Expert Exploits: From Reads to Adjustments
Last week, we discussed how to develop reads – a critical step in exploiting your opponents’ weaknesses, AKA the most lucrative part of the game.
Developing the reads is, in my view, the grunt work. It’s time-intensive, often tedious, organizational, and hard.
Turning those reads into exploits is the fun, creative, and exciting part of our job as master exploiters!
Now, that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, but that’s why we’re all here.
We’ll start with the more straightforward principles and move towards the really fun stuff as we go. Buckle up!
Find The Biggest Weaknesses
Once you’ve developed a list of reads on an opponent, go through them and figure out which of their leaks is the largest.
If you’re playing someone heads-up, you might be able to go after all of them, but in a ring game with several opponents to keep track of, you can’t expect to have mapped-out adjustments for every leak of every opponent.
Focus on where you’ll get the most return on your investment (of attention and brain-space).
Keep in mind that a weakness might be a range strength.
If your opponent double barrels with way too strong of a range, that’s a leak. And you exploit that leak, primarily, by folding.
That said, there are often several ways to adjust to a specific leak (or a collection of leaks), and it’ll be our job to pick the most impactful.
We likely won’t have the time or memory to gameplan the six ways we’ll adjust to each of five leaks from eight different opponents.
So, we pick one or two key ways to adjust to one or two key leaks, and otherwise, we just keep the leak in mind. It may come in handy for us to think through a novel situation on the fly.
Let’s get into an example…
Direct Strikes
Let’s take our above opponent, who continuation bets the turn with way too strong of a range.
We’ve picked that as our main leak to target. Now let’s come up with a couple of ways that we’ll adjust:
1. Fold more to turn c-bets
Nice and easy. This is what I’ll call the direct strike.
The turn c-bet range is too strong, so we fold more against it.
Another semi-direct strike would be:
2. Fold to more river c-bets
If our opponent’s turn betting range is too strong, they have far fewer bluffs to choose from on the river than they’re supposed to.
So, unless they do something crazy, their river betting range has to be too strong, too. You can attack that by folding to more river c-bets.
Notice that I said “attack” by folding.
It’s so important to view these exploits as the attacks on your opponent’s EV that they are. When a range is too strong, many players will shrug and think, “Welp, can’t do much to exploit this guy,” and they don’t get excited.
Not me – I’m pumped to fold the river to a nit.
Whenever you get to fold a hand that you have no business folding in theory, you’re making money by losing less.
When the roles are reversed, and they have two pair against your set, they’re going to call the river and lose 20 big blinds. You’ll find the hero fold, which you need to think about as making you 20 big blinds.
Indirect Maneuvers
If the above examples are direct strikes on our opponent’s leak, what’s an example of an indirect one?
Well, let’s assume this opponent has a normal enough preflop and flop c-bet strategy.
That means their turn c-bet frequency is going to be low.
Why?
If their range for getting to the turn is normal and their range for betting the turn is way too strong, that means that they have to be missing some turn c-bets with weak hands.
So if their turn c-bet frequency will be low, what kind of indirect maneuvers can we make to take advantage of that?
(For clarity’s sake: Let’s also assume our opponent is in position, so we can get specific.)
We could:
Call flop with weaker bluff-catchers.
Float flop with more weak draws to bluff river.
Skip flop check-raise semi-bluffs and check-call instead.
Bluff more and check more value on rivers.
I could go on, but let’s stop here and make sure you understand how each of these takes advantage of our opponent’s strategy.
If you haven’t figured them out yet, take a few minutes to consider them and formulate a guess before we move on.
Even if your guesses are going to be bad – just try. It’s good practice for you, and you’ll improve over time.
Okay, let’s continue…
All of these take advantage of the fact that we will face fewer turn c-bets than we’re supposed to, and they’ll be from a strong range.
1. Calling flop bets with weaker bluff-catchers
These weaker bluff-catchers get punished by turn barrels from value and bluffs, but since our opponent is skipping most of the bluffs, we’ll get to see more showdowns with these pairs than normal.
2. Floating flop bets with more weak draws to bluff the river
We’ll be allowed to see more rivers than we’re supposed to in theory, and the range that checks back the turn will be weaker than it should be. So we get to realize more equity and bluff more effectively on the river.
Why will it be weaker? More on that soon.
3. Skipping flop check-raise semi-bluffs. Check-calling instead.
Normally, we check-raise semi-bluffs to win the pot against weaker parts of our opponent’s range.
When we run into the stronger part of their range, we’ve put in more money than we hoped, but it’s the price we pay.
Not anymore!
Now our opponent is going to tell us on the turn whether they have a strong hand or not, and we get to avoid putting in too much money against those hands, get to realize more equity in the check-call line, and get more profitable bluffs on the river after the turn goes check-check.
4. Betting bluffs and checking value on rivers
The above examples include planning river bluffs with flop check-call hands, but I want to separate this out to be clear.
All of those potential turn bluffs that your opponent misses go into their check-back range.
That means that the check-back range has more potential bet-check-bet bluffs.
Bluffing against this weakened range should work nicely, and checking more hands to induce river bluffs could too, especially when they fold too often to your value bets.
Zoom Out
What we learned in these last few examples is a key concept:
Every branch of poker’s game tree is interconnected.
If one range gets stronger, another range has to get weaker.
When our opponent skips c-betting most of their weak hands that they should c-bet on the turn, there is nothing they can do to avoid weakening their turn check-back range.
(Unless, of course, they want to start mucking their weakest holdings before even seeing the river!)
Whenever you spot a leak, zoom out and identify the impacts of that leak on various ranges. There will always be a consequence, and sometimes the consequences aren’t so obvious.
I’m pumped to fold the river against a nit.
In the example above, it was clear how to “attack” our opponent’s strong turn c-bet range directly. We just fold.
But some leaks won’t offer openings for high EV direct strikes.
It’s possible for players to have a robust, well-balanced betting range while still leaking. It’s harder to figure out how to beat them, but that’s our job. Let’s get into an example.
A Tough Leak to Crack
We’re now up against an opponent who c-bets the turn too often.
They accomplish this by:
Never slow-playing or pot-controlling on the turn.
Betting too thinly for value, and
Adding the appropriate number of bluffs to that range.
Could we find a direct strike against this opponent?
Not really.*
*We could probably expand our turn value check-raise range slightly to attack their thinner value, but this will add negligible EV.
Despite betting at the wrong frequency, our opponent has a pretty balanced and relatively strong betting range.
But, wait!
Are there any indirect maneuvers we could deploy?
Yes!
Firstly, we can reverse a lot of the flop adjustments from our previous example opponent, because we’re now going to face too many turn c-bets rather than too few.
So we should over-fold the flop with some of our weaker made hands and other floats, and we should check-raise other draws more aggressively, since they are now losing EV as flop check-calls.
Now we’ve got our opponent c-betting the turn into a range that we’re happier facing c-bets with.
But, the highest EV adjustments we can make come on the river.
Whenever you spot a leak, zoom out and identify
the impacts of that leak on various ranges.
Our opponent isn’t just a little bit capped when they check back turn – they’re entirely capped. They are never checking back even a pretty good hand on the turn.
They built that powerful, aggressive turn c-bet strategy by utilizing valuable hands that should be in their turn check-back range.
This means, barring huge changes to the board, we can go nuts on the river.
We get to value bet thinner and bigger.
We get to check-raise thinner and bigger.
And we get to add more bluffs to these ranges to capture EV.
If your opponent bets flop on J♠️7♠️3❤️ and checks back the K♣️ turn, and they never have J9 or better, when the 2❤️ river peels off, you can, for example, bet 500% pot with J9!
It sounds crazy because it’s a very strong adjustment (and a safe river), but it’s truly part of a good counterstrategy.
Takeaways
Your opponent managed to c-bet the turn too often while still constructing a turn c-bet range that was fairly robust.
You can’t do that without a cost.
You have to pull those range resources from somewhere.
If you’ve taken anything away from this, please open your mind to the domino effect of poor range construction and the world of possibilities it opens up for you – the master exploiter.
Have fun out there.
