Diversify Your Play
One key part of maintaining stable win rates is diversifying your play. If you have more weapons, techniques, tricks and such you have more ways to win. If you are a nitty player dependant on your hole cards, your win rate will drop every time you hit a cold deck, bad beats, or anytime there is a solid player at your table capable of exploiting nits. If you diversify your play, you are not putting all your eggs in one basket and will see less variance, if the deck is cold you will still be able to win with plain aggression.,, this list goes on.
How do you diversify your play? Well, you are going to take all the tools that each style of player uses and you are going to perfect all of them. LAGGs use aggression as there main weapon, and ultimately bluff alot. Nits use simple position and premium hands. TAGGS use premium hands, position and well timed aggression, fish (the good fish) use passiveness in disguise and wake up on the river with a monster that beats you. maniacs, they use FEAR. Fear that if you call on the flop, you are paying your stack to see a river...
But what do Taggs, laggs, nits and fish all have in common? They are ALL exploitable.
If I had to use metaphors to describe this, which I will do because I use metaphors ALOT, I would compare NL holdem to Martial Arts.
Think about diversification in MMA. If you had to pick the likely winner in a fight out of the follwing types, who would you pick?
Professional Boxer
Kickboxer
Wrestler
streetfighter
Mixed Martial Artist
My pick would hands down be Mixed Martial Artist.... why? Diversification.
Think about players at your table like this:
a NIT is like a boxer waiting around for that one "haymaker" to knock you out, and has no other ways of beating you. And if you hit him first, he's done.
A Maniac is like a streetfighter just attacking without discipline or strategy and hoping for the best, and if you hit him first he goes crazy berserk and makes even more mistakes.
A fish is like, well, a fish is like that weak little b*tch that never fights back
A LAGG is like the streetfighter, they just have a little more discipline but are still very predicatable.
and finally the TAGG, the TAGG is like the bare fist striker that uses smarts and opportunity, but still doesn't stand a chance against a mixed martial artist.
MMA fighters have many tools, they know how to wrestle, they know how to strike, karate, ju jitsu, boxing, etc.... and most of all they know how and when to adjust to their opponent, and which skills to utilize for a victory.
So, diversify, learn how to use the wide range of tools out there, those tools do not belong to any certain style of player.
Some of the basic tools are:
Aggression (the TAGGS/LAGGS primary tool)
bluffing (The maniacs primary tool)
some advanced tools to think about:
inducing bluffs
isolation
stealing flops/turns/rivers
manipulating your image
controlling the table, forcing
image manipulation
exploiting weakness
exploiting certain flop textures in and out of position
show weakness to induce aggression and vis versa
use your think tank to make THEM think
you have the control and ability to control your image at the table. You can make yourself look like a solid player, who deserves respect on the turn. But when you lose that respect, is your strategy done with? the answer is heck no, now you are going to exploit the crap out of the 5 guys at the table who think you are an idiot.
LEARN HOW THEY REACT TO EVERY EVENT and take advantage of it.
If you were to ask me what my table stats are (VPIP/PR/3bet) etc... my answer would be "it depends". My vpip, pfr, 3bet, cbet and all other stats is absolutely dependant on the villains at my table. Which leads me to my word of advice for the day.
word of the day:
ALWAYS have your hud displaying Current table stats on your villains.
Get rid of your ABC poker and learn some algebra.
Good Lucks to you all
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