Live Adjustments. (Drew, ... )

So drew, how do you differ your play (by default) to a live game you assume will be loose passive?

Do you just play tight until you get a feel for how much people are PFRing, how much people are calling PFRs, then just adapt? Do you limp more in games with tons of limping in EP/MP, then raise for isolation behind them in CO/BU with more marginal holdings and try to take it down with a c-bet, or do you just wait for your powerhouses to do that?

I guess that depends on how light the limping villains float on the flop, eh?

I guess I'm looking for some general adaptations you make to your multi-tabling online-bot mode for the o-ville games...

I rely more on reads when playing live than online. The multi-tabling online-bot mode requires zero reading skills (no hud ftw). Live, I have fewer opportunities to stack over pairs with sets per hour than online. This forces us to play the player.

You hit nearly every question on the head. I start off tight until I get a good feel for PFRing ranges (because I do not have any reads yet). I limp in more when there is lots of limping (exactly like 2nl online). I still wait for powerhouse hands before I'm raising PF to isolate.

Honestly though, the two games are really quite similar. If anything, my live game is better because I add reads into my game (which is 90% of poker according to every poker player in the world).

btw, game tonight in the oh dot. 6pm ish. seniors centre down the street from the uptown theatre on the south side of broadway. give me a shout if interested, i think i gave u my # in a PM

1) Position, position, postion, position.
2) See lots of flops with the fish.... in position....
3) Don't be too timid to 3-bet, steal out of the blinds and make big money bluffs against all but the biggest of stations. Lots of live players are timid and it feels a lot more like real money than a video game.
4) Pay attention to your opponents' habbits. What is their approach to the game? Do they expect to make money? Do they commit to flops? Peel? Are they honest when they talk about their hand? Do they tip hand strength with bet sizing? What other kind of information do they leak?
5) Profit

patience and self-control should be essentials of your live games. Also, i suggest you to buy this book for your live games: Read 'em and Reap, A Career FBI Agent's Guide to Decoding Poker Tells. Seriously, i spot lots of specific tells and use it a lot to read ppl in my local casino after reading through it. :wink:
for example: there's one huge donk here who often clasp his hands behind his head pretty much every time he entered a pot with a decent hand and he did this with monsters too.

If it's your first time playing live for much money, avoid alcohol and try to make sure you're not giving anything big away. When I first started playing live, another player at the table noted that i suppressed a grin every time i liked my hand. Tells don't get much more obvious than that.

Aside from that, yeah I like tight early just because bet-sizing and # of players seeing the flop at a live game can be pretty ridiculous. A lot of the way you'll make money live is by exploiting big, gaping obvious holes and weaknesses. They'll usually go to showdown against each other fairly often and you should get some pretty good ideas of how your opps play pretty quickly. So a bit of watching while nut camping/standard TAgg play will usually make the game pretty damn easy by the time you decide to open up as you see fit according to the table.

I do make a few adjustments to my normal game when i sit at a live table without knowing my opps. When i first sit, I play a real tight preflop range like AOK's 19 hand thing or so, and when I have a premium hand, I'll overraise it (like 6-8x bb) because getting callers is almost never a problem and I want to play premiums for stacks. Again though, this is only until I feel like I have an idea what my opps are doing and their relative skill levels. After that, it's all situational.

i'm going down to my local card room tonight and love to see BIG money heavy actions over there :P Poker tells books + Tight aggressive play+ good discipline+ patience = PROFIT
Have a good weekend , my fellow FTRers :wink: