A focused approach - concentrating on a particular strategy or style of play - is the right approach and 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 have been thinking about this a lot lately. And I decided that I might be harming readers by concentrating on topics that are meant to analyse a higher level of play.
Do you need these things to be the best? Of course, but it is a fact that most poker pros make their living by exploiting weak players who know little or nothing about pots, ranges and other things.
Ask yourself this question: in order to maximise profits against weak players, we must
- Playing GTO all the time, bluffing at the right frequency, etc.?
- Playing in a style that makes the best use of weak players and their mistakes, even if it means not always playing "perfect" poker?
One more question: what percentage of good players' profits come from bad players? I think it is impossible to know the exact answer to this question, but I would be surprised if the answer is less than 90%.
I'm not saying that it doesn't matter to be able to play against winning players, it's very important, because poker is a very competitive game. Nowadays, there are simply too many good players to compete against. And it is much more difficult to play against good players than against fish, so it is important to concentrate on playing at a higher level and improving your game.
Nevertheless, I still think that we often overestimate the value of learning complex subjects, forgetting where most of the gains come from. In this article, we will focus on the fact that we make most of our money playing against the fish and discuss how to extract maximum profit from weak players.
What do we need to achieve when playing against fish?
In principle, two main objectives can be identified:
- Discovering the best answers against their poor play.
- Provoke you to make more mistakes.
So we can conclude that a few details become less important, if at all, when playing against weak players:
- Balancing your range
- Define how often we bluff or callin
- Trying to play in a way that doesn't reveal any trends that could lead to our opponents playing us. (beeing exploitable)
And a few nuances that are less important than usual:
- Pot odds
- ICM
- Conditional arm strength
Why are these normally essential factors becoming less important?
Imagine that you are playing a game of rock, paper, scissors (vasky chi) against a fish and you know that your opponent shows rock more than 50% times and scissors only 10%. Which strategy will be correct?
- Randomly display paper, rock or scissors at a frequency of approximately 33.3% each.
- Show paper 100% times*.
This example is like the analogue of playing against the fish. If a player always shoves all-in on the river with only the best hand, you must discard the second-best hand, even if this contradicts the basic theory of the game and makes you vulnerable.
* Of course, if you play a large number of games, you should sometimes mix paper, rock and scissors because your opponent may misunderstand you, but it's not essential.
But it's time to get back to poker.
Isolating limp players
When weak players are limping and folding frequently, you should isolate quite widely from the windy positions.
For example:
Effective chip count 50bb.
Hero CO has Ac8s. HJ limps, hero isolates 4bb. It's hard not to profit from this decision and here are some reasons why:
- We have a positional advantage and the initiative;
- Very often we will have the best hand;
- We have better post-flop skills;
- We will take the pot immediately if the player who limped folds.
Now let's discuss the negative aspects of a situation where you're limpin' along behind:
- We probably won't have a position (depending on the BTN) and we certainly won't have the initiative;
- Players behind us can place bets and knock us out of the pot;
- If no one raises, we will usually play a hand with at least three bets, which makes it more difficult, especially with Ac8s, a hand that plays poorly in multi-person pots.
- We can no longer win the bank pre-flop.
The next question is how widely should we isolate limpets? The short answer is that it depends on the situation. Firstly, think about positions, the more players that take action after you, the more cautious you should be. Secondly, in MTTs it is very important how many chips the players have, not just you but everyone else at the table. With 10bb you won't want to isolate yourself with cards that you won't want to call with after getting shoved.
In vacuum conditions you get isolated with all the smart hands you can find below. It will always be profitable to isolate weak players' limps from late position. However, you should not isolate 30% hands all the time, because regular players will outsmart you. Most regular players nowadays use the hud, and not even the best players are able to 3bet through frequent isolations. So, isolation is an action that needs to be balanced, and you can do this by choosing the hands you isolate with wisely.
Each situation and each player is unique, so you cannot draw up a specific table of which hands you will isolate and which you will not, but on the other hand, you can roughly draw the frames you will use based on the chip counts.
When you have about a standard MTT chip stack (20-40bb), be careful to isolate with hands that have one or two high cards or hands that play very well post-flop (like 10 9 of one suit). Even if you are in a two-way fight for the pot, you will usually only have about 2.5 times as many cards on the flop as are already in the pot, which means that it will be almost impossible to discard if you catch the top pair, and very difficult if you catch the second or third pair. Choosing hands that can normally catch the top pair on the flop makes our game easier, and even easier if you catch a better hand, putting all your chips in the middle of the table is usually very easy.
When players have more chips (40bb+), choose hands that can catch the best hands (single suits, high connectors, pairs, etc.). There are some hands that you should avoid, which are usually the second strongest hands, 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. In contrast to 89s, this hand is less likely to be dominated and you have a better chance of catching the best hand.
Note: If the limper is really a very weak player, isolating with KTo or A8 can be a very good way to play.
3betting before the flop to isolate weak opponents
When playing against regular players, we often have to 3bet pre-flop with a polarised range. Simply put, 12% is mixing the best hands with bluff hands that we normally don't respond to preflop bets with. There is no need to balance your 3betting range so stylishly against the fish because they don't really understand about such a thing as range. Normally we don't want to 3bet with hands that play very badly post-flop, because we will see flops often. 3betting 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 3bet a weak player before the flop:
- How narrowly does the player open?
This is the most important question. There are fish that limp 50% hands and only open 10 10+ and AK. We should not 3bet with bluffs against such players.
There are also players who open with 15% and fold with 30%. Against these we can 3bet not only the best hands, but also hands that play well post-flop, especially when we have a position advantage.
Finally, there are players who open with hands of tragic value, players against whom we must play to our advantage by 3betting with a wide range for value.
What are the positions?
Even bad players from early positions open more narrowly, which means that we cannot 3bet UTG opening too freely. So the later the position, the wider we 3bet.
When we are in BB position and face a weak opening player in a two-player pot, we should usually just call, unless we have a monster in our hand. An important reason for 3betting fish is that we isolate them and throw them out of the pot, but when there are no more players left in the game, we are assured that the fish is now ours until the end of the hand. Swelling the pot without a positional advantage increases the variance and leaves us with less room to manoeuvre.
Translated from https://www.upswingpoker.com/exploit-weak-players-preflop-mtts/
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