Quote:
Originally Posted by noobsickle
So does this make tight/aggressive the most "ideal" way to play with small variations to counter these types?
imho, no.
as mentioned in the OP, each of the three styles of fish does
- really badly against one of the other styles, but
- really well against the remaining style.
so if your opponent is the weaktight, then you do best against him by becoming somewhat more like an aggrodonk when you are against him in a hand (lots of bluffs, but fold when the weaktight plays back at you and you don't have a monster, because he surely does.)
this is, i think i'm right in saying, an exploitive strategy; we deviate ourselves from the 'correct' way of playing, in order to maximise our profits from our opponent's deviations. NLHET&P has a great chapter on this, i think it's called 'swapping mistakes' or something similar.
now obviously if someone else spots what we're doing, they can then exploit us; in the above example, if we're playing like the aggrodonk, someone else can start calling us a lot lighter, since we're playing more (and thus on average weaker) hands than is 'correct', more aggressively than is 'correct.'
(some further reading on a slightly more refined version of this idea in
this article if you're interested)
one way of avoiding these problems would be to play what we think is 'correct' poker all the time, mix up our play judiciously so as not to be readable, and not adjust (or adjust
less) to exploit our bad opponents; i think i'm right in saying this is an 'equilibrium' strategy as opposed to an exploitive one, since our primary focus is on avoid getting exploited ourselves, rather than exploiting our poor opponents. possibly this is what you meant when you asked if TAG was 'ideal' vs all opponents.
considering we play the micros, and we are (hopefully) better on average than our opponents, i hope you can see that we are better off adopting exploitive strategies than equilibrium ones; the gains we achieve by using exploitive strategies over equilibrium ones far outweigh the disadvantages of getting exploited ourselves, because our opponents are not, in general, good enough to correctly exploit the mistakes we are purposely making.
hth and makes sense, and all imho in case it doesn't