F Paulsson
euro love
Silver Level
I was going to put this on my blog, because... Well, because I write enough stuff over there. But this does a lot more good in the forums, so here you go:
So you practise game selection. And you come across a table with a guy who plays a third of all hands, but clearly isn't a strong loose-aggressive player, but rather just someone who plays too many hands. Score! You found a fish! Sit down, play, profit. Easy money. Right? Except that doesn't quite suffice. It's not enough that you have players at your table who have leaks - because they don't have leaks if you're not exploiting them. With the exception of stuff like calling river bets with a hand that can never win or not betting the river in position with the nuts, there are very few plays that are inherently wrong; that are bad in a vacuum.
What I'm getting at is that you should be thinking about what mistakes your opponents make and how you're going to take advantage of them. Just saying "they make mistakes" is to only get halfway there. In fact, it's probably even less than halfway. Because unless you exploit them, they may not be mistakes at all.
Consider someone who 3-bets on average 20% of hands against you. Is he making a mistake?
Or someone who floats almost every flop you c-bet.
Or someone who flats a really wide range on the button preflop.
It's not enough to look at a player's VPIP and think that you've found a good table. You need to actually take advantage of the mistakes that players is making to make it worth it. I've played extensively with some 35/15 type players that are actually break-even at 200NL. They could probably improve on their preflop hand selection, but whatever they're doing postflop clearly outweighs any disadvantage they start with.
And let's not forget our friends the regs. If your table selection tool is to look at VPIPs, then you might wrongly deduce that a table full of regs is one where you don't have much of an exploitative edge. Think again. Regs don't have the big flashy "leak" of having a high VPIP, but they can (and do) certainly have other habits that you can exploit. Think about your opponent, about where he tends to overdo something that you can exploit, and then try to get into those situations with him with a plan for how to abuse it. Maybe he check-raises the flop an awful lot from the blinds. That can be a pretty big leak if you know how to handle it - but most opponents don't, so the eager flop raisers get away with it.
So, just to drive the point home one last time: Leaks are there for the picking. But if you ain't picking, they ain't leaks. Playing "bad players" is not an immediate recipe for success - you have to either find bad players that happen to have a style that doesn't work against how you play, or you have to adjust how you play to the mistakes they make. I know which of the two is the more common approach, and I also know which one is the more profitable. The two are not the same.
So you practise game selection. And you come across a table with a guy who plays a third of all hands, but clearly isn't a strong loose-aggressive player, but rather just someone who plays too many hands. Score! You found a fish! Sit down, play, profit. Easy money. Right? Except that doesn't quite suffice. It's not enough that you have players at your table who have leaks - because they don't have leaks if you're not exploiting them. With the exception of stuff like calling river bets with a hand that can never win or not betting the river in position with the nuts, there are very few plays that are inherently wrong; that are bad in a vacuum.
What I'm getting at is that you should be thinking about what mistakes your opponents make and how you're going to take advantage of them. Just saying "they make mistakes" is to only get halfway there. In fact, it's probably even less than halfway. Because unless you exploit them, they may not be mistakes at all.
Consider someone who 3-bets on average 20% of hands against you. Is he making a mistake?
Or someone who floats almost every flop you c-bet.
Or someone who flats a really wide range on the button preflop.
It's not enough to look at a player's VPIP and think that you've found a good table. You need to actually take advantage of the mistakes that players is making to make it worth it. I've played extensively with some 35/15 type players that are actually break-even at 200NL. They could probably improve on their preflop hand selection, but whatever they're doing postflop clearly outweighs any disadvantage they start with.
And let's not forget our friends the regs. If your table selection tool is to look at VPIPs, then you might wrongly deduce that a table full of regs is one where you don't have much of an exploitative edge. Think again. Regs don't have the big flashy "leak" of having a high VPIP, but they can (and do) certainly have other habits that you can exploit. Think about your opponent, about where he tends to overdo something that you can exploit, and then try to get into those situations with him with a plan for how to abuse it. Maybe he check-raises the flop an awful lot from the blinds. That can be a pretty big leak if you know how to handle it - but most opponents don't, so the eager flop raisers get away with it.
So, just to drive the point home one last time: Leaks are there for the picking. But if you ain't picking, they ain't leaks. Playing "bad players" is not an immediate recipe for success - you have to either find bad players that happen to have a style that doesn't work against how you play, or you have to adjust how you play to the mistakes they make. I know which of the two is the more common approach, and I also know which one is the more profitable. The two are not the same.