When you take the lead at a table, do you open or narrow your range?
I used to open it, and it was a mixed bag. Some tables, I could be more aggressive and bully more. At limper friendly tables, it was often possible to see cheap flops, so playing a wider range was rewarded occasionally when you hit with a hand you couldn’t normally play in a more active table.
Playing a see-the-flop-and-dump strategy isn’t very strong, and will lose you a lot of chips in the long run. But if you combine it with aggressively bullying weak players off of pots, it can seem viable. If you’re also betting aggressively with weak Kings and Queens when they hit, and getting the table to fold, that can also offset your losses from seeing a lot of cheap flops. With the big stack, you can sometimes manage this, depending on the strength of the table.
But after a while it seemed like this strategy wasn’t working for me anymore. When your opponents call the bully bluffs, you really start losing more than you gain by the technique. Bullying can still be profitable, but you can’t just do it all the time. But with the right position and right sized table it is useful.
More recently, I’ve taken to keeping my range the same after I take a chip lead, and have found that I keep my stack longer and get deeper into tournaments when I play tighter. I win fewer pots, but I hold onto those chips longer. Combined with better betting strategy, I’m finding I am more often taking larger pots.
Also, if you do open your range in certain situations, what hands do you open up to? Paint-suited for flush draws? 89+? 76+? Rag pocket pairs?