If you were to walk into a brick-and-mortar card room in most places in the world, you may not have many options when choosing a table. If you want to play poker then you may have no choice but to play in a full-ring game if the only table that is available already has eight seated players.
This lack of options can mean that many live poker players sit in games that they possibly don’t want to be seated in. They may have travelled a fair distance to get to the game or they may need to leave the casino by a certain time if they have other commitments. A smaller number of available tables can mean that aggressive players who prefer short handed play may be playing full-ring games and vice-versa.
This situation is totally different online. If a player logs onto a poker site and chooses to sit at a full-ring game when they had the option to choose a six max or a heads up game then this is a serious indication of that player’s overall mindset.
Choosing full-ring over six max games tends to be an indication that a player is tight and conservative and prefers games where the blind pressure is low so they don’t feel pressured to get involved with certain types of hands. This type of game suits the style of play in which players like to sit and wait for other players to make mistakes and this is especially the case in low-stakes games.
Look a little deeper into the psychological make up of a full-ring game player and it is quite obvious that these players are more risk averse than their six max brothers. Any hands they play will tend to be based on the strength of their cards and their cards alone.
They will venture into making looser plays like stealing from position or raising from the small blind when it has been folded to them, but these are plays that are designed to win a very small pot. If a player gets all in for their entire 100BB stack pre-flop in a NLHE full-ring game and you are sitting there with a hand like QQ then the chances of your hand being good at that stage are not good.
I have played about 50k hands on Cake Poker practicing these NL50 small stakes strategies, and the times that a player makes a substantial play pre-flop with a deep stack and shows up with a hand worse than QQ are few and far between.
Take the following example: the villain open-raises to $1.75 in the UTG position and it is folded around to you in the cut-off with QQ. You three-bet to $6 and everyone folds back to the original raiser who shoves their remaining $40 into the pot in a huge overbet. I see many players attempt to rationalise these overbet shoves as plays that don’t want action, like with AK.
But in reality the other player is figuring that you must have a decent hand yourself to three-bet and they are trying to get you to commit all of your money before any scare cards come on the flop to freeze the action. Most of the time of course these huge overbets only serve to end the pot there and then and tend not to get paid off!
But the fact remains that they do get paid off from time to time and this reinforces the belief in the players mind that their play has been correct. You will need to adjust for any poker game that you care to sit down in – I have long argued that it is wrong to simply assume that if a player is beating $200-$400 then they could also beat all levels underneath that.
Beating low-stakes poker can be very difficult for sophisticated players on many different levels; but the key problem is maintaining discipline and being able to play for an hourly rate that is substantially less than what they are used to.
Homing in on the proper strategy is critical, but doing this means figuring out the psychology of the players at your table. I have known a couple of successful high-stakes online professionals who simply cannot make money playing low-stakes poker: they try to play too aggressively in full-ring NLHE and it simply does not work.
When you raise in NLHE with the sole intention of stealing the blinds then you are taking a price that is odds on and that is never a good price to take. If you call raises with the sole intention of trying to outplay someone after the flop then in low-stakes NLHE full-ring game you will be calling a legitimate raising hand a good percentage of the time.
Plus the sheer weight of short stackers these days means that the implied odds are nowhere near as good as what they need to be to make plays like these profitable. The amount of available money that is being risked in low-stakes cash games is not only smaller but by deliberately short stacking you have revealed that you want to risk even less money.
This strong aversion to risk is one of the key fundamental psychological features of full-ring NLHE cash games and it can definitely be exploited. The process is a simple one and means that you need to adjust your ranges in certain situations. You must open up more to steal raise or to raise limpers and especially when you have position. But many of these strategies are dependent on the stack sizes of the players who have limped.
I would be far less inclined to attack short stacked limpers than I would deep stacked ones for the simple reason that they are more likely going to call and commit to their hand once they have decided to play it. In contrast to this, players will tend to be making legitimate raises far more, so getting involved with certain types of hands like AQ for instance can leave you in a position where you have terrible reverse implied odds.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson is sponsored by Cake Poker and can be seen at www.cakepoker.com/thedean and at www.pokersharkpool.com