Joe The Pro

TAG can be best

At the beginning of this year I was completely absorbed and addicted to watching poker instructional videos. After watching so many of them I was convinced that I HAD to play a LAG style to be any good. I adjusted my game and worked very hard to increase my VPIP and PFR. It felt unnatural to my play style but at times I was able to maintain my win rate.

I'll get back to this.

In the forums there is one user who kindly data mines FTP and publishes ONLY the win rate of the top players at my stakes (100NL). Using his list, I made notes on the top 30 players as players to avoid playing if possible. While I was making notes on them I noticed that almost ALL (I think but one) players played very simple TAG (18/14ish) according to the hands I had on them.

Okay back on track.

So why was I trying so desperately hard to up my stats to something like 22/18 when not only did it feel unnatural to me, but none of the top players at my stakes were doing.

Lately I've been alternating between mid stack and deep stack. If the tables are tough, I believe mid stack is the way to go as I can multitable like crazy and limit the tough decisions (I can also punish the regulars by doing 4-bet all in bluffs). But if the table is full of fishes I buy in for full and play TAG.

The other interesting thing to note is that if you hypothesize the winning-most player's yearly salary including rakeback he makes about 60k USD. For some reason that disappointed me that the very best I could do is make 60K a year, but then I thought about it and realized that I had never intended to make 100NL a living. I always believed that I would need to do mainly 200NL and the occasional 400NL.

posted by joe | permalink | 0 comments