Plugging leaks: High Fold to Steal

I was reading a post on BlackRain79's blog about taking advantage of leaks in the cash game of regular players. First of all, he writes a great blog, has written (and continues to write) very good strategy books, and you should read his stuff if you want to improve your cash game).

One of the leaks he speaks about is upping our steal attempts when the opponent has a very high Fold to Steal percentage (over 80%, let's say). I posted a question on his blog page and thought I should post it here as well to get the input from this forum.

"I'm not going to say which player type I think I belong to (!) but would like to ask you a question about how to work on the Fold to Steal stat to lower it. I do take into consideration the opponent's Attempt to Steal and also Fold to 3bet and use that to figure out if I should call or raise instead of folding. But, overall, my Fold to Steal is high because I don't want to play a poor hand out of position. And that's the type of hand I'll usually have in the blinds. So, how do we plug that kind of leak to prevent being exploited by the opponent?"

Are you in the Blinds attempting to steal from the CO or Button raise? Or your raising and someone else is trying to steal from the blinds?

Aces2w1n said:

Are you in the Blinds attempting to steal from the CO or Button raise? Or your raising and someone else is trying to steal from the blinds?

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Here I'm looking at my own Fold to Steal stat either when the CO/BTN/or SB is trying to steal my SB or BB.

We're folding to a steal attempt in a lot of situations because we'd be out of position on the flop (exception being when the SB attempts to steal our BB). This can be exploitable and I'm trying to understand how to make it less exploitable.

Read up on squeeze play.
Table image is extremely important if you want to steal off a stealer. Normally if you and your opponent have played a lot of hands and he thinks your tight, you should be able to 3bet him and get him off his hand. Look at your opponent stats as well because people raising on the BTN and CO are a lot wider than say earlier/medium position which makes this effective.

Being a good player post flop really helps as well incase you do get called and outplay your opponent.

3-bet more against opponents with high attempt to steal and fold to 3-bet, and cold call and stop and go on a lot of flops against players with moderate to low post flop aggression. Easy game.

John A said:

3-bet more against opponents with high attempt to steal and fold to 3-bet, and cold call and stop and go on a lot of flops against players with moderate to low post flop aggression. Easy game.

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What would you define as "moderate to low" for post-flop aggression and approximately how many hands would you want on an opponent to feel confident in your post-flop aggression stats?

John A said:

3-bet more against opponents with high attempt to steal and fold to 3-bet, and cold call and stop and go on a lot of flops against players with moderate to low post flop aggression. Easy game.

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That's what I meant to say lol

nabmom said:

What would you define as "moderate to low" for post-flop aggression and approximately how many hands would you want on an opponent to feel confident in your post-flop aggression stats?

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2.8 and under... usually 150 hands or so, but you can have 50 hands on someone and they have an aggression of 1.5, and it's fairly safe to say they will likely be passive. So any extremity in small sample will usually normalize towards a passive or aggressive person.