A situation arose the other night that had me change up decision-making a bit that illustrates an important point. Trying to understand what my opponents are up to and constructing a counter strategy is the path to advanced poker. In the spread limit games I’ve been playing in lately, in general, my opponent’s strategy has been to play as many hands as possible, as cheaply as possible and try to flop a monster hand and stack somebody. This causes them to fold too frequently on later streets because they don’t make strong hands the overwhelming majority of times. So, my counter strategy has been to build pots on the early streets that I can steal on later streets with big bluffs. But, occasionally an exception comes along. When I identify a tendency of a specific player (versus a general strategy of nearly all my opponents) I can make changes to exploit it.
As I mentioned my general strategy is to build pots early in
hands. Betting middling and flat
calls are usually the task preflop and on the flop. I’m not into pre-flop shoving or massive overbets because
I’m usually wanting two or three way pots. I save my pot sized and overbets for the turn and river
where my opponents make their biggest mistakes. However, the other night I identified a guy, an older fellow
with about $70 behind (2-20 spread game) at about three hours into the game
made a big $10 preflop open saying, “I’m trying to go home.” Often I’ve seen players make little
speeches like this as a trap, trying to get calls when they are dealt a big
hand. But, this fellow followed up
the next few hands with similar big open raises. I obliged this fellow by 3-betting with pretty much junk
hands and taking down the pot right there or with a big continuation bet on the
flop. I ended up taking the
remainder of this guy’s stack when I did flop middle pair and put him all in on
the turn. He called with only A
high.
Having a general strategy with opponents is important for
sustained success but being able to recognize specific situations with
individual players and being
flexible with my overall strategy is the way to true profit!
