Exploiting your Opponents Part 1: The Why

Far too many players sit down with a gameplan and say "I'm going to do this, and this, and this." They sit down and play their style, whatever it may be, 12/10, 22/20, 17/12, or what have you, making minimal adjustments to their opponents. Their gonna C-bet certain flops, ch/r monsters and draws, only fire 3 streets with strong hands, and give up most of the time when their C-bets get called. Sure some of them may be winners, but they are leaving vast ammounts of value on the table. Until you get to like 200NL or higher, balance and GTO play isn't a huge concern since very few people are going to be able to exploit you effectively and most will probably make the completely wrong adjustment and end up losing more to you. So for the most part you should be looking to always take the lines to best exploit your opponents mistakes.

To further illustrate my point here, here's some interesting stuff. We'll be looking at opponent exploitation in a broader sense. I broke down my sessions played by individual table to look in to this. Here's some sessions I chose by random. Format is going to be hands played, my stats, and then the stats of the one player to my immediate left and the players in the two seats to my left.

1. 98 hands played. M 29/26, R 47/7, L1 22/12, L2 20/7

The player to my right is obviously limping a lot. His Limp-call is 60% and his fold to c-bet is 40%. Not ideal for isolation, but still easily exploitable. I couldn't isolate as wide as I would have liked to as I needed some value post flop, but still I liked having him on my right.

Both the players to my left are ideal candidates. They are fairly tight, and not very aggressive. Both of their fold to C-bet are 100% so yeah, I spent a good deal of time pounding on them. These are the types of guys you should be looking for to be in the blinds. They obviously have some sort of clue, but at the same time are fairly horrible, they aren't going to adjust, and when they play back you can be 100% certain they have a hand.

This whole table was pretty much ideal since I had 4 tight passive players with a huge fish on my immediate right.

2. 126 hands played. M 12/10, R 22/7, L1 78/32, L2 66/0

So, quite different from the last table. The player immediately to my left here is obviously the main reason for this. I couldn't open up at all here due to him. He has a 23% c-bet over the 200 some hands I have on him and he usually has like a 60bb stack, so countering him with light 4-bets is out of the question since he's prone to shipping it pretty light. So I was stuck nut peddling for the most part, which isn't too bad when you got someone like him on your table who you can just value town all day. The rest of the table was equally horrible.

3. 136 Hands played. m 20/18, R 29/5, L1 15/12, L2 9/9

Another really good spot. I obviously must have been card dead at this table for my stats to be only 20/18 since my Att to steal was 78%. Two players to my left are stupid tight, and guy on my right likes to limp-fold a lot (0% Limp-call). There was a short stack on the table opposite from me, so that's probably part of the reason for not being as loose as I should have been at this table.


If you're not adjusting how you play to exploit your opponents in the best way possible, you're just not going to be winning as much as you could be. There's like close to 0 players below 200NL that are ever going to adjust properly, so there's really no reason not to take the most exploitative lines possible. If the tables tight, go crazy. If the guy on your right is opening light, start 3-betting the hell out of him from the button. Overbet shove rivers with the nuts vs. players that don't fold TP. Triple barrel the hell out of guys that don't like to stack with TP. Pretty much all of your opponents are going to play pretty badly. Start maximizing your earn by exploiting their mistakes as much as possible.

I'm gonna wrap this up with a little exercise for you. Go in to your DB and look at your sessions by individual table (I'm sure PT3 has this as well). If your stats for most of your tables are very similar, I would classify that as a large leak and is something you need to work on.

Exploiting Your Opponents Part 2 - Nits

Exploiting Your Opponents Part 3 : LoosePassive

PT3 does have this, but it's not obvious, I found it by accident a few weeks ago - go to the sessions tab and double click on a single table session, the positions and general tabs will show your stats.

DS, really really nice post...

Excellent post DS! Needs more love imo!

FWIW, I plan on expanding on this a bit, showing specific examples of how to best exploit certain opponent types in the coming weeks.

Yes please do!

Read this post about two minutes after it went up on the board and was looking forward to responses from some of the advanced players/members. Great topic imo. Two questions went through my mind immediately; 1)Does this apply to micro stakes? Because that's all I'm playing right now until I feel ready to move up the ladder. 2) Should I get PT3 or something similar while still at these limits?

Great post, dsvw! Amazing you have time to do this right now. But I think you are right. If you play the same way every time trying to keep your stats at 12/8 or 15/10 or whatever, you are exploitable.

I've quit worrying about keeping my stats in a certain range and just started to try and play the table more. I haven't had swings as bad and my game just feels better.

Excellent post dsvw, perfectly written.

1) Yes. Stakes are NOT at all a factor in anything other than looking at the average profile of a player. In other words, you still look at each player's tendencies, you still see which ones are most exploitable, and you still adjust accordingly to them.

2) Yes, as long as you can afford it. It's never too early to get a hud.

I would suggest HEM though. I didn't like PT3.

I'd also suggest HEM, even though I'm using PT3, if you're planning on participating in a forum, especially if your focus will be cash games. Most of the cash game players here are using HEM (I may be the only one using PT3 who's active in the microstakes threads, not sure), so it's easier to talk if you're using the same tool. It's not that big a deal, but it sometimes takes me a few extra days to figure out how to look up something in PT3 that everyone else seems to see in HEM immediately.

Yeah, seriously, PT3 makes me feel like I need a programmers degree to be able to run it.

HEM= Cheaper, Easier to run, and does the same thing if not more.

Dsvw, looking forward to your expanded discussion. Hoping it includes something like table 2 as an example - I always love having a 66/0 and a 22/7 on the table, great steal opportunities, but I start getting confused with a 78/32 in the mix - and if he's on my left, I generally actually leave the table. I get the general ideas you put down here, waiting for the nuts and betting heavy for value, hoping to see some examples.

I understand why these are ideal situations, but I would like to know
how exactly a person should adjust their game to these situations.
Preflop, you cant really be looking to just attack one of the ppl because
you don't know if the other really tight dudes are going to raise you or
what, so im guessing that preflop you play the whole table. Obviously
the loose players will probably call and you want them to call a good
amount if you have a good hand, but thats like common sense and I'd like
to know what other moves could be done durring preflop. Plus, what about
after the flop with the tight players? If you catch what would you do? If
you miss should you risk the raise? cause i mean they did call the preflop
raise after all, so are they usually willing to keep moving forward?

Exploiting Your Opponents Part 2 : Nits


Edit : Can someone with some modhax edit this in to the bottom of the OP? ty

Great post dsvw. The micros are so much fun to chip away at, and the majority of the players there are just there to get lucky, not really play with any confidence or knowledge. I am with though sly, I am using PT3 for my stats as well, for some reason I like it better than HEM as I have used both and just preferred it. I look forward to getting some more of your tips though dsvw, good work.

Excellent post, dsvw!!

I have a question about table 3. You say the two players to your left are "stupid tight". Every 15/12 in my database is a pretty decent reg. Maybe a couple of them are more ABC then tricky, but I don't find them to be bad players. Do you just mean in general they don't defend their blinds much?

Thanks for the great post.

Well I play 6-max, you might be playing FR.

Ah, yes, I do play FR.

Great post DSVW!!! More reason why your 10K challenge will be a success.

Why do you prefer 6-max over FR? I've dabbled a little in 6-max but don't get it. I've noticed a lot of the vets here play 6-max so there must be somthing I'm missing? What is it?

6max will generally have worse players who can't cope with the aggression. FR is usually full of nittier type of players who nut pedal, so it can be harder to get paid off. This is really general, coz I know Zach disagrees a lot with the above. But Zach and the other FR guys do well enough at FR to not really care about 6mx.

Usually you can achieve better winrates at 6mx b/c of the above. But it's all meh, coz some folks just can't adapt to 6mx from FR because of the aggression.

thanks for this tread i feel i learned a bunch. i know i got lots more to learn on this subject. i would think how a player plays after the flop super important too. in the 2nd example if this loose player will call huge value bets then i would think it correct to do it. if he bets and raises alot then i would check big hands to him like AA-QQ and let him bet my big hands for me. i'm trying to work on adjusting my game to fit the players at the table. thanks so much for this thread and hope to see more like it in the future thanks.

1. I feel my edge is bigger at 6-max.

2. My earn is probably higher overall. I'm not very proficient at playing more than 9 tables, even at FR. So even if was able to have the same WR at FR, I don't think I could play enough tables to account for the loss of hands per hour.

3. I feel you improve quicker at 6-max than at FR, just due to the increased # of marginal decisions you're forced to make.

4. FR is booooooooooooooooring

+1

FR gets pretty aggressive and full of marginal decisions once you move up high enough in stakes.

So far your posts have been the most eye opening I have found on this forum. Makes me very happy to have decided to join. Keep em coming man. I can't wait to get back on the virtual tables now.