In my opinion there are no real "playstyles" in poker. Just evolutionary stages of your own playstyle compared to the majority of players you are playing against. I will explain this in the following.
There are three factors that determine your edge in a hand:
Cards Position Skill
Lets take this extreme example:
We are playing on a table where everyone has more skill than us. Most players will agree that it is the most +EV decision to leave the table but lets just assume we are chained to the table and have no other options than to play. ;)
The correct adjustment to play on this table would be to exclusively maximise the other factors to gain an edge over our opponents. We play very tight and preferably only in position to the villain.
Conversely if we play against opponents we have a significant skill edge, we can sacrifice a little of the other two factors to play more hands profitable. Still we cant make up for playing 100% of hands by our skill except for very rare cases but you get the deal.
So to be able to play more hands, we need to have a skill advantage over our opponents. This could be in the form of specific reads, for example our villain always bets the flop and then check/folds the turn if he missed the board.
Our adjustment against this villain: We can open up extremely wide preflop, float his cbet on the flop and then take the pot down on later streets when he checks to us, even with air.
Or general flaws in their game like folding too much to 3bets, paying us off too light or betting too often with a very weak range.
If we are able to play 30% of hands profitably now, we make more money than if we only would play 20% of hands. If you didnt open J/9s before and folded it for 0bb/100hands, but now are playing it for a profit, you increased your overall winrate by a little.
Knowing where your villains range is weak is way more valuable than
knowing the line how your opponent plays his nuts just because the
latter doesnt happen that often.
So whenever your villain plays a
certain line and you took your notes, you can narrow his range down very
accurately and make the most +EV decision against him. Lets be honest. No one in the micro stakes and even only a few in small stakes try to play balanced or near GTO. They isolate big parts of their range with the lines they take. So we can take very unbalanced lines against their unbalanced ranges.
This is basically the reason why its flawed to say that no playstyle is better or worse imo. If we are able to play more hands for a profit than if we were playing less hands, the first playstyle is obviously better. Hence if we play too many hands and loose marginal with a big part of them, the tighter playstyle is better for us for the time being until we manage to get good enough to play more hands profitably.
The only downside to it is, you really have to pay attention and cant autopilot because if you just play with a VPIP of 30 without making moves on ppls tendencies that you gather from your notes, the whole concept falls apart and you are just lighting money on fire.
I only manage to play 4 tables yet while beeing very loose. After this sunday, I will try out how it affects me when I play 5 to 6 tables.
Also looking forward to this tuesday as it will be my very first live session ;).
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