LAG Me, Baby

Never is a promise, and you can't afford to lie.
--Fiona Apple

Kiss imagined.

Party Poker is evil. Exhibit A:

As a token of our appreciation for your patronage, we have added a special ‘welcome back’ gift to your account - 75 USD which is now in your account! **

** To cash out this bonus, you will have to play 10 times the bonus amount in raked hands by May 23, 2006 11:59 p.m. (ET).

Realizing that they have not had the benefit of my rake in a long, long time after I basically swore off online poker due to its drudgery, the diabolical bastards at Party -- the same ones who light cigars with hundred dollar bills and own several small South Pacific islands -- thought waving a measly $75 in front of my nose would be enough to entice me back to their site. What they failed to consider is that the chances of me playing 750 raked hands in 10 days are slimmer than I am. None of my readers needs me to explain just how slim that is.

My firm intention was not to be so easily bought and I justifiably dismissed the email -- without deleting it. Mistake. It sat there, the cursed Party Poker email, taunting me with its free cash, and the promises of more free cash to come from the lemurs that inhabit the Party Poker site. The more the email lingered, the more it seemed wrong to just let the $75 sit there unclaimed. Instead, what if I treated the Party bonus like monopoly money? See how high I could push it, before I lost it all. Treat it as if it were someone else's money, and hey! - it was.

Thus was born the Great LAG Experiment of 2006.

For someone who has always tended towards playing more on the tight-weak side of things (as much as I hate to admit it), playing like a LAG would be a welcome stylistic change if I were going to wade back into the clickmonkey-filled waters at Party. The style isn't *completely* unknown to me. There was one solid LAG at the old Above Malibu game against whom I've logged hundreds of hours and thousands of hands. I set a few pre-flop rules for myself, mainly regarding hand selection, reminded myself to push my hands hard after the flop (raising / reraising with nothing, if need be), and headed off to the $0.50/1 limit holdem tables. Sure, the potential for a meteoric rise or catastrophic fall was smaller on the limit tables than it would have been on a $0.25/$0.50 nolimit holdem table, but since I was conducting an experiment, I wanted to preserve my monopoly bankroll long enough to draw a few conclusions.

First conclusion: people on the $0.50/$1.00 limit tables suck. Please observe:



After approximately 750 hands, a somewhat limited sample size I realize, I am up 120 big bets. That's 16 BBs/100 and an hourly rate of $11.50. What does minimum wage pay these days? I'm not playing a TAG style either - it's definitely more on the LAG side of things. My VP$IP is 34, my pre-flop raise percentage is 19, and my post-flop aggression factor is 3.10. In short, I'm not playing maniacally, but I'm definitely raising light and ramming and jamming.

I think the key so far has been a combination of (1) stupidity of my opponents, (2) opponents' timidity to 3-bet pre-flop without a monster, (3) opponents' timidity post-flop to mix it up against a pre-flop raiser without hitting a solid flop and (4) stupidity of my opponents. Reading these people after the flop most of the time is startlingly simple, allowing my post-flop decisions to make themselves. In short, I apply maximum pressure pre-flop (few open-limps, no cold calls) and then outplay post-flop. Easy peasy.

Second conclusion: being the table LAG is fun! It's much more fun than playing tight because I see more hands and have to make more decisions and am generally more involved in what's going on at my table. If I were playing tougher opponents all those extra decisions might be a problem, but for now it's just delightful -- especially when I defend my big blind with crap and get there. In fact, in one of those weird small sample size quirks, the big blind is my most profitable position.

Now I have $120 which, when combined with some limited monkeying around in $25NL, $50NL and $1/$2 limit that I did early on, I've pushed up to $170. I did not complete the raked hands requirement, so that $170 is on top of Party's initial $75, which they took back. I figure I'll put in another 12-15 hours at $0.50/$1.00, work up to $300, and then jump up to $1/$2. This is potentially the resurrection of my limit holdem challenge started back in December 2004, which was abandoned after my 15/30 flameout in early 2005. In nomine patrie, indeed.

This time, though, it's all the house's money - what do I have to lose?