Poker Exploits

[Gauthier Zitnik]

Youcan take advantage of these players by raising over their limp with a pretty wide range. The goal is to isolate yourself with them so you play postflop in a heads-up pot, which is why this play is known as iso-raising.

This leak is extremely common among live players (at most levels) and micro-stakes players online. These guys tend to have a value-only range made of JJ+, AQ+ when they re-raise preflop. This approach is sub-optimal due to the fact that it is easy to spot and very exploitable.

When the preflop raiser gets cold-called by a player who is in position, he should check on the flop with most of his range. This is the best strategy because the preflop caller usually has a stronger range.

Since these players tend to bet with almost all their value range, you will have both a nut advantage and a range advantage versus their checking range. You can take advantage of this leak by using a high frequency, large bet size strategy, which puts their stupidly weak range in a very tough spot.

Betting with a balanced range on the river, in theory, allows you to extract maximum value with your value hands by denying your opponent the option of exploitatively folding his bluff-catchers. But the vast majority of poker players are straight-up wimps when it comes to bluffing on the river.

I would advise you to read each subsection again and really try to understand the reasoning behind each exploit. Understanding them fully will help you identify spots to adjust against the specific opponents in your games.

A lot of easy small pots can be earned against passive opponents that overfold pre and post flop, which provides more opportunities to make +EV poker bluffs and claim money uncontested. However a full-blown attack on turn and river should be carefully considered if those passive players actually stick around to finish and play out the hand.

Quite often you will also stumble over opponents that never fold to a continuation bet or continue their aggression post flop. Under these circumstances, bluffs can be quite costly whereas valuebets with top pair get paid off more often and should be the main source of profit.

The same opponent can also combine both styles and turn out to be very aggressive with their preflop poker play but then shut down post flop in order to adjust to the table. This was not as common in the past but with lots of poker math and knowledge out there and available to everyone, it makes sense that the pure stereotypes are no longer as prevalent.

Another way to identify these two broad player types and further physical tells is the table chat. Not everyone is sitting there with hoodies, headphones and shades on. Pay close attention to what your opponents are talking about or how they interact during the hands. Is someone always chatting a lot on the flop and suddenly falls silent as he calls a first barrel and checks the turn?

While aggression can lead to a lot of success, nobody likes to taste the own medicine when facing this type of opponent at the table. To quickly determine how to deal with it, pay attention if the aggression is there by default or based on spots and board textures.

While it may not be possible to recognize all these four scenarios in a reliable way at a casino, for online poker, there are tools such as poker software HUDs that do all the work and provide all the data you need to adjust your playing style. The only task left is recognizing the patterns and spots, drawing the conclusions, and going for the solution that makes the most sense.

To sum up this article on four of the major poker player types and exploits to look for at the tables we want to focus on maximizing profits through proper categorizations. While there is a wide variety of poker player personalities when we can bucket individual habits into the four poker player trend types listed above it will be much easier to pick the perfect spots to gain advantages and collect more chips for stack and bankroll.

And, I don't play on sites that do not allow for a HUD. I like to have every advantage possible over my opponents, and the HUD, along with my experience using it, puts me far ahead of most of my opponents.

I'm going to share two of my favorite HUD statistics based exploits today. The first is exploiting turn honest cbettors and the second is exploiting frequent 3bet callers. And I'll give you the exact HUD statistics and percentages I look for when exploiting these players.

I exploit turn honest cbettors by calling almost every flop cbet and then betting at the next opportunity after they check the turn. If I'm IP, I will bet on the turn. And if I'm OOP and they check-behind, I will bet on the river.

I won't call every single flop cbet, though. I will gauge how likely their preflop range hit the board before calling, and I'll think about how my range hits the board. On hard to hit boards like Q72r or TT5, there are less strong hands in their range, so calling with the intent to bluff later is more profitable.

Something like 70% on the flop down to 45% on the turn is great. Even better would be 85% on the flop down to 33% on the turn (Smart HUD panel above for Villain 20). The lower their turn cbet is and the bigger the gap, the more turn honest they are.

It's also helpful they fold versus flop cbets a lot (look for Fold to Flop Cbet >60%). Just imagine a player who calls 3bets frequently but gives up on every flop unless they catch a good hand. 3betting then cbet bluffing them = printing money.

Counter strategies revolving around specific weakness are typically referred to as exploits. As a simple example, imagine a Villain (opponent) who is folding significantly too often when facing continuation bets on the flop.

So, although we have some ideas regarding what GTO play looks like, the perfect GTO strategy is as of yet, unknown. Even if a ideal GTO strategy were known, it would likely be too complex to be implemented accurately by a human player.

In fact, GTO poker itself is a type of exploitative style! It happens to be the most profitable counter strategy against another opponent, who is also following a GTO style! In other words, if we knew our opponent was playing a perfect GTO strategy, the most profitable counter strategy is to take a GTO approach ourselves.

When our opponent folds too much to aggression, we can exploit this by playing more aggressively. The concept is simple, but how much is too much? A solid understanding of GTO play allows us to spot scenarios where our opponent is folding too much, but GTO play is a skill that takes time to acquire.

To get a perfect idea of whether our opponent is not folding enough in particular scenarios, we should again base this on a solid understanding of GTO theory. But, as discussed, this takes time to acquire, so it makes sense to have a shortcut until we develop a well-rounded comprehension of GTO principles.

Our opponent should generally be folding somewhere around this frequency if he is playing correctly (usually slightly above). The precise game theory response depends on the exact situation and considers several crucial variables.

The key exploit is that we never bluff against someone who is folding below the break-even threshold. One mistake that many players make is that they continue to bluff regardless, often citing balance as the reason. However, the best response is to shut down all bluffs since our opponent is not folding often enough for any of those bluffs to be profitable.

Our opponent is bluffing 50% of the time, meaning we would win significantly more often than the 25% required by our pot odds. We can exploit our opponent here, by calling all of our bluff-catchers.

As an example, GTO solver seems to indicate that the correct frequency for c betting the flop out-of-position in a heads-up single-raised pot is around 35%. Despite this many players c-bet 60% or even 70% when out of position on the flop.

When a player is overly aggressive early on in the hand, there will always be repercussions later on the hand. For example, what happens if we raise against our opponents excessively high c-bet frequency?

If he tries to continue at the correct frequency vs our raise his continuing range will be too broad (allowing us to generate an exploit). If he tries to continue with solely a profitable range (probably his best option), his folding frequency will become overly high, allowing us to generate a bluff-raise exploit.

We ran the maths earlier in the guide, and we know that our opponent needs to bluff around 25% of the time here if he wants to be balanced. A bluffing frequency of just 10% allows us to generate an exploit since it means our opponents betting range is overly strong.

As an example, GTO solvers seem to recommend flop raising frequencies (in single-raised heads up pots) of around 15%. If we encounter an opponent who is raising only 5%, we should generally assume that we have some opportunities for an exploitative counter.

As such, live players may gravitate towards basing their exploitative decisions around physical tells. If a specific facial tick indicates that Villain is bluffing, a live player may act on that without having a sample size of data that demonstrates that Villain bluffs too much.

A HUD (heads up display) is a tool which Overlay stats onto an online poker window. The HUD is connected to a database that stores information on all opponents. Poker tracking software creates such a database as part of its install process and is also generally the engine that runs the HUD itself.

Now, every time we see that player at our table, we instantly notice the orange tag. Exploitatively, we know that we should try and steal a lot preflop and postflop but get out of the way as soon as Villain starts betting or raising.

Population analysis is the technique of working with a database of hand histories to establish default tendencies of the population. This feature allows us to generate exploitative strategies for dealing with an unknown Villain. (It turns out that the majority of opponents have remarkably similar leaks).

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