Super-Simple Adjustments for Low Stakes Live Cash – Top Tips by Upswing Poker

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It is no secret that live cash games are generally much softer than their online counterparts. The key to winning in these games is finding leaks in your opponents’ strategies and taking full advantage of them.

While knowing the GTO strategy is always an asset at the tables, live games often require you to take a more exploitative approach to maximize your win rate.

In this article, we’ll focus on one simple but often overlooked adjustment that can help you immediately improve your results in low-stakes live games (up to NL500).

Balance Is Overrated in Live Games

When you play in tough online games against very competent opponents, you have to pay a lot of attention to balancing your ranges. In soft live games, this is not the case.

Trying to play a perfectly balanced game against opponents who have very obvious leaks is counterproductive and will lead to leaving money on the table.

This is one of the main points that Uri Peleg makes in his “Elite Cash Games Exploits” course.

While you want to try and stay balanced against the best poker player out there, this isn’t something you should worry too much about playing against recreational players or bad low-stakes regs.

In fact, it is often the case that general tendencies in these games are so far off from GTO that trying to stick to the optimal strategy can even lose you money in multi-way scenarios.

So, instead of obsessing over balancing and staying on the GTO side of things, you can introduce some simple adjustments to immediately improve your results.

Simple Exploits That Work at Low Stakes Cash

When trying to change your strategy and adjust, there is always the danger you do it the wrong way. Luckily, most of the very effective exploits are very simple and easy to execute:

Adjust your raising range based on other players’ tendencies – if you’re up against loose players who like to defend a lot, hands from the bottom part of your range lose in value as you won’t get to steal blinds often enough.

• Experiment with different bet sizes to target different parts of your opponents’ ranges.
• Tailor your c-bet strategy according to opponents’ individual tendencies – c-bet more against players who often fold to continuation bets and reduce your frequencies against the ones who like to check-raise.
• Adjust opening sizes to target specific opponents – raise bigger against players in the blinds who like to call too much but rarely 3-bet to charge them more to see flops.
• Fold more against players who don’t bluff enough – this will save you a lot of money in the long run.

Don’t Worry About Your Table Image

You might think that your opponents will eventually pick up on what you’re doing and start to adjust. And, if you notice this to be the case, it might be time to reconsider some of your adjustments and maybe go back to playing a more GTO style.

But for the most part, this simply won’t happen at low stakes.

Most players will be focused on their own cards to notice what you’re doing, and even if they notice something is off, they probably won’t know how to adjust properly.

You can get away with a lot in these games, and as long as you have a good bankroll for the games you play in, you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment with different strategies.

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If you’d like to learn more about this topic and pick up some more useful tips for your games, definitely check out the Upswing Poker Lab.