playing and raising every hand

[lorenz0wns]

This is absolutely not true. Playing optimally for hours hoping to get it in on a coinflip is not a path to consistent success. In certain situations, you might settle for a flip against the top end of someone's range, but that is generally not the ideal, as, if you are correctly ranging opponents, you will only get it in ahead. You can't always be correct, but most solid players look to AVOID flips for their tourney life.





You guys are missing something fundamental to today's poker. In the early days, nobody was playing much no-limit holdem, so when Doyle's masterpiece came out, he pointed out that playing the top 20% of hands with aggression was a winning strategy against players who played too many hands too passively. Then, the poker boom hit, and everyone did that. Dan Harrington's tournament strat masterpiece Harrington on Holdem then defined a new version of tight aggression, and yet more got on board. But the reality is that winning poker - and Doyle had already pointed this out - is generally more efficient when you play against the grain of the table. So if everyone is tight and aggressive, loose and trappy become the winning strat. But then Negreanu turned the poker world on it's head again, demonstrating a loose aggressive strategy that still generally holds sway over the old-timers and Harringbots, who continue waiting to try to win the occasional big pot vs taking constant stabs at the smaller pots.

Many top players know both styles inside and out, can recognize them, and can attack or defend appropriately. Factor in the ideas that simple math and multitabling have brought to the concept of reducing variance, and you end up with what you are experiencing: players you think that are playing bad that are absolutely crushing tournaments, while you fold and fold and fold waiting for AK or AA to get all your chips in with. By that point, your stack is all but irrelevant to them, if they've built their stacks well. And if they KO early, on the next without a second thought.

I mentioned this once in another thread, how after some instruction from some nosebleed friends I slashed my ITM% almost in half (meaning I cashed much, much less), while blowing my profit through the roof by almost 700% (meaning that when I DID cash, it was very rarely for the minimum, and often in the top 3).

Just some food for thought.

idk, if you wanna have sick scores like shaun deeb you're going to want to take flips for your tourney life to accumulate a big stack although you have to take 'em in the right time like in the middle of a tourney, obv not in the beginning because if u win a flip in the beginning you're still nowhere near the FT.

http://officialpokerrankings.com/ful...2501E.html?t=3

^that's shaun deebs acc on FTP. as u can see all his major bustouts happen 65% of the time during the middle of a tourney. the reason being he takes those flips in which if he wins it sets up his deep runs to the FT, a crushing 18% which is almost double the average player