DSteele02's NL Full Ring Strategy

[dsteele02]

I'm going to attempt to talk a little about how I approach full ring over a few posts. This will likely take me a few days to complete as I can only devote a few minutes late at night.

Before the first card is dealt

A big part of successful ring game play is putting yourselves in positions to win repeatedly and trusting that over time you will. In order to do this you need a few skills that have nothing to do with how you play your cards.

• Ability to honestly and accurately diagnose what players you crush and what players crush you.
  
• Ability to quickly ascertain the relative aggression, pot size, and stack size of a table as a whole.
  
• Ability to make and adhere to a strict Bankroll Management system.

When I go table hunting I'm looking for tables that average a 17-25 PFR% (Pre-flop raise). I'm also looking for tables with a VPIP% (Voluntarily put money in the pot) of 17-30.

The reason for this is that my style has my own PFR% hovering between 20-30, my 3-bet% is at 15-20, and my 4-bet is hovering around 10. What this tells you is that I am playing extremely fast, controlled poker.

At a table where you're looking at an average of 1 Pre-flop raiser every 2 rounds and 2 callers/limpers every round I am going to get the opportunity to 3-bet for value and as a bluff pretty often.

To facilitate this I am looking at how often the table as a whole folds to 3-bets and c-bets, and I'm hoping they fold to 3-bets roughly 55.275% (exact break even number for 3-bets) of the time and to c-bets roughly 62% of the time.

If I can find a table with these tendencies (and I always do) then I can expect to average +11bbs/100 assuming I don't actually pick up a real hand.

The reason we look at opponents stack sizes when sitting is that for my particular style I need them to have enough chips behind at all times that they don't ever feel committed. This means, if there's a few 50 bb nits sitting I'm finding another table.

I can't stress that enough. When facing a 100bb table 3-betting wide is a great value/bluff tool that should be used often, but when facing 50bb tables it's a tool that should be avoided with less than premium hands. The few times you'll get a 50bb stack to fold are not worth the greater % of times that you'll either see a 4-bet/shove pre-flop or an all in on the flop.

As far as bankroll management goes I operate on a standard 5% rule, meaning I never sit at any given table with more than 5% of my total bankroll. Thousands of players stress this to the point of it sounding cliche, there is a reason for that. It works.

So, my game of choice right now is $1/ 2 9max ring (40-100bb) and I like to buy in at 100bbs or $200. All I have to do is take $200x20 and if that number is lower than my bankroll I am good to sit, if not I need to either step down in stakes or lower my buy in. (Another very simple method is to divide your BR by 20 at the start of the day. Whatever you get is your max buy in for that day.)

I've gone over style specific table selection and bankroll management in this post. As a note to myself, I'd like to pick up the next post by explaining how I attain such a high PFR% without going broke. Possibly show the widened LAG (For lack of a better definition) range and also explain in a little more detail what all the %'s we talked about in the first post actually tell us about how to beat a specific table.

[dsteele02]

These charts loosely represent a standard 'smart' LAG approach to the game.

All credits for the charts go to Ace Solutions via the LeakBuster application.

Note: Blue = raise and Orange = fold.





Note: Button and SB ranges are roughly the same

[DangerMouse]

I`m not a ring game player but this is really interesting. Keep it going Daniel

[dsteele02]

I think DM may be one of the few interested in this, but I still apologize for not getting to work on this sooner.

I only have a few games to play tonight so I'll work on throwing together my next post, which will likely discuss why those %s we talked about are so important.

[pkrplr4116]

I'm loving it, pls keep 'em coming! 'm copying and pasting to read later, as i'm in a game right now

[dhawkins701]

nah man it's a great post. With a lot of great info in it for many of our poker playing members. I myself find it interesting and if i ever stop being a degen i look forward to puttin some of this info into my own game. Keep this post up daniel,look forward to your next installment of this post.

[alanperc]

I'm liking the pre flop hand charts.

[ZFoley83]

I'm assuming this is for online as these charts are useless for live play. There's no reason to open UTG with a hand like KJs or 22 as the vast majority of pots are limpfests all the way up to 5/10NL.

Disclaimer: I play live about 30 hours a week.