I've played a couple hundred thousand LHE hands online over the last four or five years, but almost exclusively at full ring, at limits ranging from .02/.04 to $1/$2.

I'm currently playing .50/$1 LHE at Party, but i've moved to 6-max hands. My question is: How much should I be opening my starting range of hands and with how wide a range of hands should I be defending my BB?

at full ring, i'm your typical 22/5/3...something like that, if I recall. I'm using PT3 so i can figure out answers to any questions ya'll might have.

I'm slowly getting used to the swinginess, being up 22BB on one table and down 17 on another and recently suffered a 100BB downswing that the numbers tell me was just bad luck.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Well for full ring if you're only raising preflop 5% of the time as you said it sounds like you're playing far too passively

At 6-max my stats are about 34/22/1.5 and I protect my big blind a lot and my small blind very little. I play more passively after the flop than many other winning players as the way the game is played I find that works for my style quite well.

At 6-max, especially when the table is getting shorter with 5, 4 or even 3 players the range of the opening raiser is usually much wider than in a full ring game.

The most common 6-max play is a raiser against somebody protecting out of their blinds and this is where you are going to win or lose money. In the big blind preflop I play loose and passive. I call raises with a wide range and in heads up situations I rarely 3-bet out of the big. By playing this way it's hard to put me on a hand preflop. Out of the small blind I play tight but very aggressive preflop. If the hand isn't worth 3 betting out of the small in general I will fold.

The above of course are very general. At the lower limits you may have more passive players calling a lot and that means you have to adjust to that. In those cases I might call out of the small blind with a much wider range of hands for example.

For online play it's good that you're expanding into 6-max since it's by far the more popular game and at the middle limits full ring is becoming less and less.

That's good stuff, Bob.

I'd like to play more 6-max too but I need to build up more of a bankroll for it at fr first. Since 6-max has more swings, what would you recommend for a BR size to comfortably play there?

I've heard 400 to 500 BB's is ideal to handle the swings. At the lower limits .10/.20 and lower your usual 300 BB is fine. Most of my sessions are winners or barely losing anything more than 25 BB at these lower levels.

The first consideration should be that you're winning at that limit and have an edge on the game since no matter how large your bankroll is if you aren't a winner it doesn't matter.

I'm not sure what limits you're playing but if you want to work on your 6-max game and you have bankroll concerns drop down in limits to play 6-max to become a better 6-max player.

Once you feel comfortable with the game and are winning don't be afraid to take some shots at the limit one higher than you normally play. There really is no harm in taking limited controlled shots if playing that higher limit doesn't intimate you into playing less than your best. When you're playing lower limits the most important consideration should be improving your game and not following strict, conservative bankroll rules.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that bankroll discipline isn't important for players who are playing for a living but a recreational player trying to become the best they can be who has another good source of income can afford to take more chances as long as they truly have the skill to beat the game.

Thanks for all the great info, Bob!

Right now I am only 4 tabling $1/$2 FR every so often as I am mostly a tourney player but I'd like to move into the 6-max game eventually. And I def only supplement my income with poker, i don't depend on it but I still like to have a decent idea of what kind of br i need. We'll see

This one tidbit alone will save you a ton of $$ in the long run. Lord knows starting out 58/16 from the small blind stunted the hell out of my original grown in lhe 6max. I can't even begin to describe how important Bob's words are here.

ive started calling a lot more out of the small blind, especially if the big blind is either overly tight or overly loose and sucks. so far its working well for me.

I'm a big fan of this as well, but for someone first moving to 6-max, I'd advise them to basically always 3-bet or fold their SB in spots where they're facing one raiser. It's something I stuck with early on and it helped keep me out of trouble, taught me the power of having the lead, showed me the value of fold equity in HU pots, and allowed me to safely adapt to a point where I could formulate reads accurately enough to recognize good cold-calling spots.

I think that a few good rules of thumb are great to have when you first start out, but as you move up they can hamper your growth and creativity, so it's sort of a give and take and something you have to re-evaluate often.

Ok, I want to be very clear on this, Jeff. All of this stuff is really, really important for you to understand if you want to transition comfortably into SHLHE.

You need to raise more. Never open limp. Rarely limp behind. Very very rarely cold-call a single raiser from anywhere except the BB. Defend your BB more. Open up preflop. Be more aggressive post-flop with draws, pairs, big hands, everything. Get to showdown a lot.

You aren't going to be comfortable with a lot of or possibly any of these adjustments coming from Full Ring (where it doesn't seem that you were particularly aggressive either), but they are absolutely essential for you to make.

I know that that is a ton of information to be thrown at you and completely overhauling your game can be a disorienting and frustrating process, so feel free to PM me if you have any questions or anything. I can give you much better guidance through AIM or whatever than I can here.