I’ve got to thinking about ABC poker.  Pros often tell people that at lower stakes playing tight is the best way to win.  It seems like a simple theory.  If you are often holding better hands than your opponents when you see a flop, you should win a lot more times.  But when you see guys down there playing the LAG style, they seem to be cleaning up sometimes, so you often wonder whether tight is right, even at the lower stakes.

Well, just for a second, think about that NL1000 pro coming back to NL50 to make a video.  He wants to display how to win playing a tight style.  So he raises good hands, plays position and plays straight forward postflop.  Do you think it is possible a newer player can pick up these tips and emulate this style well?  Not really.  Most of what makes this guy a pro is he has a great idea about how to play the game well on every street, and against every type of opponent.  He has tonnes of experience, can hand read like a machine, and has explored a lot of poker theories probably with the help of other good players too.  There is no chance a newer player trying to play ABC will be able to understand properly when to make those big calls, folds and bets as well as the pro.  So the pro will crush the game playing tight, while the newer player will make a tonne of postflop mistakes and be slightly +EV or maybe even -EV if he hasn’t grasped the concepts well.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is ABC poker will be enough to crush the lower stakes games, at least until NL200 from what I’ve experienced, but realistically only if you have very good ideas about why you are playing hands, when to bet and when to fold.  It is far more important to build up good ideas about how to play the game, and good hand reading skills than it is to work out whether you want to play a LAG or a TAG style preflop.  The more skills you build up of course, the more you start to push barriers, which might include playing more hands preflop.

My tips right now on how to do this might be to put a lot of time in doing equity equations against a range of hands (not just the hand someone showed down) and trying to work out the most +EV way to play certain hands against a range.  Also playing games like heads up cash, where you get to play a lot of postflop poker can really help open your eyes to different ways to play hands, which can help you get more value and find more +EV bluffs when playing ring games.