Hi,
Not sure if it's the right place to ask but since it's mentioned in the book but not really exhaustively, I figured I could ask it here. If not I'll post in SS or in the theory forums.
tl;dr : Should I overestimate my opponents ?
(I'm asking this because specifically in the hand examples at the end, "arguing like a politician", a lot of the strongest arguments assume villain is playing well. The TT hand OTB in a FR game blew my mind. I think in a good way.)
Ok here is the deal. In chess when you learn with a teacher, he tells you to never play a move if you know there is a strong counter move, basically never think your opponent won't see it. So, don't underestimate him and always calculate his best replies to every move. And if he makes a mistake, good for you.
If I consider this logic for poker I'm left with 2 choices :
1 - play expecting my opponents will play well. If he does play well, I'll have an edge when I have a range advantage and he'll have an edge when he has a range advantage and we'll roughly break even in the long run. But hopefully he'll make mistakes and I'll make money, sort of "accidentally" but it will be the result of me playing well and him deviating away of a maximally exploitative strategy.
2 - play expecting they'll make mistake : the big advantage of this approach is that I won't fall into their little traps (check top pair on a drawy board to let me bluff them, stuff like that). I also won't get overbluff/underbluff because I'll know the type of mistakes they make in various spots. But the big drawbacks I see are twofold : a) when the field changes (for example moving up), I will not have developped a strong strategy that just works well overall, and I will sort of have to "read the field" again. b) there is a lot of levelling involved in this approach.
Ideally I would just like to do 1), meaning, play good poker and hope they sometimes spazz out buy ins at me. But it really gets into my head when they start doing maniacal things that I can just take super marginal spots and get away with it. I guess I'm sort of afraid to miss out on opportunities to stack off with like 2nd pair because I suspect this guy is check/shoving any hand.
Edit : also it's sometimes particularly hard to assume they play well if they limp UTG or min 3bet and such. I sort of automatically assume they play bad and turn into super tricky mode sort of automatically, sometimes with no consideration of the action anymore. And I think it can be a huge leak but I'm not sure.
Great book by the way, I understood a lot of things about the game and I now have a much clearer idea of how to think about the game. Only drawback is that I now tank forever on every hand not being sure of what to do
but I guess it's actually better to keep an open mind about every situation rather than just being in autopilot. I particularly love the "new reasons for betting" a lot more than just value or bets. Ironically I talked to a midstakes pro who studies theory a lot and he doesn't like it, not sure if his mind will change over time.
Last edited by OMGLillianLee; 04-20-2018 at 12:18 PM.