Was just wondering what you guys thoughts are on the big difference between stakes. Say from $50 - $100?Obviously players improve but are the majority really that much better? I have been playing some $57.50's and $115 over the last few days against some winning regs and I haven't been all that impressed. Yeah they are somewhat tougher to play but the main difference I have noticed is just aggression factor. They 3bet alot lighter, call 3 bets lighter and also make lighter calldowns on the river - I have seen alot of light calls or A high calls on the river without any real hand reading.. I feel like my opponents have sharkscoped me and seen that I have been playing $34.50's and have got it in their head they can just crush me.Is the leap from the 50 levels to the 100's really that big?
I don't really think that any of the jumps between levels are as big as people make them out to be. It is more of a matter of being around long enough to be a familiar face so the regs stop joining you. There are still fish in every level, they just become slightly more scarce.
Thanks xSCWx, you've basically confirmed my thoughts after dabbling in some higher stakes of late. Another thing I've noticed is that some of the regs have a particular style that has obviously worked so they never deviate from it and it is easy to put them in tough spots - which is why I guess the become "regs" and have so many games played at the one level.If they were constantly evolving as players and not playing a set gameplan they would be moving up stakes on a semi regular basis would they not? (I'm talking about moves from 50-100-200-300+, once you get higher the games are obviously alot drier)
I think you pretty much nailed it on the first post, not a lot of difference, bit more aggression, bit less fishy. The great thing about HU is that it's such a complicated game that you can always get better, and it's just a matter of being able to adjust successfully to the higher aggression rate, which really isn't that hard to do. A lot of the advantages you can carve out for yourself involve thinking outside the box more than your opponents, poker players in general and especially HU players have somewhat of an aversion toward this though and prefer lines that are both simple to play and popular, which is pretty ridiculous actually. For instance, on another forum I tried to engage the people there into a discussion of OOP play where I suggested that, given the fact that players play tighter OOP preflop, they are thus bringing better ranges to postflop play, and maybe some of their negative returns OOP in general may be resulting from too weak postflop play, and maybe by looking at this we can gain some insights, I've actually done a lot of work in this area and that is certainly the case, I wanted to get some other people's ideas though. As it turned out all I really got was, you're out of your mind, everyone knows it's a big disadvantage here, you can't really reduce your disadvantage here, how dare you challenge traditional thinking, and then got challenged to matches where I'm supposed to play OOP for the whole match. So I left the place with a big grin on my face :) That's great to hear actually, I'm glad no one really wants to get better, I had a bunch of other stuff I wanted to talk about, I've tried to bring up serious discussions about theory elsewhere but got met with pretty much the same crap, no one really wants to think about the game too much and especially get off the beaten path too much and if you're not afraid of any of this and are at least somewhat bright then no one should really scare you :)
Interesting post KingCobra.I had a bunch of other stuff I wanted to talk about Give it a try and start a new thread!!