[d2themfi]

out of good faith, here is an example of a write up I did for Thomas


Hi there!

Here is my question:

As everybody know you take different lines against different opponents on the flop when being the preflop aggressor. On the same flop you check fold to some opponents, bet flop with the intention to bet a blank turn to some, take the bet, check, bet line to some opponent....etc.
What line you chose to take is based on many things, preflop ranges, how bluffy, tricky, passive, aggressive the opponent are, if he bluff raises wet boards or dry boards, if he floats, if he is a nit abc player, is he capable raising turn with a draw?, and so on.
There are so many factors to take into consideration when deciding what line to take when planning the hand on flop and further streets.
My question is:
When playing more than 3 tables and playing against many unknown opponents, how on earth do you know what line to take. Surely looking at the stats cannot be enough?
Thanks!
Thomas



So this is a good question to begin our lessons. The reason why is it shows a clear distinction from the type of poker we will be talking about(mostly) and the type of poker that 98% of mid and small stakes players play

Essentially there are two ways to approach poker, or a specific hand or situation. The first of these ways is the approach favored by almost everyone, although usually because they lack a better alternative, or are simply ignorant that there are better methods out there. This first method is called exploitative poker. I won't harp on this to long because you are already familiar with its concepts. Essentially when we are playing exploitatively, we attempt to make inferences and reads about our opponents hand, ranges, and strategy, and then we attempt to take the maximally exploitative action against that strategy. Essentially we are attempting to maximize our expectation with our specific hand against our opponents strategy without any regard for future hands. This is essentially what people mean when they say “in a vacuum”.

Ideally we would always play exploitative poker. In that case it would imply that we are always very confident in our reads of our opponents. We would also be confident that our opponents were not going to change their strategies. Because, remember, when we play exploitatively, we are in turn opening ourselves up to what's called counter exploitation. In this case our opponents would be attempting to do to us what we are doing to them(exploiting their play)

But what happens when we are not so confident in our reads about what our opponents could hold, or what their strategy is? In those cases, if we make broad assumptions about our opponents play, and then attempt to exploit them, if we are wrong we could be in real trouble. Here's an example that might help

Say we are on the river and the pot is 100$, and there are 100$ left in the stacks. Our opponent moves in and we hold a pure bluff catcher. Well the pot is now 200$ and we need to call 100$, so we are getting 2-1, and need to be good 33% of the time. If we do not have much of a read on our opponent, but assume that he is bluffing 50% of the time in this spot(for whatever reason), then we should always call and our ev would be 50$ for every call (.5(200)-.5(100)= 50).

But what if our assumption is wrong and our opponent is only bluffing 25% of the time? Well we are calling every time still because we made the wrong assumption, but now we are losing 25$ (.25(200)-.75(100)= -25). You can see now why having very good reads when we are playing exploitatively is so important!

This begs the question, what do we do when we are playing an unknown opponent, or an opponent who we think is good enough that he will realize we are trying to exploit him, and will adjust?

This question is essentially what you asked in your email. What we need to do is come up with “default” strategies that do well vs. a wide range of counter strategies. These default strategies will serve us well vs. unknown opponents and opponents who we think are very good. They will attempt to make us unexploitable. Essentially this is what “balance” refers to. If your strategy is perfectly balanced then it is unexploitable. In practice, it is virtually impossible to perfectly balance your play. But we can come up with strategies that are very well balanced, and likely very hard to exploit for real life opponents.

A nice benefit of good balanced strategies is they often do very well exploiting common mistakes by players. So even though we might not be actively trying to exploit someone, it is possible for us to exploit them “by accident” when using our balanced strategy because they are making fundamental errors

It should be noted that when we are playing balanced, things like hand reading do not really matter. Our default balanced strategies do not depend on what our opponent holds. They are designed in order to protect us from an opponent whose strategy we do not know. Because of that it is important to make the distinction between when we are playing balanced and when we are playing exploitatively

Of course even when we are attempting to play balanced, we should still be seeking to actively hand read our opponent. The reason is not for the present hand, but for future hands. Hopefully through careful observation we can make good reads on our opponents play that will allow us to exploit him maximally. Until that happens however, we stick to our default strategy in attempts to play "defense" essentially