I've been playing a pretty live $1/$2 home game for the last month. 4 sessions and I'm up a bit more than 800 bones. I'm fairly new to live poker though and I'm looking for some advice.

Basically it goes like this, there are two guys in the game that buyin for anywhere from 600-1000 bucks each week. I buyin for 300-500 myself, along with usually one other really tight player. Then the rest of the table generally fills with people buying in for 100 or so each. The two big stack players play literally 80% of pots, and I'm having a fairly tough time beating them.

I really can't tell how to approach this game. Generally, the preflop raise is anywhere from 11-15 dollars, and there can be anywhere from 2-5 callers. With so many short stacks, I'm 3 betting preflop pretty liberally with decent hands (99+, AQs+) to the 50ish range and still ending up with these people in the pot. I'm certain this is just variance slapping me in the face, but I don't know what to do. Example hand:

8 handed and I'm in the CO with 99, live strattle (sp?) is on LAGtard 1 with about 1100 in front of him, double strattle is LAGtard 2 with about 870 in front of him. Next two players have less than 150 and call the 8 bucks, I raise the 8 to 30 staight with about 350 behind. Folded around, bother lag's call and all fold. Now about 110 in the pot after the rake.

Flop come 678 rainbow. Both Lags check to me, I bet 125 into the pot and LAG one folds and LAG 2 puts me allin. Do we call here?

Reads are that LAG2 is not that good but seems to have cards all the time. He calls down on tons of boards and reraises liberally pretty much at any sign of weakness. He could definitely be putting me on just overs here, or and overpair. So now I have to call ~225 to win 560...

****, I don't know why I'm even asking. I think it's probably an obv call. I'm just megatilted right now as I kept flopping big hands and getting outdrawn. Maybe I would just like to know what others would do if playing in this game. In all reality, the stacks and such make it play like a 2/5 or even 5/10 game at times. I guess it could be that I'm just not good enough. Please help.

The hand you posted is a call.

I used to play in a similar game. Honestly, you're going to need a large roll to play in this because your variance is going to be pretty high. I'm just going to assume you have a big enough roll to play here.

If you have a lot of shorties playing and some loose calling from the big stacks, make sure you size your preflop raises in a manner that you can re-raise when a shortie shoves. I can't emphasize this enough. If you raise a straddle to, say, 40 and the loose players call and the shortie shoves for 100, you have put yourself in a very profitable spot since you can now shut the others out and have plenty of dead money in there. It really sucks when you don't consider the stack of someone who might shove when sizing your raise.

To be honest, I found that I made the most money in this type of game by playing a tighter, passive game, but the players I played against were bad enough to put a lot of money in a pot no matter the preflop action. What I mean is, be willing to take more flops with hands you'd normally isolate with that can flop huge because it's likely that the players seeing 80 percent of the flops will pay you off with a pretty wide range.

Also, if there's a straddle to 8 and two limpers and you plan on raising 99, I think you need to raise more unless you're building a pot in the hopes of hitting a set.

Lastly, AKIMTIOPHUN.

Nice


Don't you need entire table to be calling to make this move profitable?

Try to figure out where the biggest mistakes are made and formulate a strategy to exploit those mistakes. I'm not really sure from your post where those mistakes are. If the big stack players play poorly after the flop, that's an ideal situation and you want to cover them.



Stay open to the possibility that this guy knows what he's doing.

If, on the other hand, the profit is coming from the villains playing too loose before the flop, then there's no reason to buy-in deep. Keep exploiting them by raising with your good starting hands.

Otherwise, make sure the door is locked and stay aware.