Elements of strategic awareness

Elements of strategic awareness1

We have already examined the psychological portrait of the opponent and seen how levelling works. But to really predict your opponent's behaviour, you need to see the game through his eyes. This requires a deeper knowledge than the basics. We have to recreate not only his perception, but also all the idiosyncrasies through which he sees the world.

Strategic awareness is the sum total of how your opponent assesses the strategic potential of various boards, situations, etc. In which situations does your opponent think it is best to bluff? Make valuebets? Checkraise, slowplay? This is a bit different from portraiture, which is a lot of generalisations. Instead, we have to use very precise, empirical methods to recreate the perception of another player. This is where the skill of observation becomes key. We have to make sure that no valuable information about our opponent is missed unconsciously.

There are two key elements of strategic awareness: understanding the flow of the game and the structure of the board.

Game flow perception is the player's perception of the different variations of game flow. For example: how does your opponent interpret two bluffs in a row? How does he think you interpret two bluffs in a row? Does he realise that after you make a big bluff, the other player is less likely to bluff again? All of these traits form a large part of your opponent's standard model of how he or she plays with other poker players. And they also form part of his own projection: if he perceives the flow of the game in the simplest way, he will tend to expect others to behave as he does.

The perception of the Borad's structure shows how the player perceives the combinations on the board and the relative value of each new card appearing on the board. For example, how badly does your opponent value a c-betting air in J♠9♠5 ? Or in this situation J♠8♠2♦ ? Or in this situation A♠J♠9♦ ? What if the ace is ruffed? Ten? Four?

Of course, there must be an objective value in these situations in order to be able to bluff or make semiblefs. Through intensive combinatorial analysis, you can classify situations according to how good they are for bluffing in a vacuum. Everybody learns poker in different ways, and nobody's perception is perfectly aligned with mathematical calculations or objective reality. Some people value one hand more than another, some people think they have a higher fold equity in certain situations in the turn, and so on.

To rebuild your understanding of your opponent's board structure, you need to pay close attention to which flops, turns and rivers he likes to attack on, and to his judgement in various bluff and semi-bluff situations.

Weaker players often have a naive perception of board combinations. They do not realise the possibilities of an implied semibleph or bluff by representing hands they do not have. They often overestimate the value of highcard-flat-flat boards, e.g. A♠5♣8♦ or K♦5♠5♣. They will rarely consider representing flush draws or straight draws.

When assessing your opponent's strategic perception, you also need to consider the second level, i.e. how they perceive your perception. To see this, you need to observe which hands are show downs, what kind of tournaments you have attacked so far and which ones you have surrendered. Your opponent will usually always have a clearer portrait of himself than you do.But a conscious, self-observant player will always have at least some awareness of the situations in which he is attacking and Elements of strategic awareness
where they are calm.

As the match progresses and the history grows, it is normal to improve in adjusting strategy. If the cards are ones where the image you have created has a low bluff probability, you should increase your bluff frequency. And if the cards are ones where you have repeatedly made bluffs or semi-bluffs, you should slow down the game and reduce the number of bluffs. A large part of your winrate against a decent player will be this adjustment of your own game.

What about the third level? The third level shows what your opponent thinks about how you perceive his strategic perception. Simply put, a player will adjust his game based on his own self-image. So, if you want to think on the third level, you only need to follow your opponent's adjustments in his pties board structures. You should think about which boards you called down, which ones he bluffed on, where you folded, where the opponent adjusted his game in the opposite direction.

These adjustments have to be evaluated in the equilibrium of the semiblefs. This is the standard frequency of the semiblefs against which these adjustments are made. The standard frequency is not used much at the beginning. But when psychology, game flow and individual observations start to separate players from the equilibrium of the semiblefs, their frequency becomes more exploitative (exploited).

The difficulty in poker starts when it comes to positively identifying these deviations and defining them in the chaos of poker. Your opponent will sometimes get a lot of hands of the simplest baord structure and you will need to conclude that he represents better cards, instead of thinking that he is just lucky and the cards are falling. There is an art to being able to distinguish between the two. And it's probably one of the last skills you need when learning poker.

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