All were in Chinese, attempting to sell various fake documentation. I noticed and stopped the assault after two hours. However, the topics and posts remained until recently (3 p.m.) when I deleted all remaining remnants. The clean-up is complete.

I hope you didn't suffer any significant inconvenience. Thank you for continuing to test our Poker1 forum. It will be more widely promoted and available soon.

-- Mike Caro

But I just figure that its like counting cards.  I know what I hold, and since most people will still call, I get to increase the stakes when I know I am ahead in the odds, and play for low stakes or fold when I am weaker. 

There are so many players that just don't quite get that you a) have to play to scoop and b) you better be nutted on one board with a shot at the other.  With 5 cards down, its unlikely a non-nut hand is going to win in a full ring game.

But tonight, some guy wanted to play 5-2-2 (double board high, 5 down) but where you could play THREE of your down cards in making a 5 card hand.  

I couldn't quite figure out what to think of it.  First of all, even more you need to be nutted to win anything.   But the problem to me seemed to be that how do you really know what the nuts is?   I mean, at any time someone could have quads and you really have no way of knowing that they have.

So how do you play it?  Do you just ignore quads and figure that people will not have three of the same rank down very often, so just ignore it?  

It occurred to me that since quads are possible on every hand, live reads become very important.  Does that heavy betting player just have the nut full house or do they have the quads?   With double boards there are probably 3-4 different quads that are potentially out there, assuming you are probably blocking a few of them. 

The other thing that occurs to me is that any time one has a better understanding of a game that the opponents, there is a big advantage.  And from what I saw, a lot of players really underestimated how strong of a hand would be needed to win.

• The average position of each player to the line of misery
• To discourage set miners
• The table's definition of raise sizing

If everyone is overly comfortable with the stakes on the table that increases the raise. Inversely, if everyone is playing significantly above what they should be playing raise size is baseline. With upper premium hands I'll raise higher to discourage set mining and have a easier time detecting possible sets. If the table's definition of normal x3 bb preflop raise is x4 or x5 I'll test to see if I can go below that to achieve the same filtering and lower possible cost.

I think the hardest hands to detect are flopped sets and rivered two pairs. Sometimes I'll over three bet to discourage set miners due to my low ability to detect flopped sets. 

Criticism and advice on my above play style is welcome and requested. 

Hi, Bill -- I hardly ever recommend poker books these days. That's because I haven't read enough of them to make fair comparisons.

I am planning to publish my own research in the future. Maybe someone else here has an informed opinion. Thanks for posting.

-- Mike Caro