your play to deal with this villain?

Their big-picture strategy is to wait for dominating preflop hands, then go to the flop and play cautiously postflop. Their opening range is like {88+, KQo+, AJo+, JTs+}, with a better nit having a much wider range in position, but really, they don't generally steal blinds since they are afraid of getting played back at.

A lot of them don't really seem to have a huge amount of positional awareness, since they are so tight and basically rely on card value rather than aggression and initiative to win pots.

Push them off a blindsteal once and they don't try again all session, so whenever they open the BU once I've slapped them down the first time, I'm just folding unless I have the nuts. Their coldcalling range to a 3bet is like {JJ, QQ, AK, AQs} - sometimes not even JJ.

Again, whenever your 13/9 is playing back at you, he just turned his hand face up.

A lot of flops are going to scare them. Their motivating goal is not to lose big pots. Notice that's not really a goal, since it's about avoidance of something rather than something they want to achieve.

Their motivating fears are that they always put their opponent on the nuts (I tend to do this sometimes myself). I'd adjust by staying out of their way a lot of the time when I didn't have a hand that had reasonably equity against their opening range. When I did have good equity, I'd be 3betting them a lot, since they probably fold a ton to this preflop and they may also call and play fit-or-fold at the flop, so there's going to be ample opportunity to take it away on a later street.

I also want position on them, for all the normal reasons but also because on a drawy board they are going to bet out to protect their hand due to their fear of being drawn out on, so that turns their hand face up for me before I ever commit to anything beyond the preflop action. If they check a drawy board to me, they don't have a piece of it mostly.

Objective: How much information do you glean from those 2 numbers when they're not your own?

A little, but I want to know more about how they behave subsequently to opening, or calling. There's a 13/9/2 and then there's a 13/9/7.

There are 13/9s who get a hand and get married to it, and there are 13/9s who fold a lot post flop, fearing the few combos in their opponents range that beat them.