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High Stakes Advice to Ignore in Microstakes Games

A lot of players like to look up to high-stakes players for strategy advice. There’s nothing wrong with that per se. However, there is a fine line between taking advice into consideration, and misapplying it. As a player, you must always remember to tailor your strategy to the types of opponents you will be playing. I’m sure you can imagine the skill difference between a high-stakes pro, and a gambler at 25NL.

Whenever you read strategy, you need to take into consideration who it was meant for. Advanced metagame concepts aren’t going to apply to basic games full of non-thinking players. Here are a few strategy items in particular that you should be weary of applying to the lower limits.

Balancing your range:

This is a hugely misapplied concept that leads players into all sorts of bad situations. The basic tenet of balancing your range is this: you never want to be too predictable. Because of this, balanced range theory states that one should occasionally ‘mix up’ his play. For example, if you find you are only raising the top 10 percent of your hands preflop, the theory would advise you to start raising worse hands to avoid your opponents catching on to your strategy.

At higher limits, where players are thinking about your strategy, this is great advice. That’s unquestionable. However, at micro limits, players aren’t thinking about your strategy. They are barely thinking about their own strategy, much less yours. Balancing your range against opponents who haven’t even realized you have a range is pointless, and will actually diminish your edge.

At lower limits you simply want to exploit bad play, and the fact that opponents aren’t really using a strategy. There is absolutely no need to start changing the cards you play as part of your strategy, since nobody will be catching on to your strategy any time soon.

Light 3-betting:

Lots of skilled players advocate 3-betting light in order to combat certain opponents. This is a great strategy, and it works very often- but only against thinking opponents. In microstakes games, thinking opponents barely exist. The ones that do move up in limits very quickly.

I don’t want to suggest that you should not 3-bet. There is a time and a place to do so at low limits. Usually, we play for value against non-thinking players, since those types have no concept of value in the first place (they call anything).

When a bad player raises preflop, it’s generally a sign that they probably have a decent hand. 3-betting a player who has not raised preflop in 150 hands is fine if you have a great hand. Otherwise, it should be obvious that they may have something worth playing. Why 3-bet with poor cards in this situation? It doesn’t make sense.

3-betting light just for the sake of it is pointless, and in fact goes against the very core of value-based microstakes strategy. It’s counterproductive, and shouldn’t be put into practice. Save the light 3-betting for battles of aggression at higher stakes.

Playing LAG continued in the next post.

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