Are You Cheating Preflop?
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Something interesting happens to no-limit players once they really settle in with a truly successful strategy. First, they develop an understanding of preflop play that goes far beyond the, “Wait, so I should play JTs from the cutoff, but not from the hijack?” level of thinking. Second, they begin to realize that they can control and manipulate their opponents to a degree they had never before thought possible.
These two changes in mindset typically result in newly-good players loosening up significantly. They aren’t worried anymore about making sure they get all the unprofitable preflop hands out of their game. And they know that they can turn unfavorable situations to their favor by making good postflop decisions. They feel comfortable in more and more postflop situations, and therefore they end up playing more and more hands.
Some of this loosening is indisputably good. For instance, loosening up on the button is rarely bad and often quite good. I think in a typical small stakes 6-max game, you can open nearly any hand on the button and do so profitably. And you can similarly isolate limpers from the button with quite a wide range and increase your winrate doing so.
But I do think some newly-good players begin to cheat a little bit.
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Tags: junk hands, LAG, loose-aggressive, no-limit-holdem, playing out of position, poker, preflop-play, trash-hands
could it be, and I’m going out on a limb here… but… could it be, that the profit made from the positions that are profitable (button), and the loss induced by opening with junk from EP/MP are derived of the same function?
put another way: “advertising”. if a player is known to open with junk OOP, will he not get more customers with quality hands IP, hence increasing his profit?
in your example, would not the player who is capable of analyzing his play with PT play with stats and be able to recognize tendencies by other players to “play back” and adjust his play accordingly?
regards,
2weiX