[Closed] How good is the SSS?

Stick to what are you doing.Play the players,play position and ext.

SSS is terrible and does not work unless your opponents are COMPLETE idiots.

You will get identified and bullied by good players as soon as you sit down at the table. They will constantly steal your blinds, and force you to fold pre-flop by being aggressive with hands like 78, QT... basically any 2 cards in late position. This will result in you leaking HUGE amounts of money from the button and the blinds.

The "theory" is that you are going to make all this lost money back by going all-in and winning against loose big-stacks who will call your bets.

The reality is though, that these players are all familiar with what you are trying to do, and will NOT call your bets because they have learned how to tighten their range against SSS players.

The end result is these SS players will bleed money for hours until they get QQ+ or AK and then they will go all-in and get ZERO callers. And if they DO get called, it's usually by QQ+ or AK anway, so they are either dominated or it's a flip.

This strategy takes all the skill and fun out of the game and it does not yeild winning results. It may have worked in the old days of poker when everyone was a fish but these days people know what they are doing and will exploit the pants off you.

I play it for a while and i must say SSS is not so simple as it seems to be at first glance. It is good way to go for begginer cause it shows You one of main things in poker: self discipline and calm logics.

in4my is quite right overall about SSS, and how to exploit their strategy. But thats about it. IMHO any strategy, including BSS, will fail if You start to play against more expierenced guys. Personaly i just jump from table to table looking for juicy VPIPs, i doubt i will dominate more expierenced players by just starting to play BSS.

So, my bottomline: poker is not about strategy type You choose, but ability to learn, understand and to practice! Once You will understand that SSS is wrong for You, You will switch!

GL @ tables, mates!

BSS players stealing your blinds is absolutely not a problem.

Its very easy to pick up who is stealing with any 2. They will easily fold their hands to a resteal.. or even better the ones that call 20BB push with marginal hands.

SSS its not every1's cup of tea. I tried it once before.. hated it. Then i really wanted to clear some bonuses so i made myself try the strat again. Now i find it awesome and i balance it with normal BSS so i dont get bored as easily on the table because i only play on strat

SSS can work - Any bronze player has some great vids to watch. The ones i would recommend is the user review in the bronze section done by Xarry2. He knows his stuff!

Happy grinding

SSS is definitely good in the micro-stakes, don't know about higher limits myself but there are people playing it successful on this website.

SSS is unbelievably easy in micro limits, but in some point there comes a line(some limit, different in every site) where basic SSS doesn't work. You have to adapt to the game and to the players. Still, its playable, but much much harder..

IMO if you want to clear a bonus or build up your capital a bit then play SSS at micro-limits.

Dont stick to ur own style,if it was good enough,u would never ask that here...

SSS is great. If you prefer a different way. Hell. Do it that way.

At the end of the day you have to do what you think is best.

Originally posted by inf4my
SSS is terrible and does not work unless your opponents are COMPLETE idiots.

Hehe, good one.
Too bad that in reality it's the other way around.
You can only make money in poker if your opponents make mistakes against you. If they don't, you will just end up paying rake and never winning anything in the long run.
That's why you can never win as a big stack unless your opponents are worse than you and make more mistakes.

With short stack on the other hand, you have a fundamental mathematical advantage. Even if a perfect strategy would be found and all players with say 100+ bb stacks were playing it*, you could win in the game if you were allowed to play with a shorter stack.
That's because say you raise with a strong hand and get a caller and now another player behind him is having 44 or 87s, what should he do? Obviously he has to call, because he has a hand with great potential to win a lot of money from the other big stack with a set or a straight and he will be in possition in the hand.
This call is however a mistake against you because you don't have enough money behind to offer sufficient implied odds and because this villain just make a mistake against YOU (even though it was his best possible play with highest EV), you profit.

To sum it up:
With BSS you need to find players who are worse than you and are going to make mistakes for you to turn any profit.
With SSS you only need to find players who have more money on the table to gain a mathematical advantage sufficient to win.

* - there surely is a perfect strategy, but it's too difficult to find it, because the game is too complicated; also if we found it, it would still be more profitable to play another way in order to exploit your opponent's weaknesses rather than just play unexploitable perfect strategy with minimum winrate

''SSS is terrible and does not work unless your opponents are COMPLETE idiots.''

so go find them!

SSS is as good as you play it, just like anything else. To make it profitable you have to adjust to the opponents, and to know how to adjust takes a lot of experience. Generally on lower limits it is a lot more profitable because very few recognize your strategy, and even if they do, they don't know how to treat you. As you go up the limits more and more of your opponents will know your strategy and they will know how they can exploit that.

It's never about WHAT you do, it's always about HOW you do it!

use stat programs to know when to fold your JJ and QQ against good players

Ok, as noob myself i will just try to sum it up in simple language, correct me pls I just try to fully understand meaning of there BSS implied odd principles.

So, BSS idea is to play sometimes bad hands, like small pairs, small connectors and other trash, by doing so their idea is to hit something good in flop/turn/river by playing preflop/flop/turn negative pot odds. And here comes then the main idea. If they DO however hit something monster, like, flush, 3-of-kind they try to trap opponent(or opponents) with big stack into all-in. If BSS player succeeds, he is in profits, so -EV pot odds at start do not count anymore. And, yes, this was trivial example, i hope i did get it right!

Since SSS do not have juicy big stack to trap in their all-in, they are making big mistake by going -EV at start and even if they hit something in flop/turn/river anyways pot is too small in longterm to be +EV for them.

And Meiffert, - Your clear explanations help alot to understand!

Originally posted by slowshow
And, yes, this was trivial example, i hope i did get it right!

Since SSS do not have juicy big stack to trap in their all-in, they are making big mistake by going -EV at start and even if they hit something in flop/turn/river anyways pot is too small in longterm to be +EV for them.

You got it exactly right.
I wrote a more detailed example about the implied odds in this thread, you might want to check it out if you are interested.

1. get silver status + elephant with SSS grinding
2. mass hasenbraten videos
3. play NL10/25 with BSS and profit! (switch to SH once you are comfortable)

I think its good to play SSS for the first 2-3 months, then get a nice bankroll and move on. SSS is really boring in the long term and forces you to play like 16+ tables since you are going to be playing super tight, it's also not that easy to make money with SSS, most of your money will come from rakeback.