I'm a Tagfish, plz help me

[minSim]

My occasionally 2+2 lurking moment when I’m bored at work at Friday was actually quite nice today. Someone started a thread about Tagfishes and there stages and their symptoms.
(you can find it here if you want to read it: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...d.php?t=146616)

And although I knew/felt this already, I couldn’t really bring it to words, but this guy did a pretty good job:
I’m a Tagfish.
Here are the points he mentioned that directly apply to me:

Hey TAGfish,
You group together starting hands that look somewhat similarly and analyze them as if they were identical when they are somewhat different. You believe J9s is identical to J8s. You believe 98s is identical to 76s.

Hey TAGfish,
You don't bet with the 40% of your hand range that has the most equity in a situation where you bet 40% of the time. You probably attempt to "balance your range" in spots that SHOULD NOT BE BALANCED.

Hey TAGfish,
You assume that every other player is controlled by their inner TAGfish too.

And especially these three:

Hey TAGfish,
You don't understand what a hand range is. You pretend you do, but you don't. If you actually understand what a hand range is, you have no idea how to determine another player's hand range in any given situation. If you understand how to determine their range, you don't know what to do with it, and only know how to exploit the MOST skewed ranges

Hey TAGfish,
You are very good at playing the top and bottom of your hand range, but very bad at playing the middle.

Hey TAGfish,
You make progressively more mistakes the deeper you get into a hand. Your preflop play is generally not mistake ridden. You might not do anything that is extremely exploitable, and you might play tight or loose. Your flop play is marginally worse but still reasonably competent. As you get to the turn and river and the decisions become more difficult and involve more money, you make more costly mistakes.

And later in one of his comments:

The stage 2 TAGfish understands that sometimes people have good hands and sometimes have bad hands when they take the same action. They will then take it to the next step often and realize that people who are active are bluffing a lot, and they'll start trying to make some random moves to try to exploit this.

I happen to think that players that are beyond these stages (partly) recognize these things.
I hope you guys have some tips for me, or players at the same stage, on how to develop further.
I have tons of excel sheets with like complete formula’s for break even points of 4betting/shoveing against certain 3bet ranges, analyses of how certain raising or calling ranges hit all kinds of flops, several 3bet scenario analyses, probability analyses, etc.

But tbh, I think those are pretty far from what really matters in becoming a fundamentally better player, that understands why he’s playing the game the way he’s playing. They usually are just details for particular situations, that really don’t come up very often in SSNL.


The op of the 2+2 thread I referred to also had the following comment in it (inclusing my reply):

Hey TAGfish,
You think the double barrel is like radiation or something, only used very sparingly. Think about how easy you are to play against when you fire with 100% of your range on every flop, then fire with the top 10% of your range on the turn, and randomly bluff with 1% of your range.

(Explanation) Double barrel more and you will get more value on your better hands, and win more with your weaker hands.

A lot of you probably check back middle pair frequently in position but you probably don't really know why. Basically the way to be perfectly balanced is to bet with the top X% of your range and the bottom X% of your range where X is the same. If you decide that cbetting 60% of the time on a flop is the most profitable against an opponent, bet with the top 30% and bottom 30% of your range and check the middle 40%. Follow the same process on the turn, and you will become much much better. Then at some point once your opponents are actually competent and understanding what you're doing, you can start MERRRRRRGING!!!

Instaedit: obviously when I talk about top and bottom 30% I mean put every hand in your range into pokerstove against his range and rank them by equity. Take the 30% that have the most equity and the 30% that have the least and there is your balanced betting range if you want to bet 60%.

Please explain this, because it's VERY interesting....and I'm your school example for Tagfish.

- Why do you break it into a 50/50?
- Why do you think 50/50 is good at lower stakes games?

Because to me it seems like this also implies that i.e. against loose passive players, you're bluffing as often as you're valuebetting. At least at first this doesn't seem the way you wanna go.

But as mentioned, I'm one of your best examples of Tagfish, so I might be missing tons of points and concepts. Please elaborate some if you want.

The fact that a few days back I did’nt know whether to raise, fold or call AJo in the blinds versus an unknown CO or BTN raiser, because I just didn’t which option was better for what reason and ended up folding because of it, said enough to me.
It’s the same thing that I don’t have enough understanding of certain fundamental parts of NLH that I can’t say for sure if the suggestion in the above quote is spot on or not. I don't have enough knowledge the be able to be sure, or I don't know how to use the knowledge to be able to be sure.

[jyms]

Hey TAGfish,
You don't bet with the 40% of your hand range that has the most equity in a situation where you bet 40% of the time. You probably attempt to "balance your range" in spots that SHOULD NOT BE BALANCED.

Ok this one is pretty tough for me to explain, and I've been trying to put it into words for a WHILE. Imagine a K52 rainbow flop where the cutoff opened for pot preflop and you called on the button. If the cutoff is a TAGfish it is very likely he will bet 100% of his range here and only call a TINY percentage of the time if you make a small raise. When they do call, their range is very skewed towards hands that have a lot of equity. Because of this, raising a large percentage of the time will be extremely profitable. TAGfish don't adjust so if you have a perfectly balanced range here you are burning money INSANE money. I used to think that the most profitable thing to do here was to balance my range. If I was only going to raise 3 hands for value, (22, 55, KK) I would raise exactly that same number of combinations as bluffs. Obviously the ratios vary greatly from player to player, but now there are definitely players you should raise 5x as often with hands worse than KT or K9 than with those better. The way I select those hands is by picking the ones that have the most equity if called. For example, A3 > K8 > 98. Because A3 has 4 times as much equity against a range of (KK+, 55, 22, K5s, K9+), you should be 4x as inclined to raise A3 as 98 here. Many TAGfish do not realize the massive differences between these hands and see both as just a no pair hand.

This quote alone may have just changed my game on a scale that I never knew existed.

[Da GOAT]

wow

[ATOTHEC101]

wow indeed, preety interesting stuff that applys to alot of my game to.

[DJJunkPauds]

That thread is pretty good at telling me what I already knew was wrong with my game without telling me how to fix it.

Still a nice post though, and thanks for the link minSim.

[Da GOAT]

tbh i seen thread on 2+2 and cudltn comprehend much. sure its tell the problem but i dunno instinctively straight away how to fix it. thank god they extended some thoughts.

excellent post and i know ive learned a ton.

[Da GOAT]

finally i know what i can do with pokerstove *facepalm*

burning money if i dont

[badgers]

wow post thnx minsim

[minSim]

Does somebody understand the concept in de last quote, on a level that he can say something meanfull about it and/or can explain it further?

[Erpel]

Speaking of 2+2 producing something worth reading, I found this interesting - Ryan Fee regular 2+2 poster wrote this handy guide to 6max:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/ryanfee/fees6max.pdf

[minSim]

It's indeed a good guide Erpel. I dicovered it a few months back and have read and studied things of it a few times since then.

But tbh, the quide probably does a good thing in creating a Tagfish, although likely a better one then most out there. It's definately one of the better guides out there.

But I'm beginning to think that in the end guides will not make you a much better player. This could very much be person dependant though, but until I analyse something myself I'm very hard to get conficed. Someone telling you to do something even when there's some form of why in there, in the end won't help make the decision in a slightly different scenario. I know Ryan Fee tries to explain certain things and that's definately good and plays a large part in why this guide is very good compared to others.

[minSim]

Also, I don't know if any knows what 'bottom up' and 'top down' strategy's mean. It are often used terms in business.

Top down means for example that the CEO of a company writes a plan for a change. Then the managers of the underlying departments write more detailed plans that are derivatives from the CEO plan and in the end the employees work according to that managers plans.

Bottom up i.e. means that an employee goes to his manager and explains he's seeing something go wrong on the workfloor. The manager of the department includes this in his development plan for the next year. The development plans from all departments will be input for next years strategy which will be written in the CEO's plan.


Going back to poker:

Most people learn poker bottom up. They play some, read
some guides, some forums, some tips and tricks, etc. And slowly they'll start to see certain things group together and they'll explore it. That process goes over several times and on the way you're understanding things on higher levels more and more. Call it concepts, or fundamentals, or maybe even metagame, it's pretty much the same thin. It seems like while you're developing as a player, together with it you're understanding things more on a higher conceptual level.


In the end what I'm trying to do is find a way to learn poker top down. Understanding things like balance and why end when we should balance, equity and different forms of it for different hands (i.e. draws or made hands)....and very likely tons of other things that I just don't know about at this time.

[jyms]

It's indeed a good guide Erpel. I discovered it a few months back and have read and studied things of it a few times since then.

But tbh, the guide probably does a good thing in creating a Tagfish, although likely a better one then most out there. It's definately one of the better guides out there.

But I'm beginning to think that in the end guides will not make you a much better player. This could very much be person dependent though, but until I analyze something myself I'm very hard to get conficed. Someone telling you to do something even when there's some form of why in there, in the end won't help make the decision in a slightly different scenario. I know Ryan Fee tries to explain certain things and that's definately good and plays a large part in why this guide is very good compared to others.

I discovered some things about this only recently. Guides and books will make you better, if being a taggfish is better than what you are now. The truly great players here and on other sites got to where they are thinking about the game alot. Spending hours looking at hands, assigning ranges, reviewing actions based on ranges and how th opponent would react.

My biggest enlightenment in recent months was the "KK on an A high flop" thread started by gabe over 3 years ago. It is a simple problem that elicits a ton of thoughts about getting value versus betting for information. Guides teach you how to basically play, but once you learn how to fold preflop, cbet and double barrel, you will find yourself having to learn how to play $50NL and up where just betting will not be enough to make a decent winrate and progress as a player. Doing anything without thoughts about what your opponent will do with his entire range of hands is counterproductive.

[noble007]

A lot of you probably check back middle pair frequently in position but you probably don't really know why. Basically the way to be perfectly balanced is to bet with the top X% of your range and the bottom X% of your range where X is the same. If you decide that cbetting 60% of the time on a flop is the most profitable against an opponent, bet with the top 30% and bottom 30% of your range and check the middle 40%. Follow the same process on the turn, and you will become much much better. Then at some point once your opponents are actually competent and understanding what you're doing, you can start MERRRRRRGING!!!

I think that quote is completely wrong and is an incredibly inferior strategy to play against 99% of the players you come across....

In the quote above he is basically describing the 'optimal range' to play in any situation. I think it is very important to realise though that this approach will not maximise your profits!! Playing the style indicated above (finding the correct % of hands to bet and splitting them equally between the bottom & top of your range) will merely minimise your losses against the very best players in the game!! Ie. It will make you unexploitable if you get it exactly right (it will never be -ev long term at worst it will be neutral ev if your opp adjusts perfectly.)

But the fact is that nearly all the players we play against have weaknesses and dont adjust perfectly to our range that is why instead of playing the optimal range we use 'exploitative strategies & ranges' to maximise our profit from the mistakes they make. (Ie we skew our ranges until they adjust - against a calling station who called 100% of our river bets we would never bet with the top and bottom 30% of our range because the result would be neautral ev/break-even instead we would just bet with any hand that has 51% equity vs his range and get masssssive profit.)

& his later quotes are just examples of using exploitative strategies & ranges instead of the optimal one he originally advocated above..
ie on the K52 flop if your opponents weakness is that he is folding too many hands in this spot to a raise then obviously you increase your bluffing frequency in this spot take advantage of this. (adding on hands usually in the order of equity they have if called , ((not always though sometimes it is better to add on hands in the order of certainty you will have that you will be ahead if you hit one of your outs but I wont go into that now.))

[Erpel]

On the topic of how we learn, following Robb's newbie lessons I now ran into the lesson where he referenced ISF's backwards learning comments and revised ISF theorem and the 2+2 thread on Shania - I've read both before and when I read them now I find that I understand a little more.

Poker isn't the only thing where we build a higher level conceptual knowledge from knowing specific applications. I mentioned a different angle on it in a thread in the beginners forum recently - when you do not grasp something completely to get a full understanding you have to laboriously go through a lot of manual steps - as you get better at them some of the steps become automatic and subconscious and you begin to develop shorthand terms that describe concepts much bigger than the beginner is prepared to keep in his head at one time. Like a hand range. A beginner cannot grasp what a hand range means - you box around the concept and eventually get a rudimentary understanding of it - you start applying it and start to feel you've got the hang of it - you start viewing situations and decisions from the perspective of hand ranges and you understand that your previous understanding was a shallow ghost of what hand ranges really mean. As with many such things once you've taken a leap in understanding you rapidly lose a feel for how it was not to understand it, and what you could ever have missed.

I've run across one very apt definition of what it is to be a genius, which I'll paraphrase here: If you can manage to take something that appears unfathomably complex and explain it in a way that exposed the core principles and makes it simple and approachable - that's genius.

As I live and learn I've had to conclude that that's not just genius - that's also experience and any level of knowledge beyond the superficial in any thing. It certainly applies to poker knowledge. The litmus test of if you have understood a poker concept is if you can explain it to a non-poker person in a way that they can grasp the essentials of why it is important and why it works. The frustrating thing is that what you've taken weeks or months to get to a point where you feel you fully understand this non-poker person will then dismiss as "just common sense, surely?" - but that just goes to show that you have managed in your explanation to make the solution obvious - and that's akin to genius.

[badgers]

In the end what I'm trying to do is find a way to learn poker top down. Understanding things like balance and why end when we should balance, equity and different forms of it for different hands (i.e. draws or made hands)....and very likely tons of other things that I just don't know about at this time.

Sorry to be harsh but this just seems retarded. I don't understand why you would want to do this instead of building a good foundation in the basics with hand reading instead of leaping into stuff like making perfectly balanced ranges against players who we can exploit.

I mean I just don't understand why you would want to learn "top down". It makes no sense, sure you may be able to create a perfectly balanced range but if you suck at hand-reading then you're screwed.

[minSim]

Hand reading is 1, but knowing what to do with/against that range is 2.

Being able to create an optimal range/image of your own is something totally different as well.

I'm pretty sure, in general, top down is the better way to learn things; from concepts to details. It's basically how schools work, and most trainings, etc.


Noble: I agree completely with you.
I haven't checkedyet, but I'm hoping for some nice answers from the guy in the 2+2 thread.

[bode]

wow, thanks for pointing this out minsim. that post feels like its written directly about me. i am officially a TAGfish, sigh.

[grnydrowave2]

In the end what I'm trying to do is find a way to learn poker top down. Understanding things like balance and why end when we should balance, equity and different forms of it for different hands (i.e. draws or made hands)....and very likely tons of other things that I just don't know about at this time.

Sorry to be harsh but this just seems retarded. I don't understand why you would want to do this instead of building a good foundation in the basics with hand reading instead of leaping into stuff like making perfectly balanced ranges against players who we can exploit.

I mean I just don't understand why you would want to learn "top down". It makes no sense, sure you may be able to create a perfectly balanced range but if you suck at hand-reading then you're screwed.

http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...er-t67349.html

Makes sense to me.

[Marshall28]

When I was reading the responses in this thread, it reminded me of an article I read a while back written by ZeeJustin.... smart dude. Here's a link:

http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/show...rt=1&vc=1&nt=2

I can remember back when these were the things I was struggling with, and lots of successful friends would try to explain to me the math side of things in order to rationalize why a balanced range works in poker.

What I ended up realizing is that it doesn't work for me. It never has. I tend to find a lot of what ZJ is talking about as far as a 'non-rati0nal' player understands the game, I fit into that category really well. Non-rational is definitely very different than irrational, I would say it's more of a psychologically based understanding and doesn't really resemble a game theory approach at all. A good example would be from the movie 21. Kevin Spacey is asking the kid to choose 1 of 3 doors, 1 of which has a brand new car behind it, and the other 2, goats. Spacey says "in this game he is the host and he knows which door the car is behind. The kid picks the 1st door, and Kevin Spacey goes and opens the 3rd door to reveal a goat, then asks the kid if he wants to change his pick. The kid says no, and gives the reasoning that when he first chose, he had a 33.3% chance of being right, and now that there are only two doors left, his original equity has gone up to 66.6%. I would definitely stick to the 1st door, but for a psychological reason. I'd do it because the host didn't stipulate which door he would open first, so if I chose the wrong one, I'm sure he would have gone to that door and opened it to show a goat behind it. Reality is, with the 3rd door revealed, his equity only went up 17.7% because he is allowed a new choice at this juncture.

If you think about which way you would answer here, I think it can say a lot about the type of player you are, as well as what you might be capable of. Like in ZJ's post, I found that I excelled in MSNL where a psychological approach imo is much more profitable. I've struggled at micro stakes for a long time, but as soon as I hit MSNL things jsut started to make sense....The game becomes much less convoluted and much clearer. It tends to be the math oriented guys that I have seen really struggle when they hit those games, because the higher the stakes, the better their opponents understand how to play non-exploitatively, and they are no longer able to capitalize on their opponents mistakes.

I know it was kinda long, but this was just some stuff I wanted to get off my mind.

[dsaxton]

That ZeeJustin article is very interesting. When I was learning to play backgammon, I can recall going from a point where I had to sit there and calculate what I thought the right play was (conscious incompetence / competence), to a point where I no longer thought at all, but simply intuited my decisions (unconscious competence).

It's interesting how different mental processes are rendered unconscious after so much repetition. With respect to poker, I've noticed that this is the case with hand-reading. When I first started playing, I would sit and replay the betting in my head and consciously try to determine what my opponent had based on some type of practical induction. Now, I don't think about it, but instead "feel" what my opponent is holding (which I'm sure is a conclusion my brain is coming to from the same process as before, only subconsciously). Oftentimes, I'll make very specific reads on my opponent's hand (sometimes down to the suits of his hole cards), and then be unable to articulate my reasoning afterwards.

I think the reason why so-called rational players (I would consider myself one) tend to have more difficulty at higher limits is simply because most of the situations aren't ones that can easily be analyzed in terms of pure deductive logic. They involve a more organic mix of psychology, intuition, pattern recognition and practical judgement. In lower stakes games, your opponents simply aren't thinking intelligently about the game, so the psychological mind games that the "feel" players excel at don't exist. The game is more a matter of making reasonably accurate reads on your opponents hands and avoiding making mathematical errors. These types of decisions are best addressed by the type of deductive reasoning that the logical players excel at. Also, I think that rational players have a natural tendency to systemize their style of play (that is, come up with notions of what is or is not the correct play in certain situations based on some set of objective criteria like position and their hole cards and stick to them), and this can oftentimes work to their detriment when their opponents are attempting to adjust to their play.

[Marshall28]

dsaxton .. true that.

[guitarizt]

The kid picks the 1st door, and Kevin Spacey goes and opens the 3rd door to reveal a goat, then asks the kid if he wants to change his pick. The kid says no, and gives the reasoning that when he first chose, he had a 33.3% chance of being right, and now that there are only two doors left, his original equity has gone up to 66.6%. I would definitely stick to the 1st door, but for a psychological reason.

I would do the same thing. I also tend to do the same thing in poker.

The only problem is, you're chances go up if you switch doors. Right now I'm trying to fix my game to go more from put them one to three hands at the most and do whatever, to putting them on a bigger range and make the correct decision on each street against their likely range.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem