I know that you know I know

Heads Up / Marcus Bateman / 10 April 2011 / Leave a Comment

Some of the best spots in poker arise in situations where two regulars who know each other's games intimately go head to head in a pot. Because both players know each other's tendencies, both have to take lines that take advantage of these tactics, which in turn generally get readjusted to by the other. This process creates extremely interesting spots (and in fact provide the bedrock for most high-stakes poker), and thinking clearly about what your opponent knows about you is crucial to survival in higher-stakes games.

Say you have an observant opponent you have played with a great deal who rarely sees you float bad hands out of position. Against most players, you should basically never float junk without the sledgehammer of position on the opponent, but against some players this can become a huge weapon.

As they know that you basically never do this, you actually doing it to them reeks of extreme strength, as they believe that you would never be 'stupid' enough to do such a high risk move without a monster hand. Hey presto, against an observant player you suddenly have an incredibly strong looking line that if used well will win you the odd decent pot, even though such a move against any other player would generally be terrible.

The way you have to play against weak players is to maximise your ability to exploit their leaks, and rarely involves much high risk or out of the box thinking. You simply identify the big mistakes they are making, pound away at them until they go broke or change their line, and generally just try not to out think yourself. This is a very different ball game to playing against solid regulars, where it is crucial that you throw in plays that are extremely dependent on understanding what they know about you, and how they think about how you think.

This is arguably the core reason why you should never trust or respect players who talk about poker in very set terms of what is right and wrong. Plays that against one player type are huge mistakes are dynamic and clever players against another and vice versa. Poker's inherent complexity lies in the fact that the psychological element of it is vastly deep and hard to think about - particularly against other astute players. Deep thinking is the order of the day against other solid regulars, and working out how they respond to what they think they know about you is crucial to success in bigger games.

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