One contagious behavior in live games all over the world seems to be the insane raise sizes.
I’ve played poker pretty much in every continent and I can say, this is a pretty much worldwide universal thing – people raise INSANELY high in live games.
Now, what am I referencing as the baseline when I say live players raise high? The “GTO” optimal raise sizes. We can argue that it will change via format and effective stacks, but in general I’m sure we could all agree that a standard (let’s just say in position as an example) raise size is anywhere from 2~2.75x (assuming no limpers and it’s a single raised pot with you as the initial opener).
Now, if you’ve played a poker game in any of your local casinos, you would know that the average raise size is usually double or triple this. In fact, I was at a local game this week and the standard RFI was $25 for a 1/3 game. Do the math but that’s roughly a 8x open.
If you put this raise size into a solver and see what the response is, it’s laughably tight. You’re basically not allowed to play anything but your top suited aces, kings and pocket pairs in response to these raise sizes.
But then comes the problem of “edge”. If you’re actually a winning player with an edge against your opponents, you actually want to be playing as much pots as possible and get beyond the preflop stage as much as you can. So if you’re folding out and playing ridiculously tight, then you’re essentially going to be burning away any edge that you have.
Worse is when you start off with these large raise sizes, and you get randomly all in’d on the flop for example (you think this doesn’t happen? Oh it will happen) – cutting away any edge you might conceivably have.
Maybe these live players have it figured out – the real way to diminish any edge a player might have is by making every play almost a coin flip. This isn’t actually a bad strategy.
I was half joking in that last sentence because there’s many ways to counter this.
First obvious way would be to just buy in deeper and treat a 5x raise size as if it’s the standard 2.5x raise size, essentially nulling any effect of the large raises. This would also give you an advantage because if your opponent is someone who raises 5x, 7x as the initial opener, they probably aren’t really worried about their own stack size or your own. So knowing this, you could put a lot of pressure on the opponent by being able to actually play past the preflop stage.
Second obvious way is to just accept your fate and play shallow stacked, and deal with the large raise sizes. This might sound obnoxious, but if someone wants to raise ridiculously large and have the SPR drop to less than 1, then what’s the issue with playing 2 hands an hour and just jamming them every single time with pocket aces and kings?
“Oh but Dennis, they’re obviously going to just fold every time you jam!” – Ok, then didn’t we just find a huge exploit there? Just mix in a few bluffs, and jam them and adjust your ratio of value to bluffs accordingly. This is literally how solvers did it by iterating billions of times to find the optimal bluff to value bet ratio in toy games.
The point is – we have to get creative.
We have to learn to think critically.
We have to adapt.
And at the end of the day, our goal is to exploit, which inherently means you have to be unbalanced.