Even though poker has become increasingly difficult to beat over the years, small stakes live games like $1/$2 are still super-beatable.
To win in these games, you need two things. The first is to use a fundamentally sound strategy, which doesn’t really need much explaining.
The second key element is to adjust, sometimes drastically, to your opponents’ general tendencies and take advantage of their preflop and postflop mistakes.
In this article, I will share with you the number one exploit to crush small stakes cash games, and that exploit can be summed up in a single word: overfold!
While aggression is usually key to winning in poker, in small stakes live games, it is very important to be able to release your hand when your opponent is showing a lot of strength. More often than not, it means they have a good hand, and your best play is to get out of the way.
Small Stakes Players Chronically Under-Bluff
In a random $1/$2 game, you’ll find that a vast majority of players significantly under-bluff compared to the optimal GTO strategy.
Your opponents will find logical bluffs with hands like straight and flush draws, but very rarely will they have enough bluffs with junky hands containing a king-high and a backdoor of some sort.
When they’re willing to put in a lot of money into the pot, their range is usually weighted toward strong hands (much stronger than it should be in the GTO world), which makes bluff-catching unprofitable.
Knowing this, there are a few simple adjustments you can make before and after the flop to make sure you’re not leaking money.
Vital Preflop Exploits
Following the logic of small stakes players not bluffing enough, you can be fairly certain that their preflop 3-bets and 4-bets are much stronger than what GTO charts suggest.
A simple way to combat this is to fold more, especially with the offsuit portion of your range, and dial down on 4-bet bluffs since you won’t get enough folds.
When you face a 4-bet in these games, it will almost always be with a very narrow part of the range, most likely QQ+. With this knowledge, you can confidently fold all but the best hands, as this will be by far the most +EV strategy.
Let’s take a quick look at some of the preflop GTO 3-bet ranges:
Examining the lojack vs. hijack dynamics, we see that continuing ranges after a 3-bet are already pretty tight as it is. However, in small stakes games, you should further reduce the number of hands you call with, especially when facing a larger 3-bet.
Against a very tight range, even hands like ATs, AJs, and AQo significantly drop down in value, and you will be better off just folding them.
In a cutoff vs. button scenario, the GTO strategy has more hands in the calling range, as the button 3-bet range should be much wider. In these small stakes live games, however, you should still go ahead and fold most of your suited aces (ATs and below) and all of your offsuit hands.
Folding some of these hands like suited connectors can be annoying, but keep in mind that your opponents, on average, will have a really good hand. When this is the case, you’re simply not getting the right implied odds to continue, and you’ll be leaking money by sticking around.
Adjusting Your Postflop Strategy
When it comes to postflop play, it is important to recognize the type of player you’re up against and act accordingly. You’ll come across many different profiles, with some c-betting very rarely and others doing it all the time.
In general, though, the same logic applies. In most cases, if they’re showing a lot of aggression and are willing to put a lot of money into the pot, they’ll usually have a strong hand.
Let’s look at an example. Hijack raises to $6, and you defend from the big blind with [invalid notations]. You check, and they bet $12 into $13.
If this is a player you know to be on the tighter side in general, you should be folding right here. Your hand is unlikely to improve, and even when it does, the card you need could improve your opponent to a straight or a flush.
You’re simply doing very poorly against their range when they bet big, so even if it feels counterintuitive to just fold a pair to a single bet in small stakes games and against a tight opponent, this is the best thing you can do.
Let’s look at a slightly different example. We open the action to $5 with K♠9♠, the big blind calls, and the flop comes K♣Q♣10♥.
Your opponent checks to you, you fire a continuation bet of $8, and they go ahead and raise you to $22. What should you do with your top pair here?
The answer is very simple: fold. In a $1/$2 game, this check-raise is for value pretty much 100% of the time, meaning you’ll be up against two pair and straights. Against a GTO player, we would be calling a fair percentage here, but against a tight, small-stakes live player, there is simply no value in continuing.
The bottom line is, a simple way to significantly increase your win rate and crush small stakes live cash games is to fold more! Your opponents will generally under-bluff and put money in the pot only when they have a strong hand, and you can exploit this by bluffing less yourself and folding marginal holdings whenever they start blasting off!
