Should You Be a Nit? (w/ Uri Peleg) | Upswing Poker Level-Up #56

This article is a transcription of the Level-Up Podcast, hosted by Upswing VP Mike Brady with poker pro Uri Peleg. You can watch or listen to the entire episode via the links above or read on if you prefer a written version.

Mike Brady (00:00):

Let’s level up your poker knowledge by answering a key question. Would you be better off playing like a super tight nit before the flop? Uri Peleg has coached up some of the world’s best high stakes players on their way to winning millions, and he’s joining us today to answer this question.

Uri Peleg (00:16):

Hey Mike, what’s up? Thanks for having me.

Mike Brady (00:19):

Uri just released an absolutely incredible product over on Upswing Poker called Lab 2.0. This course allows you to follow a clear path, improve consistently, and build real skills. And the entire learning track was built by proven live cash, online cash and tournament pros. Uri was truly on a mission to put together the best possible team of coaches. He tapped into every corner of his network to find guys who aren’t just amazing players but also effective teachers. Today’s episode is going to be a little bit of a preview into what Lab 2.0 is like while giving you some nice value. So again, the question we’re answering today is, should you play like a nit preflop? But let’s back up. Why is this even a question? You might be wondering. Let’s look at an under the gun opening range at a six-handed table and observe the expected value of several hands.

Mike Brady (01:10):

So the top end hands, we’re going to look at their EV. We’re talking about Aces, Kings, Queen, Ace King suited. Pocket Aces by raising makes a little over nine big blinds on average every time you get to raise with it. Pocket Kings makes a little over five big blinds every time you raise with it. Pocket Queens makes a little over two big blinds and Ace Kings suited makes one point five three big blinds. That’s some really nice expected value with each of these hands. Now let’s look at the other end of the spectrum and compare that to bottom-of-range EVs. We’re looking at hands like Ace Three suited, Ten Nine suited and Queen Jack offsuit. Ace Three suited makes one fiftieth of a big blind. That’s zero point zero two big blinds when you race with it under the gun. Ten Nine suited makes one one hundredth of a big blind, zero point zero one every time you raise with it. Queen Jack offsuit, it’s actually a mixed frequency raise and it on average makes zero big blinds every time you raise with it.

Uri Peleg (02:08):

I guess one thing I would add is that we’re talking about being a nit preflop, but everything we’re saying kind of goes for. You can think of this as postflop as well because after the flop, if you would look at the EVs of your hand, you would see that a ton of it is concentrated on when you make a set or when you make two pair or when you have an overpair. So the structure of poker is always the top hands capture the majority of the value.

Mike Brady (02:35):

And to get specific with that, if you add up all the EV of these preflop hands, Aces, Kings and Queens accounts for over seventy percent of your expected value when you’re raising under the gun. Add in Jacks, Ace King and Ace Queen, so now we’re talking about the top roughly three to five percent of hands. Those make ninety-three percent of the money. The rest is basically filler. When you look at all those suited connectors, low pocket pairs, weaker offsuit hands like King Ten offsuit or King Jack offsuit, the suited hands that just barely make their way into the range like Queen Nine suited, King Eight, suited King Nine suited… All of these hands make very, very little money on average. This is what begs the question posed in the title. Should you even play these marginal EV hands? If you’re watching the video, they are the hands that are in the blue box on your screen. Now that you have the context for why we’re even asking this question, let’s cut to one of Uri’s videos straight from Lab 2.0 which answers this question in just two minutes. Listen closely.

Uri Peleg (03:42):

Okay, so I was asked the question, if a few hands make the majority of the money, why play the rest? And very, very straightforward answer. First of all, the rest of the hands do make money, so why not play them, right? And poker is a game of small incremental edges. You don’t have to play them, you can fold them in certain table conditions. Don’t get married to them. If you really have to go to the bathroom and it’s a live game, fold the hand, right? Like recognize how important or not important they are. But second reason is that if you only play the very best hands, people in poker pay attention to what you’re doing, whether it’s online or in a live setting, people are going to recognize you’re in it. Then your good hands are going to make less money. So the reason that we play the rest of the hands isn’t so that our good hands can make money.

Uri Peleg (04:34):

The reason is because these hands make money. We play them because they make money. A side effect of playing them is your range of hands becomes looser, and so your strongest hands actually start making more money, which means if I only ever play Aces, I’m not going to get action from anyone ever. But if I start playing Aces and Kings and Queens and Ace King, I’m still not going to get action from anyone ever. But when you start widening this, more and more people do start giving you action. And so your good hands start say winning more than the blinds, you’re tougher to read. Not to mention it’s more fun, it is more fun. But I’m here to teach you guys to make money, not necessarily the focus on having fun, although winning money is fun. So yeah, these hands are important to play. It’s just despite these hands being correct to play, they’re the sort of hands that you can mix around with, don’t feel like you have to play them. If you’re tired, if you’re tilted, if you got a read from someone, if it’s the best player in the world sitting to your left, feel free to play much tighter than the game theory ranges and vice versa, if all the people behind you are terrible and you have reads on them, you can play looser. These ranges are just a guideline and it’s fine to deviate from them.

Mike Brady (05:56):

To recap, you should generally not play like a nit because, number one, the weaker hands still do make money. So we talked about that Ten Nine suited that makes one one hundredth of a big blind on average when you raise it, that’s still money and some money is better than no money. Number two, people will catch on and give you less action. Think about how you play against very tight players. When you’ve identified that stereotypical old man coffee at the table and they decide to put in a re-raise over your open, aren’t you playing very, very tight against that player? You don’t want to allow people who are paying attention to do the same to you. So that’s why it’s important to mix in these hands. And then number Three kind of goes along with number two, playing a looser range helps your strong hands make more money. Your range becomes tougher to read. You might have Six Five suited or you might have Aces and that makes you tougher to play against.

Uri Peleg (06:53):

Let me add just a few simple ideas on top of that. So when we say it’s just seven percent of the money… Imagine if I said the rake it’s just seven percent extra in this game. Seven percent in poker is a lot. And the way poker works is… Beating the rake is tough. Beating the rake by five percent is amazing. There’s a ton of back and forth, so you can’t really be giving away any edges in general as an approach. And yeah, this kind of testifies to something that I think we talk about a lot where if everyone was a GTO bot, you could be a nit and everyone would still play their GTO ranges and there are a ton of nits. We want you guys… Everything we talk about always think about it from both directions. So you shouldn’t play like a nit, but also you should recognize what you want to do if someone else does play like a nit.

Uri Peleg (07:51):

There’s a live game I played in recently where a guy who would never ever bluff… I watched a podcast with Eli Elezra. And then he sat down one day and he said, “I’ve been inspired by Eli Elezra”. And he made some crazy bluff and showed it down and I was suddenly, “shit, I can’t just auto-fold to this guy anymore”. And I paid off a stack and he had it. Those kinds of things on all levels of the game. You want to be the guy who’s unpredictable. And in order to do that, you need to learn how to bluff, you need to learn how to play loose, you need to learn how to three bet and how to four bet. And one of the things in poker is you always see showdowns, but you never know how many people are just making insane folds against you. You’re never going to know that because they’re not going to show you.

Mike Brady (08:40):

In a moment I’m going to ask Uri when you actually should play like a nit, because there are scenarios where you should tighten up considerably. But first I want to talk about Uri’s new course that he’s been working incredibly hard on for the better part of the last year, Lab 2.0. Lab 2.0 allows you to follow a clear path, improve consistently, and build real skills that you can take to the poker table. Most poker training sites dump you into a sea of content and make you work to get better. And frankly, this was true for the first iteration of the lab for at least the last few years. But Lab 2.0 is different. We were on a mission to fix that. It’s poker strategy made simple. You follow a structured interactive path that adapts to your skill level. Learning happens through video lessons, quizzes, live interactive webinars, study tools like charts and of course our private community with coaches and members. Lab 2.0 is available now. Head over to upswingpoker.com and sign up. It is going to be a fantastic decision for your poker game.

Uri Peleg (09:44):

It’s important to me to mention that Lab 2.0 is not only for beginners, it’s basically designed so that at any level you’re at including a full-time pro, we know how to move you forward. So it’s a very, very comprehensive program and what you guys saw on the screen is just the very beginning of it. There is a very deep, very advanced theory, but we also start from the basics. So there is a complete structure A to Z. I think that’s something that’s important to me to add.

Mike Brady (10:14):

Yeah, and the idea here is that no matter what skill level you are at, that’s where you start in Lab 2.0. If you are a beginner, you’re going to take this personality quiz at the beginning of the course, you’re going to be identified as a beginner and you’re going to be dropped right at the beginning of the path. You might be identified more as an intermediate player, in which case you’ll be dropped a few nodes down the path. So you get to skip all that content that would just be refresher for you. You get to save that time and then if you are an advanced pro, you’re going to skip a lot of stuff and you’re going to get dropped right into what we’re calling the mastery path, which is where you really start to add high level skills to your game that can take an already good win rate and make it great.

Uri Peleg (10:56):

Yeah, and I think one of the things that differentiates this is that all of the content for beginners was created by extremely proficient players. So we don’t have low stakes coaches making low stakes content. This is only the very best coaches making all the content.

Mike Brady (11:12):

Alright, so back to our last question today, Uri, can you speak to situations in which you actually would want to nit it up at the poker table?

Uri Peleg (11:21):

Yeah, I think these are actually quite common and one of the real life examples that we had for years playing in PokerStars is there was a group of Spanish professionals who would… they would three bet with something like top twenty percent of hands when they were in position to you. So say you opened under the gun, they’re on the cutoff they’d three bet you with twenty percent of hands. And we tried to… I think this was a good play by them against how people were playing back in the day. These guys were doing very well, but we’re playing in the pool with them. We want to know how do we optimally adjust. And when we try to figure it out, the answer was, your Aces make more money. But when you have Ace Three suited that can’t in any way make money when you just get three bet a ton because there’s no way around it.

Uri Peleg (12:16):

And this is important, if I raise Ace Three suited a nd you three bet and I call, that’s not a situation in which I’m making money. That’s the situation in which the second you three bet the money that my Ace Three suited was supposed to be making is gone. I can call or fold, it’s close. That’s why those hands are indifferent. And kind of what ended up happening is that we’d want to be nits, but you can’t be a nit because everyone knows you’re a nit. But if you’re a nit in the correct circumstances, so I generally play a normal range and if there are nits at the table, I’ll play a wide range and then if there’s a crazy guy behind me, I’ll play a tight range. So over the course of a while of looking at me, I don’t look like a nit and this guy who’s three betting me with a twenty percent range is never going to know I’m a nit when he’s at the table. There is no way for him to recognize that. So this is just one example that by cherry-picking the spots to be a nit, it’s actually an extremely effective tool in your arsenal.

Mike Brady (13:21):

To bring up an example that comes up in my poker playing career, I try to play the World Series Poker main event every year. And that tournament’s very interesting because you run into a lot of weak players, that’s what makes it worth playing. But the best players in the world are also in there. I’ll find myself seated at table setups where I’ll look to my left and the two guys directly next to me have something like combined twenty-five million dollars in live earnings. Meanwhile, I’m a player who essentially plays recreational tournaments these days. I’m a knowledgeable player, but I’m certainly nowhere near their level. I am going to immediately change how I’m approaching preflop when those players are to my left. All of those marginal opens are absolutely being cut out of my range. Now, on the other side of the coin, maybe day one of that same tournament, there’s a lot of weak players still in and oftentimes I’ll find myself at a table with eight players all of whom aren’t particularly good at poker.

Mike Brady (14:20):

And then all of a sudden I find myself playing incredibly loose myself. I’m raising hands like Ace Five offsuit from early, middle position. A hand that I wouldn’t even raise from the cutoff if I had those two really strong players to my left. So, the differences can be really, really stark and it’s always going to depend on the exact setup and the exact conditions. We could probably make a forty-five-minute podcast talking about all the different possible setups and scenarios where playing like a nit would be good or playing loose would be better. But the overall takeaway to keep this concise is analyze the conditions of your situation, think critically and try to decide. Is this a situation where I should tighten up a little bit and set myself up for postflop success? Is this a situation where I should jack up my opening percentage and really try to go after it and make some extra money with all these marginal hands? Or is this just a pretty neutral situation and the best move is just to kind of play your normal strategy?

Uri Peleg (15:26):

Yeah, and I think one of the things in poker is there are a lot of guys… I think everyone knows when there’s a weaker player behind you or in the blinds you open wider, I think that’s kind of general knowledge. But the counterpoint to that of saying when there’s a strong player in the blinds, open tighter because now you’re the weaker player. Now, if we imagine the graph of how much EV your hands are making, all the marginal stuff is now losing. It does cut both ways, it’s a bit tough to swallow. But we often… If you’re sitting at a table, like you said at an international event, they’re often going to be guys who you can, without hurting your ego, say this, “I’m outclassed by these guys”. So just be careful, be in it. Don’t feel like let them run you over. I mean that’s one part of the game.

Uri Peleg (16:14):

So to your Ace Five offsuit example, I think something that not a lot of people know is that you can open looser but you can also open larger. And those are in a way two sides of the same coin. So when you tell me “sometimes I’ll open Ace Five offsuit from under the gun”, I’d say generally speaking that just doesn’t work. There are five people behind you, so it’s very hard to me being loose beyond a certain point work. But what you could do is open to five big blinds under the gun with the range that you’re playing if you think people are going to react in the same way or react in a very loose way. And what we found, and this was actually found by a friend of mine who I worked with for a long time, is that if you’re thinking about opening the button, there’s a certain threshold, let’s say the big blind is calling everything, there is a threshold where you say adding more hands actually doesn’t make sense. You’d rather just increase the size and make more money with the existing hands.

Mike Brady (17:20):

Yeah, that’s fascinating and maybe I’ll cut out that Ace Five offsuit and just raise bigger with the Ace Eight suited next time instead.

Uri Peleg (17:27):

And it can go really wide once you open your mind in terms of sizes. And this ties into playing soft games and playing in international tournaments. There are guys who we know that there’s a certain three bet size that makes sense, but there are a lot of guys who don’t know this. So if you three bet them to… If you ask me what’s the biggest three bet size you’ve ever made against someone in an online game? I’d say the biggest is probably ninety-eight big blinds where someone limped and I iso to ninety-eight big blinds because there was a guy who was just seeing flops, he didn’t care. And we’d actually iso him to ninety-eight, there’d be two big blinds behind and he’d fit or fold the flop, which was crazy. But you really need to develop flexibility. So when I see someone playing eighty percent of hands, I’m immediately in this exploratory mode of “let’s 5x, let’s see what happens”. Or if you see someone cold call a three bet and he shows down Nine Seven suited, do you think he’s folding if you open to nine big blinds with Nine Seven suited? I’d wager probably not. I don’t think he cares. And that opens up a whole world of how much more money you can make once you start getting flexible in these kinds of situations.

Mike Brady (18:53):

What a dream scenario to just open to ten big blinds, get called and then now all of a sudden you’ve got Ace King going into the flop with twenty-one big blinds in the middle for no reason. It’s like you’re getting to play a three bet pot but against a player who’s got hands that you might see in a small single-raised pot. It’s really, really favorable for you.

Uri Peleg (19:16):

And then the art of it is with Ace King which SPR you going for. Once you have someone who’s not flexible, you’re Ace King is going to miss most of the time. There are some stack to pot ratios that are very, very awkward for Ace King that you want to be avoiding. Because when you miss you have twenty-five percent equity. So don’t make it that when he flops a pair and shoves if you need thirty percent to call. That would be a very awkward situation. And similar to maneuvering stack to pot ratios with Ace King, you’re going to have to learn how to play with wide ranges when you miss and how to give people rope. There’s a ton of stuff that’s going on once you enter the rabbit hole of being very, very creative with your game.

Mike Brady (20:05):

I think that’s a good place to leave it. Now you know the answer to the question “should you play like a nit preflop?” And it’s one of those slightly unsatisfying maybes. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Upswing Poker Level Up. Hit that like button and rate the podcast five stars if you enjoyed this one and if you want to see more and get notified when we drop future episodes, hit the follow or subscribe button. It’s different verbiage on every platform and I just can’t keep up. Thanks again. Take care.

Uri Peleg (20:30):

Thank you guys.