Value betting good hands and stealing the occasional pot is quickly getting boring. It's also not all that lucrative when my sessions are limited to 1-2 hours/day. I'm also getting sick of being on the receiving end when an annoying LAG sits down and starts pushing me around. So I'm going to try an experiment and track my progress (antistuff, you'll like this). Starting at .01-.02 PLO8 6-max, I'm going to play what I'm calling PAG poker: Positionally Aggressive. The basic strategy is to minimize the number of hands I play out of position, and to keep the pots small when I do play OOP, but to build pots and put people on the defensive when I have position. Here are the rules:

1) Seats 1-4: Very tight-passive. Only play strong hands and always limp/complete/check. Basically my usual approach.

2) Seats 5&6: Raise every playable hand in unraised pots. Never limp. Follow up with a high % of CB's and fire 2nd bullets often, always pot bets. Force my opponents to pay the max and have no idea what I'm holding going into the turn and river.

(I'm switching back to PLO8 for this experiment due to the annoying tendency of many NLO8 players to push preflop)

Good luck!

I think that playing more aggressively in LP will payoff

Keep us posted.

Pretty uneventful first session. Overall the aggression was fairly effective - I pulled down a few decent pots with 2nd bullets on paired turns despite holding almost nothing. Still only able to eke out a small profit on 2 tables. I've noticed a couple of problems with my implementation of the strategy:

1) I tend to start off aggressive and then ease off as the session continues. Aggression isn't natural for me so I have a hard time keeping it up the entire time. Will have to work on that.

2) Although I've turned up the aggression I haven't loosened up my hand selection, which means I'm still not playing that many hands (I ran about 25/13 on both tables)...which in turn makes it harder to have highly profitable sessions. As I get more comfortable with the aggression I may have to start loosening up more in late position.

Eked out a tiny profit tonight, despite being up a buyin at one point. I've identified a few more problems with the strategy:

1) It's a very up-and-down way to play - unless you are able to hit some big hands to go with the stolen pots, you eventually give back what you earn.

2) You start to get called more often, which results in more multi-way than heads-up pots...which in turn makes it harder to steal pots postflop...which often results in building pots that someone else will take down.

3) You can only control the action for so long. Eventually people will start playing back and/or other aggressive players will join the table.

I guess the answer to (2) and (3) is to move around more often. As soon as people start catching on and playing back, that's when it's time to move to more fertile ground. Problem is that's not so easy to do when the table selection is limited to begin with.

4) I'm already getting bored with O8.

nah, you see as soon as they start doing this you still control the action just in a different way. as long as they are being forced to react to your actions you're in charge.

I suppose, or maybe I just haven't yet learned how to react when they play back. There were several hands last night where I made my typical Button/CO raise and then either one of the blinds or the Button decided to pot-reraise me right back. Depending on the situation I'd either fold my very marginal cards or I'd call to see the flop. If you don't hit a piece of the flop, calling pot reraises can be an easy way to erase your profits or dig yourself a hole.

I've also realized my boredom isn't so much with O8 (I really do enjoy the game) but with playing the penny tables. It's frustrating that I've been playing online poker for about 2 years now and I'm still playing the micro stakes tables. It has a lot to do with my decision to move some money over to Tilt for bonus and rakeback, so now my small roll is split between two sites, but I'm really starting to lose patience with playing cash games for 2 hours and walking away with a 50 cent profit.