Even that is highly dependent on your post-flop skill. Marginal hands and drawing hands like small pairs and small suited connectors can be highly profitable on loose tables if you're confident in your reading ability. Playing like a nit is the easiest way to play profitably on a loose table and has dramatically lower variance, but widening your range and playing intelligently post-flop can often be substantially more profitable.
I used to be profitable in the golden days being a nit and just letting the huge swaths of players pay me off. So many all-ins to bluff me off while holding top set, nut straight, or nut flush.
Just recently got back playing and am trying to learn to play against real players. I'm down overall after about 50 hours of play, but not very much. Any advice?
Poker is much harder now and it's hard to find tables that will happily pay off nitty play ad infinitum. I'd make a list of concepts you should learn about, but I think it'll be easier for me to make a list of books you should read:
The Mathematics of Poker (Chen and Ankenman)
Applications of No-Limit Poker (Janda)
Expert Heads up No-Limit Hold 'em (Tipton, this one is nice as the author is a Computer Scientist and also has a course on building a solver.)
Professional No Limit-Hold 'em (Flynn, Miller, Mehta)
Finally, you should get a membership to something like Upswing or RIO to help synthesize the information into a useful framework for play. Also, you'll want access to something like PIO or Pokersnowie for analysis of your hands.
One book that I have really really enjoyed that is somewhat recent (2016) is The Grinders Manual [1]. It gives fantastic advice that is still relevant and is extremely readable. Covers a wide range of topics and came widely recommended to me. It’s helped my game a lot as I just started playing seriously about 5 months ago.
It’s geared toward online cash playing, but I ignore most of the HUD stuff and can use all the concepts in my live games.
Poker has changed radically now a days. It's all about ranges. You're never going to succeed with a nitty style simply because it's going to immediately show up in a million different ways on peoples HUDs. People are going to push you hard and immediately give up immediately whenever you fight back, unless they have the nuts.
Let's take a very simple toy game. You are dealt a 1 to 3 in order of increasing strength. The deck has one of each card, so if you have a 3 your opponent does not. We have one round of play with only a bet or a fold allowed. The goal of our game is simply to maximize the number of mistakes our opponent makes. A mistake would be folding when he has the better hand, or calling when he has a worse hand. We're going to assume we're playing against a good and logical player.
We can analyze this game pretty easily. Our opponent is always going to call when he has a 3 since he can beat anything. And he's never going to call with a 1 since he can't beat anything. So our chance for an edge comes with 2s. We need to get him to call our 3s with his 2s. If we only bet our 3s, this is probably not going to work. He'd suddenly see that everytime you go to showdown, you end up with a 3. And indeed he probably would not even default to calling with 2s because, from his perspective, he only beats a 1 anyhow.
So we need to create a more balanced range that makes it where this decision is not so easy. One idea is to bet our 3s and 2s. But this would be a big mistake for reasons already alluded to. Imagine we have a 2. He has either a 3 or a 1. He's going to be able to play perfectly. No, betting a 2 will never lead to a mistake. So the only other option we have is to bet our 1s! And yeah this is where you start to see the optimal strategy. Now if he folds his 2s when we bet, he's making a mistake 50% of the time! Interestingly enough, if he calls with his 2s he's also making a mistake 50% of the time!
It's only by creating a balanced range did we create a strategy where our opponent is forced to make mistakes. And in regular poker too a general strategy is to aggressively play the top and bottom of your range. The tough decisions of course come in with the middle of your range. But you generally do not want to mix the middle and top of your range for reasons similar to this toy game. You might push your opponent off a '2', but in general you're making it pretty easy for him to play correctly.
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One other aside is that, depending on the current state of the games, it might be literally impossible to win at certain stakes on certain sites. Your max edge is pretty limited in poker. Even if you're playing against horrible players, you can only win for x bets per 100 hands (big blinds per 100 hands is the general measurement of profit - e.g. 8bb/100). When I quit playing, sites were on a sharp upward trajectory of stupidity with rake. If your edge is 15bb/100 and you're paying 20bb/100 in rake (which is not uncommon at small stakes) you're going to lose money, even though you're crushing the other players. It seems silly to worry about $3 in a $200 pot, but that $3 is ultimately going to play a far bigger role in your earn rate than anything else. This only stops being true at midstakes around $3/6 and especially $5/$10. $5/$10 being the blinds, so a normal buyin would be $1000.
I call it stupidity because I think they felt jacking up the rake was an optimal decision business wise. Winning players take money out of the games, whereas when bad players play all money eventually gets taken in rake. But they miss the meta. Many of those bad players are playing because they want to be one of the good players. That good player might take some 6 or 7 figures out of the games, but in turn inspire deposits from bad players that might be many times that. E.g. the reason I got involved in poker was because of a good winning player by the name of CTS. And then at my lower stakes games I found comparable players to aspire to emulate and so on up the stakes.
Like so many industries, optimize to maximize your profit and you very often end up doing the exact opposite! MBA = masters of business annihilation.
