Why You Should NOT Play Exploitative

Oh, the good old GTO x Exploits battle. Fewer topics generate more discussion and controversy than this one in poker. 

If you have watched some of my content before, which I imagine you most certainly did, then the title of this email may have caught your attention immediately. It doesn’t sound like the typical advice I’d give, right? After all, even though I use a lot of GTO strategy in my game, and you can find me randomizing my plays quite often in my Play & Explain videos, I’ll usually advocate for various levels of exploitation in many different zones of the game tree. 

So what’s up with this advice here? I’ll explain.

The problem with applying exploitative strategies is this one: humans are bad at intuitive exploits. Like, really, really bad. 

We are really bad at realizing the single most important thing: what’s the actual imbalance our opponents have in their strategies. In fact, lots of times we intuitively assume people do the exact opposite of what is in fact true.

A great example is the overwhelmingly predominant idea in the community that recreational players underbluff. I cannot express how much perplexity I experience when I see someone in the internet demonstratingthe utmost conviction that one should fold rivers against recs because they are just not capable of bluffing. It’s just the worst advice ever.

But what I want to convey with this email is that such peolpe are not to blame for this mistake in their perception. The only reason I know for a fact that recreational players (massively) overbluff is because I studied hundreds of millions of hand histories to find this out. Before doing such research, I literally played millions of hands myself without ever making a light river call vs a fun player. 

To further illustrate my point, let me tell you about something that has happened literally dozens of times with me during coaching sessions with my students. 

They would get into the call, we would start talking, and then after a few minutes they would complain to me about how they felt the player pool was adjusting to them. I’ve been teaching exploitative strategies to private coaching and staking students since 2018, so you can imagine how many times that has happened.

My immediate reaction since I began coaching, 5 and a half years ago,  is always the same. “Huh, really? That’s interesting. Have you checked your perception against the data?”.

“No, I haven’t”. 

That’s what I heard every single time following my question.

In one of the most recent occurrences, a high stakes student of mine was concerned that people were folding too little vs him on the river, and potentially exploiting his overbluffing tendencies. So we did what every human should always do with regards to their perception of reality – check it against the facts.

We took his sample, imported into H2N, and then built a stat that shows how often the player pool was folding overall, and compared to a “vs hero” stat, which shows the same statistic but filtered for hands where the pool was facing hero. 

The result? The player pool was folding more to my student on average than against the rest of their opponents.

Let met get the point across in the most unequivocally way possible: your perception of how your opponents play is off, most of the time. And sometimes, it’s incredibly off – like 180 degrees off. 

Unless you have many years of experience under your belt, particularly with trial and error exploits and adapting to specific opponents tendencies, the truth is that many times you’re better off not trying to exploit at all, because your perception of reality might be so off that you’re actually exploiting yourself. Like the people that overfold rivers against fish (who overbluff). Or the people that stop bluffing because they think other people are calling too much (they’re not). These guys would actually make more money playing GTO.

If you’re not going to use actual data to study your opponents behaviour, I’d strongly recommend you keep exploits to a minimum, exclusively for the circumstances you are absolutely sure that the deviation you’re attacking actually exists. 

That being said: you should just use the data and work with the facts. But more on that in a future post.

___________________________________________________________________________________

I More on this topic

4 Popular Beliefs In Poker That Are NOT TRUE

___________________________________________________________________________________

Until next time, keep it simple.
Saulo