question Bad beats cop too much blame — most leaks start preflop

Reckon heaps of players grinding online spend way too much time whinging about river suckouts and nowhere near enough time looking at the trash they’re opening and calling before the flop. At the micros especially, people defend the blinds with any old suited hand, flat garbage out of position, then act shocked when the whole hand turns into a dog’s breakfast.

My spicy take: most people would win more by tightening up a touch and respecting position than by trying to copy some fancy solver line they half-remember from a video. This obsession with being “unexploitable” at tiny stakes is a bit cooked. You do not need galaxy-brain stuff to beat players who are limp-calling K7o and paying off three streets with one pair.

The leaks I keep seeing are dead simple too — limp-calling rubbish, 3-betting hands they clearly don’t want action with, auto c-betting boards that smash the caller, then hero-calling because “top pair is too strong”. Nah mate. A lot of people are just lighting chips on fire and blaming variance for it.

Also, table selection gets ignored heaps. Blokes will sit at a table full of regs and one agro maniac, get chewed up for an hour, then say the games are dead. Just move. No medal for making life harder than it needs to be.

Curious what everyone else reckons though — if you had to fix one thing first for someone struggling online, are you starting with preflop discipline, tilt, bankroll stuff, or postflop spew?

Best little study habit I found was filtering for hands where I called flop and then hated life on the turn. Sounds dumb but it showed me I was putting myself in these mushy spots way too often. If someone's struggling, I'd start there before trying to learn fancy lines.

I dunno mate, the tighten-up advice gets pushed a bit too hard sometimes. Some low stakes pools are so passive you can nick heaps of small pots just by opening wider on the button and firing when they show weakness. I see more money left on the table from people not thin value betting than from them peeling one extra playable hand.

Not fully with you on table selection being near the top now, mostly because loads of people are in fast-fold or anonymous games where you don't get much choice. In that kind of setup, would you still make game selection the first fix, or would you lean more into population reads and timing your sessions for softer fields?