adjusting from FR to 6-max (low/micro limits)

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mdpk

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Hello,

After a few months of bad poker, I'm now confident in my ability to win at 5NL/10NL FR cash games. My last 30k hands show a solid winning pattern and I'm now playing 8 tables with relative ease. My style is rather TAG, with a VPIP around 15/12. I'm not using a HUD, but I take notes of fishes, rocks and other exploitable leaks I can spot.

However, as much as I like to see my BR grow, the game I really enjoy is 6-max cash games, ideally on 4 tables at a time. My problem is, over my last 20k hands on these tables, I'm a clear losing player. I always feel bad beated to death, but given the large enough sample of hands and my experience 9 handed, I guess it's more because of my bad play than my bad luck.

I'm playing 6-max roughly the same way I would play a FR game where the first 3 players to act have folded. I realize this must be bad play, but I have a hard time adjusting my game.

I'm still recovering from my previous losses by grinding 5NL FR (and it always works...) but I'm soon going to try 5NL 6-max again.

Any advice to help me out ?

Thanks !
 
cardplayer52

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i'm very interested to hear any replies to this as i also want to switch 6max. i would imagine it to be alot more aggressive. as there would be less implied odds on your hands. i know set/str8 mining can be profitable in a FR game as w/9 players your more likely to be against a hand that will pay off if you do hit. but i would like to here some other strategy differences between the two.
 
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Michelle5000

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-steal, steal, steal
- i usually table select better..high players seeing flop %
- button, Co isolate limpers with position by raising

This sounds like downfall...the blinds are coming round faster and ur still in a set mining and a big pots philosophy and u aren't winning enough fo the small pots.

You could experiment with stealing by raising 2x or 2.5x and do with with 35-50% of ur range from the button. You need a HUD with the fold to steal stat and how they play post flop.

Vs players how fold alot pre or on the flop. I raised upwards to 75% and against a guy who never folds - I need SD hands, so maybe only the top 25%. With HUD this info is available within 5secs at a glance..if u set it up well.

See i'd exploit u by just raising ur blind 100& of the time and if u didnt adjust, i can't continue to do it. Also, if he fought back i'd shut down. As you wouldn't have a hand enough of the times, it would be +EV. See if i'm up against a guy who is stealinn my blinds alot..i start to 3bet with Arag or Krag as it means less comobs of As and ks int he theri range. I'd start flatting them and just try and put them in tough spots. 6max does need aot more skill and i ain't a great player. But like a high stakes plaeyr said leatherass "I've never seen a good FR player' and that is probably why. They just play set, generalised game and u can't learn how to adapt and exploit that well in FR. I can PF, on the flop maybe not so well on the turn/river.
 
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slycbnew

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^^^ Good stuff on stealing.

In 6max, you want to focus more on isolating players and representing your hands effectively. Less focus on drawing/going to showdown with the best hand, more focus on playing the player.

Don't expect to be able to play as many tables in 6max as you may in FR, you need to pay closer attention to your opponents.

As in FR, use position as a weapon - but since you'll rarely be in multi-way pots (i.e. you'll rarely have proper odds to draw), it's really important that you use position effectively in 6max.

You're looking to flop sets, two pairs, and monster draws for implied odds hands.

Hand reading and villain reading are so important in 6max.

I'm sure some of the better 6max players will jump in here shortly.
 
Goodwooter

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one of the keys to 6 max is having the ability to be aggressive with marginal hands...and by ability i mean, affording to lose what you brought to the table...the blinds come around quickly at 6 max so you cant just sit around and wait for premium hands, you have to win some pots you are probably behind in with aggression...i usually avoid 6 man tables...i just feel more comfortable playing the full ring

gl to you
wooter
 
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mdpk

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Well my issue is more the lack of credibility my bets have at 5NL/10NL 6-max, compared to FR. Hard to steal when people call you down at least to turn no matter what their hand is, even harder to figure what they could be holding...

I guess it's a matter of balance.

I would like to add I hate multiway pots even 9 handed. I always try to isolate as much as I can and show no resistance at all post flop if we are 4+ involved in the pot.


That said, I decided (at last) to try a HUD (Realtime) and it's really crazy... Feels like a different game.
 
slycbnew

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Hmm, I haven't played 5NL or 10NL, so I'm not a good resource - a couple of suggestions:

1. Check if your bet sizing preflop is big enough, I use 4x BB + 1BB per limper from UTG, MP, and CO - I recently started using 3x BB for opening on the button and the SB. If you minraise a lot, it encourages a lot of limpers. Most flops I see are HU.
2. How much are you cbetting? I generally cbet around 60-75% pot.
3. Read the hand analysis forum, especially for the stakes you're playing. There are a lot of good regs here who play 6max at those stakes who also post hands.

gl and gg!
 
aliengenius

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A tournament based article (I believe by Annie Duke) but still with some good points:

Adjustments to 6-handed tournaments

Monday, November 05 2007

One of the most common types of questions people ask me has to do with how to make adjustments to your in various situations. Often the question is about adjustments between cash game play and tournament play. As well, people often asked how to adjust to shorthanded play. So it makes sense that the ultimate question in this category would be how to adjust to shorthanded tournament play. And my answer, which surprises most people, is that you don’t adjust to any of these situations.

Okay, I know that seems like a strange answer, so let me explain. Everything that you do at a poker table is conceptually and mathematically driven. How you choose the hands you play, and how you play the ones you choose, is determined by the math of poker, the game theory and the psychology. Poker is not a situation specific game. There are infinite situations that come up in poker so learning situation specific poker would be impossible. That would be like someone who could only sight read certain rules without understanding the correspondence between the letters and the individual sounds. Someone who understands that each letter stands for a particular sound can read any new word I throw at them, like frockenbatten. It doesn’t matter that you have never seen that word before or that I just made it up, you understanding the phonetic rules so you can read it. I want you to think about poker in the same way. Instead of sight reading in poker you need to understand it at a deeper level so whenever a knew situation comes you way you can play accordingly, even if you have never seen the new situation.

So let’s see how this way of thinking tells us the likely way you would play at a 6 handed tournament table. First let’s look at hand selection and then we can look at bluffing frequency. There are a few factors that drive hand selection in a poker game. The first is your position, are you early in the action or late in the action. The earlier you are in the action, the worse your decision making problem will be because you will be having to act with less information than your opponents throughout the hand. When you know you will be playing at a disadvantage, when you will be having to decide first or close to first during every betting round, you should avoid getting involved at all. This is one of the main reasons why players will play tighter up front. In back, close to the button or on the button, the opposite is true. You will be acting with a big advantage during the rest of the hand, getting to decide what to do after you have seen your opponents act first. In that case, when you know you will have a huge advantage, you can be more liberal in your hand selection.

Now, in a 6-handed game or a 10-handed game this fact about the decision making problem still holds: It doesn’t matter whether you are under the gun in a 6-handed game or a 10-handed game. You are still going to have act before everyone else so you should play more conservatively in your hand selection either way. Nothing changes there. Play looser in back and tighter up front no matter how many handed the game is.

But where do you start in your hand selection? Well, what determines what you choose to play up front really has to do with the probability that there is a better hand out against you. When you know you will be acting first you want to have a high probability of starting with the best hand because, frankly, if I am going to put myself into such a crappy decision making situation I am going to make damn sure that I have the best hand to start. As the number of players behind you, the number of cards out against you, increases so does the probability that there is a better hand out against you. In a 10 handed game there are 18 cards still out against you that you know nothing about when you are under the gun. In a 6 handed game there are only 10 cards out against you when you are under the gun. This means that you can loosen up your hand selection under the gun in a 6 handed game because the sheer number of cards left in play is less. Basically, in a 10 handed game I recommend as a baseline playing AQ off suit and AJ suited as your minimum unpaired hand up front and no less than 66 as your minimum paired hand under the gun. In middle position, I recommend loosening this up to KJ suited, KQ off suit and lowering your pairs to around 33 or 44 depending on the game. In a 6 handed game, you can behave like you do from middle position in the 10 handed game because what is driving that bar you set is the same in either game. In both cases, middle position in the 10 handed game or under the gun in the 6 handed game, there are 5 people behind you and 10 cards out against you. So your hand values should be about the same for you being first to open the action in either game. See how that works? You aren’t making any adjustment at all really. What drives your choices in either game is the same.

Now, there is another driver to how loose or tight you play in a poker game which has to do with your risk of ruin. The higher the risk of ruin, the more hands you will choose to play. Risk of ruin is determined by two factors: The first is how quickly you will go broke to the antes if you wait for a hand and the second is the size of the game, how big the reward is for waiting, in comparison to the size of the antes. Mathematically, the bigger the game in comparison to the size of the antes the tighter you should play. Also, that slower the antes come around, the tighter you should play.

Let’s take a couple of hypothetical stud games to illustrate the concept. If you are in a $300-600 stud game where you never ante and there is no low card, where you only ever put money in the pot when you choose, then you would play very, very tight because there would be no risk to you for waiting for a very good hand. By tight I mean that you would only play roll ups. That is a situation where the risk of ruin is very low and the game is very large in comparison to the size of the antes (in fact that ratio is infinity to 1) Now, what if everyone in a stud game started with $1K and that was all the money you would ever have and you had to ante $500? Now you have to play very loose because you if you don’t play the first hand you will have the put the rest of your money in on the next hand. You would basically just look at the first hand and decide if you thought it was better than random because your risk of ruin is so high on one of the next two hands and because the game itself ($300-$600) is so small in comparison to the size of the ante that there is not a big reward to waiting anyway. We can actually see this concept in action in regular stud games and tournaments. I have seen tournaments where there is a $50 ante at the $300-$600 level and I have seen tournaments where at the same level the ante is $75. In the first case you can play tighter because it is only costing you $400 per 8 hands played. In the second case it costs you an extra $200 per 8 hands for a total of $600 per round. That is 50% more per 8 hands. In the $75 ante game you, therefore, must play a little looser because your risk of going broke to the antes while waiting for a playable hand is 50% greater than in the $50 ante game.

Now, this concept applies to hold’em as well. Hold’em is an ante poker game, you have the antes themselves but also the blinds which are just antes you put in all at once. In a 6 handed game, the blinds come around on you much faster, you get only 4 free hands after you pay the blinds in comparison to 8 free hands in a 10 handed game. Since you get 50% fewer hands per blind paid in the 6 handed situation we know that from this mathematical standpoint you must play looser. You can combine this with the fact that with fewer plays in the game the pot size itself will tend to be smaller and the bigger the pot size in comparison to the size of the antes the tighter you can play because we get a bigger reward for waiting. If the average pot size in a 6 handed game is lower, then on average you will play looser in general in that situation.

Now, you can look at one last factor in figuring out how to play in general in a 6 handed tournament and that has to do with bluffing frequency. One of the things that determines the frequency with which we bluff has to do with the probability of success of the bluff. That is partly determined by how willing your opponents are to lay a hand down. In a cash game where your opponents can go back in their pockets if they lose a hand they are usually more willing to call people down. They know that if they are wrong in their call they are not out of the game. They can still keep playing. That can make your opponents hard to bully in a cash game. In a tournament, though, the chips are finite. There is no buying back in. Because of this, opponents will often play a little more scared. They tend to be more susceptible to your putting pressure on them because they know that if they are wrong about a call that that is the end for them, they are out of the game. You can be more of a bully in a tournament than in a cash game. You can bluff more.

In any game where bluffing will be more successful, you will be playing more hands in general. Whenever you choose to play a hand that is less than AA you are choosing to add a little bluff to your play. Every hand has a value component and a bluffing component to it. AA is all value. KK is nearly all value with a tiny bit of bluff. Get to AQ and you have quite a bit of bluff to the hand. Once you get all the way down to 72 off suit you are playing a hand that is basically all bluff and very little value because you know for certain that you don’t have the best hand. How far down off AA you are willing to go must have to do with how much power you think the bluffing component of the hand will have. In a game where opponents are easily bullied, the bluffing component has a lot of power so you can choose to play hands that have quite a bit of bluff to them, you can play quite loose. In games where the bluffing component doesn’t have a lot of power, then choosing to play hands with a lot of bluff to them doesn’t make much sense.

Now, we know that in a tournament situation people will be more easily bullied. We know that the number of cards out against you determines how loose you play. The fewer the cards out against you the looser hand values you can choose. We know that the quicker the antes come around you, the higher your risk of ruin in the game, the looser you must play. And lastly we know that the smaller the pot size in a game in comparison to the size of the antes, the looser you will generally play. All of the above factors in a 6 handed tournament poker game come together to give the same answer, you will be playing looser hand values in a 6 handed situation.

But, what is important to notice because, to go back to the early metaphor here, you are not poker sight readers, loose is not always the answer in the 6 handed game. If you are at a 6 handed tournament table where the players are very, very loose themselves then a couple of things will be true: First, the game will be playing very big, the pot sizes will tend to be quite large in comparison to the size of the antes. Second, players who are very loose are not easily bullied, they are not easily bluffed. In that case you would tighten up because those two factors would be compelling drivers toward more conservative choices, toward playing more of a trap poker game than a bluff poker game. Your choices are not determined by the fact that you are in a 6 handed tournament game per se but rather that the way the game you are in is playing, has determined what hands you choose to play yourself. In 6 handed tournament games that will usually mean that you loosen up but not always.
 
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mdpk

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Hmm, I haven't played 5NL or 10NL, so I'm not a good resource - a couple of suggestions:

1. Check if your bet sizing preflop is big enough, I use 4x BB + 1BB per limper from UTG, MP, and CO - I recently started using 3x BB for opening on the button and the SB. If you minraise a lot, it encourages a lot of limpers. Most flops I see are HU.
2. How much are you cbetting? I generally cbet around 60-75% pot.
3. Read the hand analysis forum, especially for the stakes you're playing. There are a lot of good regs here who play 6max at those stakes who also post hands.

gl and gg!

My standard bet size is 2xBB EP (only for 8+ handed) 3xBB MP and 4xBB LP. I used to add +1 BB / limper, but as there is a crazy ammount of limpers at these stakes, I just add +1 BB if people try to limp before me. Works well and even with 3 limpers I can usually isolate with a 5x BB raise on the button.

For cbets, I rely on the flop texture and the guy heads up with me. 1/2 to 3/4 pot on a dry flop, 2/3 to full pot on a drawy flop.


Also using a HUD made me realize quite a few things about my own style... Until then I was just looking at the few stats avaible on Full Tilt and PTR and tried to estimate where I was at. In fact, I'm not so TAG in FR games. Over the 1k hands I played with Realtime HUD, I got a VP$IP/PF of 22/20, aggression factor around 8. Not a very large sample of hands, but I didn't feel like I was running particulary hot with the cards.

In fact, I'm starting to wonder if I'm not playing too loose 6 handed, as these tables are already hyper-loose/aggressive at these stakes, much more than 9 handed tables, where the occasional maniac is quickly spoted and eaten by the first guy who happens to have a hand.

This is something I was already aware of, and the article posted by aliengenius also talk about how you should adjust your looseness according to the players at the table.

Thing is I thought I was already playing kinda tight. I usually go down to AJ (KQ) in EP, AT (KJ QJ) in MP, Ax (KT QT JT) in LP, all PP regardless of position, SC in position, some more garbage at the button if the blinds are weak. Of course you can play tighter, but it's not like I was playing K8s from MP...


I still need to take the time to read the e-book posted by Mase.


Many good advices in this thread :)
 
slycbnew

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My standard bet size is 2xBB EP (only for 8+ handed) 3xBB MP and 4xBB LP. I used to add +1 BB / limper, but as there is a crazy ammount of limpers at these stakes, I just add +1 BB if people try to limp before me. Works well and even with 3 limpers I can usually isolate with a 5x BB raise on the button.

Interesting - I use the opposite in my pf betsizing, larger (4x) from early positions and smaller (3x) from late. I want to charge people to see the flop if I'm going to play the flop oop. If I'm on the BTN and see someone open utg for 2x, my calling and 3betting ranges get pretty wide.
 
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mdpk

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If I'm on the BTN and see someone open utg for 2x, my calling and 3betting ranges get pretty wide.

This is ideal, as my range UTG is the tightest, so you can expect loads of 4 bets. As I said it's my usual bet size, but if I happen to get called too lightly when I open for a min raise EP, I can change to 3x BB opening for this table.

It's not a personal experiment, but something I learned through various poker articles, which usually suggest either a single opening bet size or an incremental bet size based on position.
 
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mdpk

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http://s3.amazonaws.com/ryanfee/fees6max.pdf

That's Fee's e-book on 6max, it's legit and a solid read for anyone who wants to know more about how it's played.

So I read it, and while it looks like an incredible article to improve your 6 handed game, it's way above my current level and the stakes I'm playing at.

However, I found this thread by the same guy: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/32/beginners-questions/fees-guide-going-robusto-243141/

Full of great advices for low stakes 6-max games :)

On a side note, Fee advocate to NOT use a HUD while learning to beat the low limits, as the experience you can gain without a HUD is more valuable than an immediate increase in profit.
 
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I use 4bb + 1 for each limper as a rule in 10nl. Any less u will either get limpers or run chance of getting 3 bet light.
 
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