Amount of players

Can someone elaborate on how the amount of players in the game should affect your play-style? Where I play it's mostly 6-player tables, so you'll be decking it out with 4-6 people.

This seems to hurt tight play a lot, since the blinds eat you a lot faster! Also, less people means on average poorer hands, so maybe playing tight hurts your chances here again?

How to adjust your playstyle to this environment? Since most of the strategies I found here seem to be written for 10-player tables.. and they don't really seem to work all to well with half as much players..

Any input, advice, comments?

The basics is:
yr cutesy LSCs aren't worth much there. Play cards with good top-pair value. Also, if you're going to play a hand, raise it PF. Always,.

God dammit.. THIS is the reason why I do well at MTTs with 10 people yet suck horribly at 5-6 people ring games. Cost me $25 over the past 2 days to figure this out lol.

Too bad I haven't found any strategy articles on this subject. (someone should make one, seriously.. even if you're never gonna play anything below 10 online, this atleast covers most house games) Ok, now I'm gonna have to think this one through.

Thx for the advice LeFou. Always raising preflop if I am gonna play a hand, will keep that in mind thx. And never played connectors even now.

And if you say good cards with top pair value, do you mean like playing A7 too?

And how do pocket pairs play out? I have had abysmal succes with them at a 6-table as opposed to 10-tables. Could just be luck/bad luck, but maybe the odds for them change too? Atleast it seems that if you do hit your set, the chances are rather slim that someone else is gonna hit their top pair so you won't get your pay-off in that 1/8 chance they hit most of the time.

The positive effect of a 'suit' on your cards also seems dimished, right?

Anything else? (I need to win back that $25 I lost playing like an idiot with the wrong strategies lol)

ick... all aces are raisable, but A7 is nothing to write home about. You get better mileage from QJ, KT, et al. By top pair hands I mean those that will usually win if they catch; Ax is a different case.

Also none of this works real well if you can't run a multistreet bluff from time to time

i'd suggest learning ABC poker in full ring first. Then do six max to work on your hand reading and aggression.

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Originally Posted by Renton

i'd suggest learning ABC poker in full ring first. Then do six max to work on your hand reading and aggression.

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I like a challenge ^^ .. plus I'm generally good at reading people.

Just read the article on 6-max limit.. very very insightful.. now I just have to figure out the differences between limit and no limit so I can filter out all the limit-specific information :)

But really.. someone kind and skilled should write something up about the differences in strategy when the amount of players go down in no-limit games.

(again sry for double post but I'm hyped now)

Whereever you may be Hypermegachi, mucho gracias to you!

Read his essay on 6max, wrote down some key elements and went to play according to his preachings (ignoring the limit-only stuff as best as possible).

Finally I turned a profit! I'm up $15 after this session (still down $10 net total, but finally I'm "getting" the 6max game). Damn and this was FUN to play! I don't think I called even one hand.. fold, raise or reraise. Occasional check. That, a remapping of card values and better understanding of 6max-specific positioning improved my game a lot!

Ofcourse no doubt I still have many leaks.. for one I still neglect to make my postflop bets based on pot-sizes.. but now that I have passed this hurdle, the path is cleared to learn to get better!

/off to bed now

Confusing day with a nice ending. FTR rocks! :)

I might sound harsh, but "getting" the game after one day, one session etc, is not realistic. You will find yourself getting it and losing it many times to come, rest assured. Hypermega's guide is for 6-max LIMIT, remember that. I would also recommend full ring, ABC poker to start with. The swings in 6-max are really huge, and it might be a problem evaluationg your game in a fair way.

If you still want to read up on 6max, try http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...ic.php?t=18187. But I think you will see that there are a lot of things to keep in mind at 6-max, and you will probably not have the ABC foundations to take on 6max, yet. If you neglect to make your postflop bets based on pot size (and things like that) really, start at full ring.

Just my $0.02.

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Originally Posted by sandstorm

I might sound harsh, but "getting" the game after one day, one session etc, is not realistic.

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Thx for the heads up. But I wasn't really trying to say I 'get the game'. I try to work in incremental steps towards getting better.

The situation is this: I'm generally good at two things, anything involving strategy, and reading people. So I was playing at the lowest stakes with the biggest idiots I could find. And the thing was, I *knew* what they were gonna do. But I just.. couldn't.. beat them. So I went to bed, but ofcourse I couldn't sleep, fretted over it for hours in sheer agony. And then suddenly I put the pieces of the puzzle together. So I came here, posted for input, read the 6max guide (yes it's for limit but I filtered that info out), wrote it out for self-reference and went back to the tables.

Again, I knew how these guys would play, but now I could beat them with my strategies. It's a very important turning point for me, since I'm on a very tight budget.. atleast I'm not gonna lose money to the biggest idiots out there any more, so I'm "safer" when trying to improve my game further. Basically my only income is through a girl who is in love with me, so that's not very solid. (not like a pimp or anything lol.. she's just getting me tons of customers from her circle her girlfriends that buy some crap DVDs I'm selling)


Or, to make a long story short: I didn't mean to say I got the 6max game, just that I finally had that epiphany moment where I understood the difference between 6max and 10max and how to adjust my strategy towards it (atleast fundamentally).

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You will find yourself getting it and losing it many times to come, rest assured. Hypermega's guide is for 6-max LIMIT, remember that. I would also recommend full ring, ABC poker to start with. The swings in 6-max are really huge, and it might be a problem evaluationg your game in a fair way.

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okido.

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If you still want to read up on 6max, try http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...ic.php?t=18187. But I think you will see that there are a lot of things to keep in mind at 6-max, and you will probably not have the ABC foundations to take on 6max, yet. If you neglect to make your postflop bets based on pot size (and things like that) really, start at full ring.

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Thanks a lot for the links. In all truthfulness, I was just hyped up when I made that post because finally I had made a step forward. I'm a lot more level-headed now already. Will be looking out for many of my leaks and trying to plug them, as always.

EDIT: maybe a bit more info, cuz it's kinda funny. I was playing with really the biggest idiots I could find who still wager real money: the kind that sits in with below half the buy-in because they're afraid to lose (or realize they suck). I had a guy with $1.5 go all-in two times in a row with 23, and exclaiming this fact truthfully before the betting! (he pulled trips the first time, was out the second)

So yeah, it's VERY frustrating that I couldn't even beat these guys! I mean, my last two MTTs I finished in top 10% and top 1% respectively, so I can't be *that bad* you know. So after my little epiphany I managed to sleep through these guys without even paying much attention. At one time, I managed to oust three of these low-stack fish in 2 consecutive hands. That was fun, lol.

So I'll probably mull on these types of guys once more until I break even again (need to win $10) and then look for better players, where I actually have to pay attention to the game and thus can learn new things.

I personally like 6 max tables (or 5 max) for the simple reason that you get to play so many more hands and you should be really agressive doing so. Just gotta be careful - cuz the swings are huge.

shorthanded game is definitly different from full table game.

my 2 cents

1. You have to be involved in more hands, otherwise the blinds will eat you alive. I think about 25% of the hands is a reasonable number.

2. Most pots are 2 or 3 way, so you want to avoid playing hands like low-mid suited connectors and probably low pocket pairs in a riase pot.

3. Hands like AQ, AJ, AT, KQ go up in value

4. You have more oppurtinities to bluff - use them.

5. Other people have more oppurtinites to bluff - get good reads on them and destack them when they do.

Thanks TLR. I'm still having some problems properly evaluating the strength of my hand. It's ok preflop.. I just lower my standards a bit from 10max, then play tight out of position and loose in position.

But postflop.. here you should evaluate your hands upwards too, but I still have problems getting the right feel here.

But the BIGGEST problem is bluffing! I am clueless about how to do this. I try, but dunno, not very succesful all in all. The main thing I seem to notice is that the good players throw around a LOT of money when they bluff.

But I'm not really comfortable doing that.. throwing around a lot of money when you don't know what you're doing seems like suicide. And trust me, it is.. I'll just be throwing money away!

Maybe I should make a new thread about this, but I'll try here.. if someone could give me some pointers on bluffing in 6max I would REALLY appreciate that. Specifically:

- How often do you bluff?
- How do you figure it's time to bluff or it's time to play 'honest'?
- How do you calculate how much to throw out on a bluff?
- How to bluff and keep your game intransparant?

I don't readily have any answers to these questions :(

I almost dont play 6 max ring, but I will take a shut at your questions.

First thing first - when you bluff you have to bet like you mean it. It has to look exactly the same as the way you bet your hand. Bluffing halfheartdly is one of the worst things you can do because any decent player will spot it and come over the top with any two.

How often do you bluff - As often as you can get away with it. As with everything in poker - it depends - in this case it highly depends on the table fabric (loose, tight, calling stations). It also depends on whether the other players play their cards or play situational poker.
For starters dont bluff in a multiway pot, you can get away with bluffing one or two people, but not three or more.

A bluff usually has to be consistant - The easiest bluff to pull is continuation bet - you show strength preflop and you show strength on the flop.

'Bluff' is actually taking advantage of a situation, for example if you think your opponent is drawing then you can 'bluff' them if the draw does not hit with any 2.

Another good type of bluff is the check-raise bluff. This requires a bit more reading skill - you have to put your opponent on a continuation bet and come over the top

How do yu calculate how much to throw out on a bluff - This is actually the easiest question to answer - bluffs has to be in line with you normal gaming. In a bluff you try to represnet a hand, so bet like the hand you represnt. If you usually bet pot size when you have TPTK then bet pot size when you want to represnet TPTK.

How to bluff and keep your game intransparent - as I said, a bluff has to look like a decent hand. If you are playing with decent players you cant pull too many bluffs with out getting challanged, if you play with villian who only play by his cards you can bluff him out of most pots.