How would you play this spot?
Posted by HaAbDe
Posted by
HaAbDe
posted in
Low Stakes
How would you play this spot?
NL2 - 6max game. UTG and HJ fold. We're in the CO. BB and SB are regs. However BTN is a fish which we don't know yet what type of fish he is. In this spot if BTN, SB, BB were regs, we'd open around 25% of hands or maybe a bit more. In this case with the fish, what should we open though? Should we open wider? I know that if fish was in the blinds then that means we should open wider(I read this in Grinder's manual). What about this spot though?
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I haven't read the grinders manual but did go through From the Ground Up from Peter Clarke.
His advice would be to look at the stats of the regulars. If they squeeze at a decent frequency we would want to open tighter. Our goal would be to play a pot with the fish, but when SB and BB get to squeeze they will put our wider range in a though spot.
If both SB and BB are rather passive regs, which at lower stakes tends to be the case, you can still open wide. You have position on the regulars and the position against the fish is going to be less significant.
In Grinder's manual, Peter says we should open from CO about 25.5% of hands with 2.5x sizing(He says though that the more experienced players can open wider). When there is a fish in the blinds and there aren't aggressive 3bettors ahead, he suggests to open about 37.5% of hands. Now, in my own example, how much wider should we open? I know that the % is lower than 37.5% since we don't have position vs the fish. How much wider than our defeault range should this one be though? Also we don't have any info vs the fish regarding what type of fish they are, so I guess we can't open too wide because he might be one of those fishes which doesn't like to fold postflop and thus if this is true, hands which rely on fold equity won't perform well vs the fish.
You are worrying about stuff that is technical and nobody can give you a perfect answer, the exact % you open is not the key factor for beating 2nl as long as it's not stupid. Put a simple preflop plan in place and focus more on your postflop play.
Yeah michael is right on, as long as you play a reasonable range you're already far above the average NL2 player.
I think the best thing you can do if you're just getting into the game is first focus on the fundamentals and solid poker before you start trying to deviate your strategy vs fish.
Once you can play a fundamentally sound game is when you should turn your focus on deviating from the fundamentals in an exploitative manner.
So i would tell you to just play the 25.5% range from the cutoff until you feel comfortable with it, then when you feel comfortable playing that range you can start to experiment with the exploitative strategy of this spot in Grinder's manual.
One more thing about this spot: im not even sure if we should take the regs too much into account for this spot. In my experience regs don’t squeeze you too light in this spot due to the less FE given by the fish (which they both had to play oop then). So most regs just whiden theire calling-ranges instead (as they should).
So often you will play the hand IP with a much stronger range and honest regs (cause the FE vs the fish ist still low postflop).
Sounds like a juicy spot to me.
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