When making decisions in poker, there are two primary aspects – strategy and psychology. What is the difference between them? Upon careful thought, we feel the difference, but it is difficult to express in words. How could it be defined?
In simple terms – strategy is good fundamentals, and psychology is understanding what is happening in people's minds. It's a good start, but we could do better.
Yes, psychology examines what is going on in people's minds, and the reason we want to “get into” others' heads is that we want to predict their game tactics. Strategy allows us to exploit others' decisions, while psychology allows us to predict them in the first place. You can't exploit a player if you don't know what they intend to do. But merely knowing what the opponent will do does not guarantee that you can take full advantage of it.
In short, strategy serves statically, it is algorithmic, while psychology is unstable. It allows predicting and anticipating strategy and its changes based on observations. Neither strategy nor psychology can exist without the other.
We can narrow down the role of psychology in poker even further. In previous articles, we talked about how to balance bluffing and value betting ranges. You might have concluded that value betting and bluffing frequencies are essentially the same, and to manipulate them, you simply need to increase one and decrease the other. In reality, it is a bit more complicated.
To say that your bluffing frequency is 0% is just another way of saying that even when you have the opportunity to bluff, you don't take it. Almost always, in a certain situation, you will have hands with which you can bluff. So, to say that the bluffing frequency is 0% is to say that you refuse to bluff. On the other hand, if the value betting frequency is 0%, it means that in that situation, you have no value hands. When you have a value hand, you don't need to decide whether to make a value bet or not; it is always made, for example, when you have a set or top pair (excluding thin value bets).
Let's say that in a certain spot, you want to modify your balance. You can quickly change the bluffing frequency since this frequency is more or less a matter of choice. It is local. You can simply decide that in this situation, you will bluff more and then just take actions; there are no external factors to consider. However, if you wanted to increase the number of value bets, you couldn't just do it. Remember the “pile of wood” (which you got to build your poker ship), your resources of good hands. They are finite and limited. If you don't have any with you at the moment, you will have to “take wood” from elsewhere and redistribute what is currently there. So 
increasing the value betting frequency is not local; it is systematic because you have to make changes in other parts of your game to get the necessary resources. You have to remove those hands from somewhere else to use them here.
We can also use this observation to emphasize the difference between psychology and strategy. When changing strategy, we have to make systematic, broad changes in our game to exploit our opponents. But psychology requires internal, localized decisions. Psychology often focuses on bluffing because it is the area where decisions are made moment by moment. Value betting is more a matter of broad strategy and range construction.
Of course, this is all very simplified; technically speaking, sometimes your range is so strong in a certain spot that you must include some bluffs or make thin value bets, etc. Despite all the simplicity presented, this way of thinking is useful for every player.
