A focused approach โ concentrating on a specific game strategy or style โ is the right approach that leads to improvement.
Sometimes it's important to look at your game from the outside and see the bigger picture and, of course, reflect.
I've been thinking about this quite often lately. And I decided that perhaps I might have harmed readers by focusing on topics meant to analyze higher-level play.
Do you need such things to become the best? Of course, but the undeniable fact is that most poker professionals make a living by exploiting weak players who know nothing or very little about pot odds, range, and other things.
Ask yourself the question: to maximize profit against weak players, we must
- Always play according to GTO, bluff at the correct frequency, etc.?
- Play in a style that best exploits weak players and their mistakes, even if it means not always playing “perfect” poker?
Another question: what percentage of good players' profits come from bad players? I think it's impossible to know the exact answer to this question, but I would be surprised if the answer was less than 90%.
I'm not saying it's unimportant to be able to play against winning players; it's very important because poker is a game with a lot of competition.
Where is the best place to play poker?
These days, there are simply too many good players to withstand. Moreover, playing against good players is much more challenging than against fish, so it's important to focus on higher-level play and improvement in it.
Despite this, I still believe that we often overestimate the learning of complex things, forgetting where the majority of profit comes from. In this article, we will focus on the fact that we earn the most by playing against fish and discuss how to extract maximum profit from weak players.
What should we achieve when playing against fish?
Essentially, two main goals can be distinguished:
- Find the best responses to their poor play.
- Provoke them to make even more mistakes.
So, we can conclude that a few details when playing against weak players become less important, if at all important:
- Balancing your range
- Defining how often we bluff or call
- Trying to play in a way that doesn't reveal any tendencies that opponents could exploit. (being exploitable)
And a few nuances that are less important than usual:
- Pot odds
- ICM
- Relative hand strength
Why do these usually essential factors become less important?
Imagine playing rock, paper, scissors against a fish, and you know that your opponent shows rock more than 50% of the time and scissors only 10%. Which strategy will be correct?
- Randomly show paper, rock, or scissors, about 33.3% of the time each.
- Show paper 100% of the time*.
This example is analogous to playing against a fish. If a player always shoves all-in on the river only with the best hand, you should fold the second-best hand, even if such a decision contradicts the main game theory and makes you vulnerable.
*Of course, if you play a large number of games, sometimes you should mix paper, rock, and scissors because the opponent might figure you out, but it's not very important.
But it's time to return to poker.
Isolating limping players
When weak players limp and often fold, you should isolate quite broadly from late positions.
For example:
Effective stack size 50bb.
Hero in CO has Ac8s. HJ limps, hero isolates to 4bb. It's hard not to profit from such a decision, and here are a few reasons why:
- We have a positional advantage and initiative;
- Very often, we will have the best hand;
- We have better post-flop skills;
- We will immediately take the pot if the limping player folds.
Now let's discuss the negative aspects of the situation when you limp behind:
- We probably won't have position (depends on BTN), and we certainly won't have initiative;
- Players behind us can raise and push us out of the pot;
- If no one raises, we will usually play the hand at least three-way, which complicates our situation, especially with Ac8s, a hand that plays poorly in multi-way pots.
- We can no longer win the pot pre-flop.
Another question โ how broadly should we isolate limpers? The short answer is โ it depends on the situation. First, think about positions; the more players act after you, the more cautious you should be.
Second, in MTTs, it's very important how many chips players have, not just you, but everyone else at the table. With 10bb, you won't want to isolate with cards that you don't want to call a shove with.
In a vacuum, you can isolate with all reasonable hands, which hands you will find by reading further. Isolating weak players' limps from late position will always be profitable. However, you shouldn't isolate 30% of hands all the time, as regular players will outsmart you.
Most regular players these days use a HUD, and even not the best players can 3-bet too frequent isolations. So, isolation is an action that needs to be balanced, which you can do by wisely selecting the hands you isolate with.
Every situation and every player is unique, so you can't set a specific table of which hands to isolate with and which not, but on the other hand, you can preliminarily outline the framework you will use based on chip counts.
When you have a roughly standard MTT chip count (20-40bb), be cautious and isolate with hands that have one or two high cards or hands that play very well post-flop (like 10 9 suited).
Even if you are fighting for the pot with two players, on the flop you will usually have only about 2.5 times more than is already in the pot, which means that catching the top pair will be almost impossible to fold, and if you catch the second or third pair, you will find yourself in a very difficult situation.
Choosing hands that can usually catch the top pair on the flop makes our game easier, and even simpler if you catch a better combination, putting all the chips in the middle of the table will usually be very easy.
When players have more chips (40bb +), choose hands with which you can catch the best combinations (suited cards, high connectors, pairs, etc.).
There are hands you should avoid, these are hands that are often the second strongest, such as KTo or A8o. This is because when you have a lot of chips, you don't want to play a bloated pot with a weak second pair. Unlike 89s, this hand will be less dominated and you will have more chances to catch the best combination.
Note: if the limper is a really weak player, isolating with KTo or A8 can be a very good way to play.
3-betting pre-flop with the aim of isolating weak opponents
When playing against regular players, we often have to 3-bet pre-flop with a polarized range. Simply put, 12% of the best hands mixed with bluff hands, with which we usually do not call pre-flop bets.
Against fish, there is no need to stylishly balance your 3-betting range, as they don't really understand such a thing as range. Usually, we don't want to 3-bet with hands that play very poorly post-flop, as we will often see flops. 3-betting a fish with, say, A8o will create a lot of problems for us.
Here are some questions we should answer when trying to decide whether to 3-bet a weak player pre-flop:
- How narrowly does the player open?
This question is the most important. There are fish who limp 50% of hands and open only 10 10 + and AK. Against such players, we should not 3-bet with bluffs.
There are also players who open 15% and limp 30%. Against these, we can 3-bet not only the best hands but also hands that play well post-flop, especially when we have a positional advantage.
Finally, there are players who open with hands of tragic value, these are players against whom we must exploit our advantage by 3-betting with a wide range for value.
What positions?
Even bad players open more narrowly from early positions, which means we can't 3-bet an UTG opening too freely. So, the later the position, the wider we 3-bet.
When we are in the BB position and face an opening from a weak player, in a two-player pot, we should usually just call, except when we hold a monster in our hands.
A strong reason to 3-bet fish is that we isolate them and remove them from the fight for the pot, but when there are no more players left in the game, we are assured that now this fish belongs only to us until the end of the hand. The pot swelling without a positional advantage increases variance and leaves us less room to maneuver.
Translated from https://www.upswingpoker.com/exploit-weak-players-preflop-mtts/
