@pkr_brat: I tried to get to your blog through your profile, but I got a message that said profile unavailable. Leave me a link to your blog in a comment, and I'll join in the discussion there.
Sorry for the lack of updates. Real life has once again intruded. I've been playing very little, and what playing I've done has not had such great results. I am not playing my A game, but not horrible, either. The cards just won't get there for me, or more accurately they get there too often for my opponents. I've been glancing at PokerEV (great sanity-keeping utility, although I'm not using its more powerful analysis capabilities), and I'm up to an 8-buyin gap between Sklansky bucks and actual winnings on my all-ins. That's over only 7,000 hands, so not good. What is good is that I'm feeling more and more confident in my player reads, and my decisions are better and better, which is especially good in the face of a rotten run of cards.
I've been reading Professional No Limit Hold'em for the past week or so. I'm almost done. It's well written (easy to read), but I'm struggling to apply (or how hard to apply) the biggest concept in the book -- SPR. If you haven't read the book, SPR stands for Stack to Pot Ratio, specifically taken at the beginning of the flop. Interestingly, if you play full stacks (100 BB), make a 4BB raise, and are called in one place, you have close to the worst SPR for a top pair type of hand. You don't get to an ideal SPR heads up with 100 BB stacks until you make about a 10x raise.
As more discussion evolves around this concept, it will be interesting to see what sort of impact the book has on the online game and how important SPR will be to the 6-max games specifically. A lot of SPR seems to apply more easily to lower live games for a couple reasons. For one, buy-ins are capped below 100BB, at least in the games around here. With smaller effective stacks, SPR goes up for the same preflop raise. More importantly, though, is that even with a largish raise, there are a lot of multiway pots, so the P in SPR goes up.
But online, even at the micro stakes, when someone puts in a pot-sized raise (much less a 4x raise), the pot will be HU. So, will we see a bunch of SPR-inspired short stackers? I think the benefits of playing a full stack still outweigh the SPR benefits, assuming we are on average more competent than our opponents. The goal behind SPR is to maximize your expectation in large pots, which is also one of the reasons to buy in full. There are several threads on 2+2 where the authors participate, and they are running a study session as well, so I'm sure this will be fleshed out more.
I'll try to get some hands posted soon, and make the way around the blogs to comment on others.
I feel like writing
7 years ago
2 comments:
Interesting concept one I've not come across before.
Would be interested to see how this one develops and will have a look at 2+2 etc.
How valid a concept is it?
It's a valid concept. Even if you can't easily achieve the SPR best suited for the sort of hand you're trying to make, you should be aware of what that does to how the hand plays out, and it also explains why some sorts of hands (mostly TP hands) are difficult to play in a lot of common situations.
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