2009 was a real eye-opener for me, both in terms of how much money it’s possible to grind out online if you work really hard and how vital it is to keep working on your game. My year didn’t start too well, and I blame that partly on the huge improvement in the quality of online play, thanks to forums, knowledge sharing and training sites like this! Being humble enough to leave your ego at the door and recognise that your game is not working is paramount to success, so here I’m going to look at a few winning adjustments you can make in your quest to beat the cash games.
The most crucial difference of six-max cash compared to full-ring is that your opponent’s playing tendencies are accentuated due to the higher rate of hands per hour. As such, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for six-max play – playing five loose-passive fish is a very different world from playing five good TAGs – and this means identifying player types is crucial. Given the blend of players at the mid stakes tables, I think filtering opponents into the following categories is probably reasonable: tight winning regular; loose winning regular; weak-tight losing regular; loose losing regular; maniac; and outright fish. That achieved, you should then look at how to make winning adjustments to your game to get the best winning margin against each player.
Adjustments in practice
Probably the player type that is most difficult for the actively thinking player to adjust to is the nit (aka rock). Rocks, nits, granites – call them what you will, these guys are not players you target, but players you tolerate. They only give action when they have the nuts or close to it, so how do you prise money out of them?
Well, this is what I’ve come up with. You want to ensure that you steal their blinds as often as possible. If they are folding their big blind to a steal so much, you can open any two cards happily. However, even if you started preflop with Aces, if a nit gives you grief on the flop or turn you should fold. Unless you have ever seen him bluff in these spots before, ditching your hand is the simplest way to ensure they never get paid off. If they are the preflop raiser and you are both deep, by all means call in position and float/take shots at stacking them, but ONLY if you have great implied odds! The simplest way to exploit them is to let them raise, fold, then move on. They are not raising enough to offset the money they will lose from the blinds. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that’s their major leak.