Quote:
Originally Posted by DevinLake
good post. Above was a nice succinct summary.
same here. I still struggle with doing something I perceive as being super exploitable.
Thank you. I still struggle with 'exploitable' play as well. I have to keep reminding myself that being exploitABLE is not the same as being exploited.
I will give an example. When I was learning to play online, years ago, many beginning players including myself had a pretty high flop c-bet % followed by a very low turn c-bet %. This was a stereotypical 'one-and-done' approach. I watched many videos and read many things that convinced me that that was a leak, in the context of the games I was playing. By thinking about the game, and learning from various sites I was able to construct a good barreling strategy while lowering my flop c-bet % to take into account player type, image, board texture, etc. The result was a 'good looking set of stats', at least from the lens of what instructional videos suggested were 'ideal' stats for those games, maybe something like 60-65% flop c-bet and ~ 50% turn c-bet. Then translating this to live games where a lot of opponents are station-y, I was a bit confused. On the one hand I know a lot of these guys have a weak range. And I know they peel my flop c-bets light on a bunch of boards. On the other hand, the stubborn bastards are refusing to fold those marginal hands to my turn barrels, even on 'good scare cards' =). So I was confronted with this unpleasant situation, where what I previously thought was 'optimal strategy' was essentially playing into my opponents greatest strength - calling down. I think there are two ways to fix this. I either really got to go full bore and triple-barrel cards I previously wouldn't have tripled for big money to really get them off their ranges, or I had to really lower my flop c-bet frequency and mostly only bet turn for value. So for a while, I struggled because intellectually I understood that approach #2 was optimal *against these specific players* but it somehow felt weak-tight/unbalanced/exploitable.
What really helped me though is thinking through the concept of Reciprocality. I realized that a) the calling stations won't be exploiting me if I lower my flop c-bet frequency to only primo textures and only double-barrel for value b) I will be getting a positive reciprocality as they will be paying me off in spots where I will easily get away from paying them off c) I can widen my value-betting range in these spots to further increase my positive Reciprocality d) since these spots occur frequently and since these guys don't have any positive reciprocalities on me, this alone is sufficient for me to crush them. Sure, not as much fun as taking a clever c/r turn, crai river line, but against the static strategies these guys are playing it was optimal =).
Anyway, this ended up being longer than I intended, but I did want to respond as I feel like there are still times when my FPS gets the better of me in spots where intellectually I know that a simple, boring counter-strategy vs. my opponents' static strategies is going to crush.