Whether consciously or sub-consciously we are all classifying our holdings into different categories at each stage of the hand. In general, some of these categories have defined actions, and some have optional actions.

Throughout the live sessions, I am fundamentally looking for other players to give me compelling reasons to become imbalanced with the action I choose in the categories that have optional actions:

Premium Value Hands with Blockers (top 2 pair & top set) – Bet or Slow-play

Premium Value Hands – Bet

Thin Value Hands - Bet or Call

Medium Strength Hands - Call

Low Strength Hands– Fold

Draws with Showdown Value - Call

Strong Draws without Showdown Value – Bet

Weak Draws without Showdown Value – Bet or Fold


When I observe a player incorrectly categorizing their hand; which results in villain’s frequency of a specific action to be too high or too low, I choose the optional action which best exploits them.

For example, we say that typical loose recreational 1/2 or 2/5 player tendencies are too loose, too sticky, and too weak. What this means is the betting frequency for their Value Hands is too low, and the calling frequency for Low Strength Hands and Draws without Showdown Value is too high.
To exploit this, we want to choose the betting action for our Thin Value hands, and the folding action for our Weak Draws without Showdown Value.
For this, we want our range to have fewer bluffs and more value. We will choose fewer low cards (suited connectors and pocket pairs) and more high cards for our opening range because we will see and win a lot of showdowns against this player type with medium strength hands.


Conversely, we say nitty 1/2 or 2/5 players are too tight, over-fold, and are too weak. This means the folding frequency for their Medium Strength Hands is too high, and the betting frequency for Value Hands and Draws Without Showdown Value is too low.
To exploit this, we want to choose the Calling action for our Thin Value Hands, and the Betting action for our Weak Draws without Showdown Value. To beat these players, we will need to have premium hands by showdown, or fold them out of the pot along the way. In order to do this, our range should be more polarized with premium high cards, and low speculative cards.

What this all boils down to is:
Whenever villain categorizes their hand incorrectly, they choose the wrong action too frequently and win smaller pots and loose larger pots than they should.

Whenever we notice that they are categorizing their hands incorrectly and adjust our range composition and actions accordingly, we win even larger pots and lose even smaller pots than we should.

Finally a brief note about starting hand ranges and hand categorizations that is beyond the scope of this post:
When playing live, the most important factor to take into account when choosing your opening hand range is stack size and position. Being out of position or having a low stack to pot ratio will prevent you from realizing the equity on your draws.
In addition, understanding flop textures, relative hand strength, and range advantage fluctuations throughout the hand are extremely important skills to master before you can successfully categorize your own hands and subsequently determine how proficient your opponent is at doing it.

I would be interested to hear any exploitative adjustments you make at live low stakes poker and thoughts you might have on my analysis. I have been playing live low stakes poker recreationally since 2001, but have only recently become interested in writing about strategy, so please take my opinions with a grain of salt if you are just starting out.

As a professional dealer for 10 years, I could probably write a book about the things low stakes live players do incorrectly. Or things that make them lose more and win less. The problem is I have such a large database of knowledge I wouldn’t know where to start and would probably end up posting something very unorganized and scattered.

Nice post

I hear you. I tried to write this post a few times before today and always ended up in TL.DR territory. It wasn't until a few days ago when I was sitting at the tables that I started to peel back the layers to see if there was some kind of 'catch all' fundamental thing I was doing when I was watching for leaks in other players.
Whenever I speak to inexperienced live players they all say that they try to pay attention to the session, but they don't really know what they are looking for. They just end up overwhelmed with information and don't know what to do with it.
The trouble I have is that Im so used to adjusting to things like stack sizes and population tendencies, that I don't notice what my subconscious is figuring out, my experience just takes over.
The good news for these new young guys is that they learned playing super nitty online games against really good players so their default strategy is so much better than the older rec players who never really bothered to learn the modern game. I love watching their faces when their AA gets called down for 3 streets with 2nd pair no kicker by Bill the retired cabbie.

Good point on "paying attention, but not knowing what to look for".

To speak to that point, something interesting I have found (as well as many of my co-workers) is that we are so much better at hand reading while dealing than we are while playing. I think it's because we are literally controlling the game and paying attention to each and every player non-stop. (At least the good dealers are who are good at their job and care about the game).

I find that the overwhelming majority of low stakes live players pay way too little attention to what is going on, as well as making an active effort to remember the details of what has previously happened. A lot of them play in a vacuum, so to speak. They miss the most obvious things such as "Seat 3 has opened 8 times in the last 2 orbits" - making his PFR % to something like 40% (given a 10 handed game). Nobody adjusts to this and this is a perfect spot to exploit such player by 3-betting them in position with a proper hand for this spot. My range in this spot would vary and this would be another discussion, but depending on how often this player C-bets, if he is flop, turn, or river honest, his stack size, how he has reacted to aggression previously, etc almost makes my cards irrelevant if I feel that the players behind me have no interest in playing the hand (which is another topic, these players often telegraph a ton of info preflop and when dealing I almost always know who is going to play and who isn't).

See, this is already getting too long with too many bullet-points lol.

Another thing that comes to mind (just recapping work from last night) is how to effectively deal with tight players who min-buy (short stackers). A lot of them will look to limp re-raise and try to trap, they will often raise too large, often in proportion to their hand strength. When they open raise 8-10x preflop, their range is often TT-AA, AQ-AK. They will often fold their small blind when getting great pot odds to call from a 5-way limped pot. If you find yourself in the cutoff or button position when this player is in the blinds, if the spot is right, steal often. The spot right being all action has folded to you, or there are one or two limpers and you pick up a value hand or hand that plays well post-flop in multi-way pots (if you are confident in your post-flop play and the stacks sizes are correct). Talking about stack sizes being correct in this spot could be a whole different post. As I said earlier, there's so many details in my memory 'database' that go into determining these spots - to me, it's just natural when I recognize them because I've seen these hands play out tens of thousands of times.

A great exercise to recognize good spots and get better is just to watch live low stakes hands. That's one benefit of being a dealer. Eventually, after many hours, an 'alarm' will go off in your head.

Also, at the very basic foundational level, when you sit down at the table, the first thing you should do is categorize your opponents as either "competent" or "incompetent" players. Both have varying levels and will allow you to adjust and make plays further on in the session.

Funny you should mention that. I spoke with a young guy the other week and he started using terms like 'aggressive' and 'passive' etc when describing the action. I quickly realized we were not on the same page as to what the terminology meant. So we started using terms like 'reckless' 'timid' and 'smart' instead which really opened up the conversation and subsequently led to my original post.

I suggested he watch the action and ask himself the following questions:
Is the action this player took too Reckless, Smart, or too Timid?
And more importantly, am I going to adjust my play to exploit this or will I benefit from this mistake just fine without doing anything?

You can disregard so much information about how bad a player is when you don't need to adjust to benefit from their mistakes, allowing you to focus on the things you do.

Agreed. A mistake I often see competent players make is that they over-think their opponent and essentially level themselves. They analyze the hand as if their opponent has logically thought through their play in a sensical way. Essentially, they think of their opponent playing in a manner that THEY would themselves play.

This often manifests by a competent player making a hero call in a terrible spot or folding the best hand.

A good example of a bad hero call spot I often see, is when a middle-pair straight-draw texture flops, for example 9-8A and hero has Top-Top or an overpair. The board will run out 6-7 and all of a sudden the villain goes from calling every street to suddenly either leading out or raising (depending on position). The obvious truth is that villain seriously just called down with a hand like T9, A5, AT, JT, TT 85, 95 giving them whatever straight makes sense for the given board. They are pretty much never bluffing here... Bad Tight-Passive Low stakes live players on average rarely bluff on the river. Most (tight-aggressive and tight-passive) will shutdown after a C-bet on the flop gets called and they don't improve, or will jam on the turn with a flush or straight draw if their stack is shallow enough. Some better, tight-aggressive players will raise the turn with their draws if they feel you will fold enough, or again it's an A-high or K-high board with a flush or straight draw, where as they have the draw, if you don't have top pair it's so tough to call. This is where it comes down to paying attention to the game and profiling your opponents.

But again, I would say it's safe to say most tight bad live low-stakes players don't bluff often, most never at all. Or they don't know how/when to bluff. It'll either be a stone cold triple barrel jam on the river (with something like AK or suited broadway cards), or never at all. They miss out on spots like C-Betting the flop when having a range advantage (ex. tight player raises pre flop comes A-x-xr or 3-7-2r) or raising A-high or K-high dry boards on the turn (ex. A-7-3r calling a flop bet in position, then a blank hitting the turn and betting when checked to, or raising 3x when faced with a small bet on the turn now). In other words, making a play for the pot in a hand where it's pretty much impossible to make the call without top pair or better on dry board textures.


The kind of dry boards I'm referring to - a good example is like this hand: