A focused approach – concentrating on a specific game strategy or playing style – 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 a lot lately. And I decided that maybe I could have harmed the readers by focusing on topics meant to analyze higher-level play.
Do you need such things to become the best? Of course, but the fact is that most poker professionals make a living by exploiting weak players who know nothing or very little about pot odds, ranges, and other things.
Ask yourself the question: to maximize profit against weak players, we must
- Always play according to GTO, bluff at the right 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 not important to be able to play against winning players; it's very important because poker is a highly competitive game. Nowadays, there are simply too many good players to compete against. Moreover, playing against good players is much more difficult than against fish, so it's important to focus on higher-level play and improvement.
Nevertheless, I still think we often overestimate the importance of learning complex things, forgetting where most of the 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?
Basically, there are two main goals:
- 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:
- 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 you are 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 basic 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 catch on, but it's not very important.
But it's time to get back 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 on 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;
- We will very often have the best hand;
- We have better post-flop skills;
- We immediately take the pot if the limping player folds.
Now let's discuss the negative aspects of limping 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 – how broadly should we isolate limpers? The short answer – 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 to consider the stack sizes of not only yourself but also all other players at the table. With 10bb, you won't want to isolate with hands that you don't want to call a shove with.
In a vacuum, you can isolate with all reasonable hands, and what those hands are you will find out 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 because regular players will outsmart you. Most regular players these days use HUDs, and even not the best players can 3-bet too frequent isolations. So, isolation is an action that needs to be balanced, and you can do this by wisely selecting the hands you isolate with.
Every situation and every player is unique, so you can't create a specific chart of which hands to isolate with and which not to, but you can preliminarily outline the ranges you will use based on stack sizes.
When you have a roughly standard MTT stack size (20-40bb), be cautious and isolate with hands that have one or two high cards or hands that play very well post-flop (like T9s). Even if you fight for the pot heads-up, on the flop you will usually have only about 2.5 times more than is already in the pot, which means that folding top pair will be almost impossible, and if you hit the second or third pair, you will find yourself in a very difficult situation. Choosing hands that usually hit top pair on the flop makes our game easier, and even simpler if you hit a better combination, putting all the chips in the middle will usually be very easy.
When players have more chips (40bb+), choose hands that can hit the best combinations (suited cards, high connectors, pairs, etc.). There are hands you should avoid, such as hands that are often second-best, like 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 hit the best combination.
Note: if the limper is a really weak player, isolating with KTo or A8 can also be a very good way to play.
3-betting pre-flop to isolate weak opponents
When playing against regular players, we often need to 3-bet pre-flop with a polarized range. Simply put, the top 12% of hands mixed with bluff hands that we usually don't call pre-flop raises with. Against fish, there's no need to balance our 3-betting range so stylishly because they don't really understand the concept of range. Usually, we don't want to 3-bet with hands that play very poorly post-flop because we will see flops often. 3-betting a fish with, say, A8o will create many problems for us.
Here are some questions we should answer when deciding 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 but open only with TT+ and AK. Against such players, we shouldn't 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 tragically weak hands; these are players we must exploit 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 UTG opens too loosely. So, the later the position, the wider we 3-bet.
When we are in the BB position and face an open from a weak player, in a heads-up pot, we should usually just call, except when we hold a monster hand.
The reasons to 3-bet fish are to isolate them and eliminate them from the fight for the pot. However, when there are no other players left in the game, we are assured that this fish now belongs only to us until the end of the hand. The pot swelling without a positional advantage increases variance and leaves us with less room to maneuver.
Translated from https://www.upswingpoker.com/exploit-weak-players-preflop-mtts/
