Abandoning balance against weak players

No Limit Holdem / Marcus Bateman / 15 February 2010 / 1 Comments

From a game theory perspective, there is no need to ever bluff in poker if playing people who never give your bets credibility.

If you watch mid and high stakes hold'em games, you will quickly see that there is a great deal of pre flop raising and re-raising.

These players are fully aware that they are in a bloody war of attrition for the blinds, and are constantly trying to isolate players and balance their range of raising hands to stop them becoming easy to read and exploit. This is necessary against other strong players, but against very weak players, playing like this is a pointless and dangerous exercise.

If you are playing people so unobservant that they will not notice that you only really re-raise pre flop with big hands, there is little point trying to balance your range against them by re-raising junk. From a game theory perspective, there is no need to ever bluff in poker if playing people who never give your bets credibility, and in low stakes games you are frequently confronted by players of this sort of standard.

Not only this, but most weak hold'em players are at their most bad post flop - anyone can see that kings are a good hand and that two seven off suit is a bad hand pre flop, but trying to work out how good a pair is post flop is much harder. You are much better off trying to keep pots small pre flop with marginal hands and then force huge mistakes post flop against very weak players - their lack of understanding and observation mean you should typically only be trying to build big pots pre flop with big hands.

It is points like this that often lead to players who are successful at a higher limit but then have to drop down to start losing at first at the lower limits. They give their opponents too much credit (as they are so used to playing opponents of a higher standard), and start making mistakes through making their game balanced and hard to exploit, which in fact just means they waste time trying to sell something to someone who does not even understand the concept of ownership.

Poker is a game where the correct style of play basically just depends on what your opponent is like. Against good players you need to mix it up to allow your game to remain tricky and hard to read, but against weak players there is no need for such complexities. If anything, overly complicating your game against weak players actually hinders you in the long run, and you are much better off just pounding on them at their weakest than trying to mix it up and disguise your game.

Related Entries

Balance against bad players
Bluffing weak players
Varying Time Tells To Beat Weak Players

Comments (1)

1. Christopher | 15 February 2010

   Good points there. Do you think it's harder to read players and throw a bluff now through online poker. You don't really see their faces on the table.