A small guide to improve your (replay)poker strategy

Replay Poker Poker Strategy
43

I don’t 100% agree with this, but a case could be made either way. If you face the same opponents a lot, you have to balance your range or become too predictable. Against random unknowns… not so much.

But the real question is this… do you want to be a better poker player or a better Replay player?

Being a better Replay player means making (mostly) small adjustments to your game, but being a better poker player means you can’t ignore basics like range balancing.

Just my opinion, do with it as you will. :slight_smile:

44

[quote=“SunPowerGuru, post:43, topic:6548”]
But the real question is this… do you want to be a better poker player or a better Replay player?
[/quote]Both :shinto_shrine: … ohhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmm

45

Joe -

There are players I find “interesting” and watch when I can. Sometimes I’ll just peek in at random high/elite stakes tables to see what’s going on. If I see one that looks like it has an interesting game going, I’ll spend some time watching and making notes on styles, bet patterns and so on. With your hand in particular, my attention was peaked because of the size relative to your bankroll. I knew there was a good story there or you wouldn’t have had 15 million of your chips in the middle.

With the player you were facing, the min raise meant almost any A from what I’ve seen of him. If he had QQ+, he almost certainly would have put in the sizeable raise.

I don’t know Dwan’s overall profit/loss but I know he is a terror on the cash game super-high roller circuit. He is a high-variance player but he certainly isn’t stupid. Just because you see him bluff someone off K’s with 7/4s on a board he had absolutely none of doesn’t mean he does that every hand. A lot of people don’t seem to get that part about televised poker. In fact, there is a waiting list for tables at the game I play in on the nights immediately following televised poker. The regulars all want seats to pick off the players who come in thinking they want to do what they just saw on TV. Its like clockwork - happens every single time like that.

I don’t play a lot here and very little of the ring games. I love my cash game but playing that way here would likely not work very well. Everything is just a bit “off” for me here. I need to find the sweet spot between fast-playing hands and over protecting vulnerable hands. Just too many people in every freaking pot with ranges that are absurd. How do you put someone on a range when they limp every pot and will call raises out of position holding 9/4s? Its insanity. If it was 1 or 2 people per table like that and the rest of the players were solid, these players would be quickly devoured. When these loose-passive types are the majority on a table, the game becomes one of patience and frankly isn’t all that interesting for me. I can be bored silly for enough potential money but not for any amount of play-chips.

Just to clarify - I didn’t mean that ignoring all balanced play is the way to go. I just meant that I thought weighting play more towards extracting value seems to be the way to go. More weight on value but not a complete abandonment of balance. For example, there are players who min-raise any A but will raise suited A’s 3x and pairs 5x. Its an every single time thing so it would be hard for them to get much value from a decent player.

46

Throughout this thread I have advocated range balancing, but it pays to lean towards going for value, which makes it less effective to play a lot of hands that put you in bluff and semi bluff situations, but of course that also depends on lots of other factors like game type, stake level, etc.

I like your point about learning poker vs learning replay poker. I recently played a little live poker against people who typically play for real money, and my experience on replay has been really helpful but limited. It helps to gain experience with different situations and board textures, and many real-money players are just as spewy as replay players. But, I do think there is more passivity and limping on replay and that being good on replay is more about exploiting it than about playing a solid unexploitable game of your own. However I think against most “fish” the approach is basically the same. It is only when you play the same opponents repeatedly and they can actually adjust that the differences start to appear. It is possible to profitably use aggression and crush the replay limpfest with more than just premium hands, it just isn’t the easiest way to do it.

47

I agree that ring for play chips can get a bit boring. Especially because I prefer full ring to 6max, and full ring is even slower. I think at really high stakes there are some very good players who require the use of some (slightly) advanced skills like range balancing, which is why I have tried to accumulate the chips to play at that level. I want to learn a more gto approach and see how it works. I prefer tournaments myself, but 50k MTTs don’t really interest me anymore.

I agree that dwan is more than the crazy bluffer he is portrayed as, but his rise and losses emphasize how much poker has changed over the past 10 years and the past 20.

I know what you mean about ring being a little “off”. It seems like it can become a bingo game where everyone just waits to hit something big. But I think along with the idea of range balancing, even on replay one can raise preflop with a solid range of hands and put all of the limpers in a weird position. You may lose some pots against multiple callers, get folds around in others, and have to fold to the guy who woke up with AA, but with enough persistence and good decision making you can be successful with a more active approach.

1 Like
48

Joe - you have so much more experience than me here that I can say you have a thoughtful opinion while I only have a small notion. I would like to play a little more traditionally on the rings here and see how that goes. I’m sure there is an “optimal” strategy that can be employed but as of yet, I don’t have a great idea of what it could be. I may try to experiment a bit and just accept the likelihood of some big losses while I do. I’m not sure yet. I’m trying to beg steal and borrow a bankroll that could sit at some of these tables without being at too heavy a disadvantage. If I am going to accept a higher amount of variance than I normally would while I figure things out, then it is especially important to have more than 20 buy-ins, at the very least.

I’ve heard a lot about whether the game here can be compared to live play for stakes and if so, how. Well, IMO, that’s a yes and a no. People who think RP players are just the absolute worst bunch of donks on the planet have probably never played low stakes cash games at any casino. Its been a long time since I’ve played 1/2 games or something like that but from what I remember, it was entirely unpleasant and just as chock full of donkey bombers, abusive drunks who thought they were Phil Ivey and mental patients on weekend release as any game you’d see here.

In cash games, there will be ranges of players at any stakes. My opinion is that the average at the table tends to move up as the stakes go up. At the lowest levels you tend to get a ton of loose passives and loose aggressives. Basically you get tables where you have 9 people guessing, praying and cursing a lot. I find a table like that to be unplayable and avoid it like the plague. As you move up in stakes, the average climbs and you finally reach a point where some strategies can be employed besides just getting your money in to the good and hoping the odds work out.

An area where the play is absolutely different here than for stakes is in the SnG arena. I’ve had a few discussions with some very successful SnG players here and we’ve talked about the differences in strategy on Replay Poker vs the same games for stakes. On RP, the introduction of tournament points and leaderboard bonuses have created an absolutely distinct version of the game. Playing 90-120 games for average finishing position in order to get leaderboard bonuses creates a different optimal style and strategy than you get without those considerations. I’m not saying its better or worse but it is objectively different.

I could go on forever on topics like this (and many of you probably feel like I do). I would like to take this moment to once again implore Replay Poker to make hands available for download/export. Until some actual analytics can be done, all of us here are stuck with trial and error and guessing on relatively low sample sizes.

49

You are definitely correct about tournament formats. Online MTTs take much longer than the biggest on replay and the blinds increase more slowly, and live takes even longer. I’ve never played a real-money tournament outside of a home game, so I can’t really compare the competition.

I think the reality between replay and real poker is somewhere in the middle, it’s not as pointless as the losing players who never get above low stakes may claim, but abc poker can crush most of the highest stakes on replay. I agree that many real money poker players are just as bad as low stakes players on replay, although my only experience is in $1/$2 ring. In that sense, I believe replay can be really helpful to learn how to beat soft games full of passive fish (which could earn you a bunch of money in real poker), but it’s more difficult to learn more advanced skills here.

I would love nothing more than to play more real-money poker, but it’s pretty difficult in most parts of the US. I can say for sure that I have a phenomenal roi in my live experience but that’s only because I’ve played so little that I can remember each hand and session specifically lol.

1 Like
50

I’ve played MTTs in Vegas for $100 buyin, and cashed… played a $1/$2 NL table a couple times @ the Venitian, and have played fixed limit for $5 limit… Of course various home games, and tons of free poker @ bars for prizes (no cash)…

I’ve done the leaderboards ( yes, Warlock is right, they create a hybrid kinda situation ) and many of the promos. While it might be kewl to be #1, I can’t see with the current limits anyone making a serious run @ 10b chips…yes billion with a B…50k mtts don’t interest me, and I hate ring games altho thats pretty much the only way up for me now. I will say that the 20k/40k Ring tables are closer to real poker than all those donk tables, but the best game I can find here @ replay is still the Regionals

What brought me to Replay, is now almost forcing me to go elsewhere and that SUX. Its the lack of MTTs in the above 100k buyin range( basically as u move up, there is less/less to play ), and trying to get a SnG to start in that range is like pulling teeth… so that leaves me 1 choice… Ring Games ( yukkk )

Recently , last week or so , I have gone from 4.5m to 13m, playing close to ABC poker, and dive-bombing tables… Replay had made it harder to bank chips while playing Ring, so I have done the only thing I can do legally… I sit for say 500k-2m , then as soon as I double that up, I leave and come back after the counter resets. If that means jumping around tables/limits… I’ll do it… I find certain rules @ replay 110% hypocritical to thier stated goals and directly contradicting other replay rules…The only thing left for us players is to abuse what rules we can, and try and get the stupid ones chg’d…

Yes, online poker is different than live, but if you adjust for it, you can get “close” to the real experience, and there is 1 bonus noone has mentioned. If you learn to beat the donks, you won’t be lunchmeat to them live as easily, plus you can develop good habits and learn advanced strategies here that “can” translate down the road to live games…

Lets try this analogy : a friend of mine is into drones, and he wouldn’t let me try his untill I had 40+ hrs on a simulator 1st…So I didn’t break stuff the 1st time I tried to lift off the ground…
Same goes for Poker, think of this as a simulator… so when you go live, you don’t just instantly torch your cash, making really really rookie mistakes.

My thread on the “schedule” around here seems to be going nowhere, and my fav MTT got ruined by inclusion into a leaderboard… But without a schedule that allows for those who have clawed thier way up, the current schedule ( to me ) says : You have too many chips now, go play elsewhere…

There really is something to be said, about playing within your bankroll but think about it… Is it really fun to sit @ a table with 20% of your bankroll… against ppl buy’n in for same amount , yet its only .02% of thier bankroll ( yess 1000x or more )… NO its NOT… Thats where a SnG or MTT, as much as possible, evens out the playing field… but if you can’t get 1 going or none are offered for the next 6 hrs, you have only 1 option… Ring, and really … all there is , is 20k/40k yet almost no tables above that…

2 Likes
51

i just started also on 888poker a few days ago, i’m only playing on building the no deposit bonus, so you can imagine the stakes i’m playing in are really low, also since i’m just in there a few days i can’t give you great information either.
what i can do is tell you what i have seen, besides of several SnG’s i have played 3 MTT’s, 2 of them didn’t end well. 1 of them however did go well, in all the tourneys i saw several of maniacs who didn’t care to get it all-in with crap, but at the same time i also saw several people who were aware of many poker strategies. in the MTT i played (50ct stake) i became 25th of more then 900 people, as the field thinned out you saw the skill level of the average player increased a lot. when it became below 100, i saw most people were aware of position, good push/fold strategy, good betsizing and much much more of this. these stronger players that were left in the end were about as strong as the 20K/40K stakes in here (of course there were many differences too but i think this compare is the closest), while the starting field was a mix of this and perhaps even one of the lowest stakes here. in the end i lost it with a shove of 11 BB’s with 99 and a call with 1010.

so the thing i can say is that these super micro stakes are having a very varied level.

really true, if i didn’t practice so much in here, i won’t have a single doubt that the no deposit bonus in 888 would already be gone instead of increased.

52

Hilarious…

53

Hand #215915753
its hw need play on elite stake

54

I want to say something that few of you will ever really understand.

I don’t play poker to learn the game… I already know all there is to know about poker.

That might seem crazy or even delusional, but I’ll try to explain it with an analogy.

All woodcarvers use the same basic set of tools, and they all use the same basic techniques. It takes a few months to learn all there is to know about carving.

Master carvers don’t carve to get better, they carve because they love to carve. They eventually get to a point where the right tool and technique is second nature… they don’t have to think about it any more. At this point, they become artists, and they constantly refine their craft to create works of beauty and elegance. The true artists don’t carve for the money.

Artists can’t explain their art, and they don’t try. You either feel it or you don’t.

It’s not hard to learn the basic tools and techniques of poker. For some, it’s hard to put the theoretical, “book knowledge” of poker into practice. They don’t feel it, and, because they don’t understand the importance of creating art for art’s sake, they never will.

Learn the basics until you feel them. Know them inside and out until they become second nature. Don’t become attached to the outcome, play for the love of the game, for the beauty of a thing done well for the right reasons.

I don’t play to become a better player, or to amass chips, or to move up in the rankings, I play for the love of art.

55

SPG -

In almost every field of endeavor or study there are people who take it an art form. However, most wood-carvers probably did in fact do it for the money. Only in the very rarified air at the top of any field are there artists. IMO, this intangible is what separates the great from the good. It goes for poker and football and architecture and so on.

I don’t know if I’m explaining myself properly here. There are things I am naturally good at and for the life of me cant understand why others don’t find them as easy as I do. In other fields, I have to work very hard to become good at something. I’ll give an example - when I started shooting (target, pistol and 3-gun) I found I had a bit of an aptitude for it and became decent pretty quickly. Then I started meeting people who were actually very accomplished at it. Now I needed to work to compete with them. Once I got through that level of competition, I started running into people who were at the very top of the sport. They were unnaturally good at what they did. It was an art form for them. I could never be what they were. However, I could spend hours and hours and hours practicing techniques to get as close to them as possible and maybe on my best day and their worst day, come close.

What I’m saying is that there are people in all fields who are gifted. Those who are, and who also have put in the time and effort to hone their craft are beyond the reach of 99.9% of the rest of the people attempting to do the same thing. Those of us who are not natural poker players try to do our best to improve our skills so that we can come as close as we can to the truly great. I recognize that I will never be great at this game. However, that does not stop me from trying to be as good a player as I can be. There is something very satisfying in doing something well that doesn’t come easily to you, at least for me.

1 Like
56

I am new to poker and have lots to learn, so I would love if you could help explain this hand:

https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/274070320

Of course, I may never really understand.

57

I guess what I’m trying to say here is to not be intimidated by the “mechanics” of the game, which includes the statistical side of things. Yes, you should learn this side of the game until it becomes second nature… it’s a vital part of the game. But it’s also a finite set of information and not that difficult to learn. There really isn’t that much to it.

Then there are the psychological aspects of the game, which are every bit as important, and can also seem intimidating to new players. Again, this is mostly myth. When it comes down to it, there are only a few basic motivations controlling human actions. For example, people often fold to a big raise, not because they aren’t getting the correct odds to call, but because they are afraid to look like an idiot if they call and are wrong.

I’m suggesting that there is a point where continued study becomes counter-productive, and this point is reached far more quickly than most realize. Sure, understand the mechanics of the game inside and out, understand the basic motivating factors that make people play the way they play… and then play the game. Don’t over think it… just play.

Play because you love the game and play enough to develop a real feel for the game, and you will get more out of it with far less effort. You will be dancing for the joy of dancing, how can you lose?

Oh, you might get a kick out of this… (haha)

My Troy Defense carbine in 5.56mm NATO

My heavy barreled Remington 700 in .308 Win.

Seems we have a lot in common. :slight_smile:

1 Like
58

hahaha, yes, you might not understand. :slight_smile:

I don’t remember that hand, but looks like it was heads up at a MTT final table. I called his min raise because I would call a min raise there with any 2 cards.

His flop bet made it obvious to me that he had nada. I had him covered, had a flush draw, and probably 2 live cards, and wanted to end it. If I was right about having 2 live cards and him having nothing (which I was), I was playing for 15 outs twice, which is roughly 55%. So, not only was I a favorite there, I probably felt I could win my chips back if I lost that hand.

I hope that satisfies your curiosity.

59

[quote=“Idi0tpLaYer, post:56, topic:6548”]
I am new to poker and have lots to learn,
[/quote]( yeah thats why She’s #2 in bankroll ) :smirk:

60

Actually, she’s probably a he. The picture is of Xuan Liu, I think from a 2014 WSOP APAC event in Melborne, where she finished 31st.

Anyway, it’s not her. Xuan Liu wouldn’t have to ask why someone would call when they think they are ahead, she’s a solid tournament player and would have made the same call. The real Liu has never used a camel notation caps scheme in her screen names, at least not since they went out of style in the early 2000s.

It was nice of him to help make my point though. Sometimes you have to make a read and just run with it. At that point, it’s more art than science.

61

@yiazmat Excellent post!

1 Like
62

Also fantastic advice - When I am playing well, I am feeling the game and having fun with it. When I am playing poorly, it is usually from what I call “vapor lock” - my mind is getting in the way rather than helping. It does seem that having fun leads to playing well, not the other way around.

What can I say? I work at things. I don’t have as much natural talent in many of the activities I’ve tried as some of my competition. However, I generally work harder and prepare more than anyone else and that usually more than compensates. Whether its practicing forms over and over again or hitting golf balls until my hands bleed or having a simulator deal me an hours worth of pocket J’s, I am going to show up to whatever competition I am in very well prepared.