The Difference between Free and "Real" poker

@puggywug - there are 2 ways to almost guarantee profitability when playing live low stakes games. The 1st is what I’ll call the “All hat, no cattle” method. Here’s what you’ll need to implement this strategy:

  1. A well-worn hoodie so you can pull the hood over your head and around your face when in a hand - preferably with a logo from a poker training site or from a European online cash site.
  2. Dark or mirrored sunglasses so people can’t read your eyes. You will rest these on your head when not in a hand and put them on when you are.
  3. A heavy card protector, preferably from a major casino. You get bonus points if its from someplace like Spielbank Baden-Baden. Pick out a good one on eBay.
  4. Sandals - under no circumstances should you wear grown-up people shoes or you’ll be spotted as an impostor instantly.
  5. A travel-cup, preferably clearly labeled “Muscle Milk” or “Brain Fuel”. You will want to bring this out early, shake it loudly so everyone will notice, take a sip and let everyone know how important it is to stay hydrated and keep your focus when grinding.
  6. The ability to shuffle your chips smoothly, without looking. You get added credibility if you can also roll a chip back and forth across your knuckles.
  7. The ability to drop poker terms into the conversations. As an example: “I triple barreled with 2nd pair and a draw to the nuts but he shoved for an extra 2 pumpkins on the river and put me in a gross spot.”

If you follow this simple strategy, it is almost certain you will take command of any table you are on and show a profit. Of course this is mostly due to the fact that the 2 regs on the table peed themselves laughing and had to leave to change pants. This leaves you free to beat up on the tourists and drunks.

The 2nd method to become profitable in live low-stakes games is to work on the basics. You don’t need any fancy plays or advanced strategies. The basics will take you surprisingly far in this game. Things like knowing to play your big pots in position or how to play 1-pair hands will be enough to give you an advantage over the field. If playing low-stakes tournaments, knowing your push/fold charts will give you a huge advantage over 90% of the field. Honestly, the field is mostly made up of recreational players who may or may not watch a little poker on TV or have a Tuesday night home game. These are not high-stakes crushers.

In my previous post, I said that these games were highly exploitable. That means people are making a ton of large mistakes. Almost none of them know they are making mistakes or why. Most will never study the game at all to find out. All you need to do is to make fewer mistakes than they are. If you just take a little time to plug the largest holes in your game, you will begin to profit against the field. As you move up in skill and stakes, you will have to address more of those leaks but at the start, just playing slightly better than the average is enough. You won’t crush these games playing like this but you will do well enough to keep playing and learning.

What do you think makes more sense, creating a strategy to deal with the 1 in a million chance a bored billionaire sits at your table or creating one that is valid against the vast majority of your opponents? You will always be playing the field at the start. In many cases, you wont have enough hands with anyone to get great player-specific reads. So, work on the basics, like hand selection by position, bet sizing, … There are tons of free resources available to get you to profitability at low stakes.

Lastly, to address what you thought would be the case with real money:

  1. People bluff too infrequently at all stakes. Bluff frequencies go up as the games get tougher but never reach optimal levels because we play vs humans, not computers.
  2. Ranges start out extremely wide (any 2 cards), tend to decrease as a player begins to learn the game more (becomes TAG) and expand again as players discover the need to balance. At the highest levels, they will settle back down a bit but these players will also know how and when to widen/tighten in specific spots or vs specific opponents they have history with. Ranges expand and contract at different stages of development.
  3. 3-bet frequencies go up and down, as with ranges. When people are limping everything up to and including QQ and only opening KK+,AK, there isn’t much point in 3-betting anything other than AA. When people start opening wider ranges, the better players will counter this by 3-betting wider as well. This is one of the biggest exploits in low stakes games, including here. For example, if someone has started to open wide but hasn’t developed a 4-bet bluffing range, players like @Ilovecat can 3-bet them in position with almost any 2 cards and profit. Flatting 3-bets OOP will destroy your bankroll against a good player.

This game has as many layers as you care to explore. However, becoming a profitable player at real money games isn’t as complicated as most people think. Don’t focus on the minutiae or you’ll paralyze yourself. Take 1 basic element at a time, become proficient in it and hit the tables. Be honest with yourself in analyzing where you are vs the field and give yourself a sufficient bankroll and you’ll likely be more than fine.

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So true, Warlock …

if you are making the right plays, profit or not… you can’t beat urself up for those times when you just… get beat… when the board is 3 7 J Q 2, and you lose 77 vs JJ. You might have made no mistakes, other than to realize someone was trapp’n you. Or perhaps the board is 3 6 8 9 A, and you lose 57 vs 710 … its not like they are drawing out on you, and in both cases you have a strong hand and you prolly shud be betting it… 8 outta 10 times, those other 2 times… you just have to live with losing a few.

Paralizing yourself, is just one form of beating yourself. Its bad enuff how cards can crush you, or that shark @ the table… but beating yourself is the worst sin you can committ @ the poker table… just don’t !!

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Sassy Sarah, where have u been? I miss u at my tables!
Anyway here is my two cents worth. I play online just for fun, some of you i’m sure have seen my name in the top ten early in tournaments, because I play “lose aggressive” as some have said. But in truth, when playing for free chips, I can change from super tight play to LAG in an instant. Changing up your play is absolutely needed online, in person for real dough not so much because nobody can afford to throw real money away. Ranking on this site is a joke. I often have to get topped off just to get in a tourney lol. The total chip count I have in the bank means almost nothing to me. Sometimes when I get a million chips, I go straight to the biggest tourney I can get into and go all in first had with 22 and lose it all because it makes no diff. When at my local bar, and the buy in is only fifty bucks, and there are only 25 people to start with, I play accordingly, to my standards, to win the money, and you won’t catch me calling without good prospects of taking the hand, like the nuts, or 75% chance of winning at least. Online free VS Real money, no comparison.

The main difference I see is psychological. It comes down to respect or lack of respect for the stakes. This is largely driven by the daily bonus. There are no daily bonuses in real money poker.

For example, let’s say you only play in a private league that plays twice a week and has a buy-in of 5K. You log in, there’s half your buyin right there. If you play at 9pm, in 3 more hours you can collect the other half of the buyin, If you log in every day and only play twice a week, your bank will grow, even if you never cash a tournament. There’s no downside at all to playing as wild and crazy as possible.

Real money micro-stakes are about the same. Nobody respects the stakes, so you see wild play. On the other hand, I’ve seen people on Replay that either buy chips or respect a bank built slowly over many months, and these players do respect their chips.

If you don’t respect the stakes, it’s hard to play well. If you play stakes so high that you are afraid of losing, it’s hard to play well. The trick is to find that happy medium, where you have the respect you need without the fear.

If we keep this in mind, there’s no real difference (except for the daily bonus) between real money and free poker.

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I’d definitely be interested.

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It was a limit game. The pot was a little over $90 But the bad beat payed the entire table $2000. The lady who won the $90 pot also collected $500 and the other $500 was split between the other seven players. Everyone at the table wins if the bad beat is dealt.

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This fold is famous and famous for being horrible… Maria would probably like to have this one back.

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Great - just lmk where you want to start and we can do it here or via PM.

I don’t know all the circumstances about this one, and you are entitled to your opinion, but on the face of it the fold does not seem so horrible to me. If you are in a tournament, you have to take many factors into account. For example, if there are 7 players left in a tournament, and 5 of those players have roughly equal stacks, and the other two players have small stacks and are teetering on the edge of elimination, it may be the right thing to fold to an all in at the flop that puts all your chips at risk, even if you do think you are ahead. In this hand the all-in opponent could have a pair of black jacks and want to block the flush draw, or could have a made flush, although admittedly the most likely hand is what he had. If prize money calculations came into consideration, it could have been a 50/50 decision.

Having done a little more research, I see that in this WSOP Europe event in 2017, she finished with the largest stack on the day in question, and ended up in 6th place in the tournament, winning over $200, 000, with two of the other players in the hand finishing behind her, and the other finishing in 5th.

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This ^^ I will say in her defence (lol) I believe, not positive though, she went on to win this one. I’ll take the criticism if I’m wrong. That being said it doesn’t change how she played this hand either way. Absolutely horrible. Cheers.

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@1Warlock Your comments in these threads are always on point. Love the player type in scenario 1, the nuts. lol Cheers!

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Amassing million of chips on Replay and thinking that portends success in cash games is akin to thinking excellent scores on Wii golf means you should hit the pro circuit.
Don’t get too excited about winning pretend chips from some dude who was chatting with his wife and watching hockey while you out-pokered him.

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Maybe we could start with looking at these numbers. If these are the averages for the low-stakes population in your dataset, what do you see instead for the players at these stakes who are winning the most? What does this tell us about their play and how we should be exploiting the general population?

I’d also be interested to see numbers for preflop play - e.g. VPIP / PFR / 3B% / ATS.

What other stats do you commonly look at when analyzing a particular player?

What stats are even available, and where can you find them? I only can see rank and bankroll on their profile page.

On this site… there’s really not much in the way of stats available. I keep a handful of stats manually on certain players and it’s a total pain to do it. But 1Warlock has stats from large databases of real money play.

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I’ll get into this when I have a little more time. In the meanwhile, do you have Flopzilla? If so, put in a 20-23% range that includes all pairs, all broadways (suited and unsuited), ATs+, A3s-A5s and ATo+. If you want to add in a few suited connectors, you can add T9s and 87s.

Use the blue filter to mark off all hands of 1-pair or better, plus flush draws and OESD. Be sure to include all pairs, including under-pairs.

Hit the “random” button to get a flop and see what % of hands pass through the filters on various flops and textures. That 46% fold to c-bet number should start to emerge on flops with 1 high card (by way of having 54% of hands pass through the filter). This is the starting point for looking at the data. BTW, if they are opening wider than this, it just gets better and better for you.

onlymenow “what irritates me the most is people that go all in every hand!!!”
Personally I like being on a table where some yahoo is throwing “All In” with every hand. I simply patiently wait to have playable cards and take their chips. I’ve done this many times on this and other sites. Of course there are the few times this has backfired on me and they win the pot, but overall I have consistently won a significant number of chips while watching the yahoo eventually leave the table broke. You just have to be patient and lay waste to their chips when you have the hand. It doesn’t matter where you play, you will eventually run into “tilted” players or loose idiots who just want to throw chips away. So play them with strategy and you will win the majority of the time.

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in money poker you don’t have spectators changing the deal

This is a weird bad beat, I’ve never seen one like this. Seems much better than the norm though. I personally hate bad beat jackpots.

I second!