Opponent Types: Knowing the Enemy

Introduction

In this Article

• How to estimate the strength of your opponents hands?
  
• How to categorize your opponents?
  

Fragmentary Information

Unlike other games, like chess, poker is a game of fragmentary information. You do not know your opponents’ cards. This lack of information prevents you from always making the perfect decision. Sklansy writes about this self-evident insight in his Fundamental Theorem of Poker:

"Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponent’s cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they loose. Conversely every time oppo-nents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played it if they could see all your cards, you lose. From “Theory of Poker”.

There are situations when not caring about your opponents is not dangerous to your play. For example, you hold a high pocket pair and a harmless flop with only low cards is being revealed, or you hit a really strong made hand on the flop. But more often than not, your hand is vulnerable and far from being the nuts. Of course you want to make the best possible move also in situations like this, so you want to estimate the approximate strength of your opponents’ hands. This method is called hand reading. Good hand reading will close the gap of lacking information (your opponents’ cards) a little bit.

Hand Reading

If you act on the assumption that your opponents are rational humans to some degree, you can cut down their hands to a certain range by ruling out unlikely options. Two factors help you do that:

Strength and type of your opponents’ hands can be estimated by analyzing the betting action they showed during this particular hand.

Knowing what kind of opponent you are facing refines the information gained by reviewing his betting sequence. If a so-called “rock” raises, you have to be much more cautious compared to a maniac’s usual raise.

Categorizing your Opponents

Playing good poker strongly relies on your ability to construe your opponents’ moves. To do this, you need to put them into categories.

A player’s style is composed of four main attributes. You should be able to categorize each of your opponents by associating them to one of these antithetic attributes. You’re correct, this categorization is rather rough. A complete analysis of each opponent would include their betting patterns in all the situations that regularly occur in Hold’em.

1. strong / weak
2. tight / loose
3. aggressive / passive
4. tricky / straight forward

These attributes reflect the opponents’ emotions, their fears, and their desires. Many decisions are made on a sub-conscious level, and people play poker for many reasons besides earning money. Oftentimes they accept financial losses to satisfy other motivations. These could be: Delight in competition, fun in the excitement, social contacts (especially concerning live poker) or entertainment at all. If you know them, you may draw conclusions from your opponents’ motivations. Their moves may become very predictable, especially if these players play an extreme style in a rigid way. It is possible to come up with specific strategies against such self-destructive opponents.

Percentage Play

At Poker, you always play the percentage game. Only on very few occasions, hand reading will enable you to know exactly what cards your opponent holds. But it is nearly always possible to narrow him down to a certain range of hands. Then you can make the one move that should be the best against the most probable hand your opponent may hold.

Example

Your opponent is a maniac, pre-flop-raising 30% of his hands. If we act on the assumption that these are about the best 30% of all hands, his hand is somewhere in this range. So if we hold a hand that breaks even against about the best 10% of all hands, we could reraise, as we would only need to be better than breaking even against the best 15% (to be able to break even against the average hand the opponent could hold).
Of course there will be those cases, where we are put against a monster (best 1% of all hands), but in the average we would be in a good position. In individual cases we will lose, but in the long run, we make profit, as his hands will be as good as ours in average – and we know more about him than vice versa. I have to mention that of course the position should be included to that assumption: Being early position, this maniac will raise less than those 30%, while in late position he will raise even more.

Flexibility

Poker hands do not have a fixed value, they always have to be seen in comparison to each other. There is no consolation prize, for those who end up with the second-best hand in some game. On the contrary, the second-best hand is kind of the worst hand in poker, as it costs its holder the most.

That is why all hands have to be played flexibly. If you have top pair with a weak kicker, you should probably fold if a rock bets (assuming that you do not have enough drawing outs). But if a maniac bets, even a raise seems to be appropriate, as he bluffs often or would play his middle or bottom pair far too strong. A raise would probably isolate this maniac by getting other decent hands to fold.

So poker is a dynamic, situational game. The same hand will be folded one time and raised another, depending on the opponent. Adaptability is an important virtue. Beginners and intermediates can still be successful with only adopting strict rules. They simply need to exploit the big mistakes of their weak opponents. But experts ($2/$4 or higher) will only win if they consider their opponents’ profiles. Many strategical decisions are mainly based upon psychological considerations. Really good players seem to literally look into their opponents’ minds. Again, Sklansky provides us with a nice quote regarding the top level in poker:

“What we mean by the psychology of poker is getting into your opponents’ heads, analyzing how they think, figuring what they think you think, and even determining what they think you think they think.” From Theory of Poker.

Soft Spots

Especially if you’re playing at multiple tables, it is nearly impossible to thoroughly analyze all of the players. You should rather concentrate on the essentials.

Most important are of course those players you profit from. To beat higher limits, you have to be able to identify the weak players at each table and find out, which attributes contribute to their faulty play. Finally you have to choose the right strategy win to their money.

Concentrating on the weak players comes along with the advantage that you can put your experiences much more often to use. After all, weak players are normally loose and as such play many more hands than the average good player.

In the end, the economical principle also applies to the observation of your opponents. Weak players often play an extreme style. Thus, you get important knowledge about them much faster than with analyzing strong players. For the time being, you should count strong players as being tight-aggressive.

Short-Handed

Especially if you’re playing short-handed, knowing your opponents is really important. A full-ring table leads to a multiway pot more often, where you usually just have to show the best hand in the end. If the flop is only three-way or heads-up, you can – and must – act much more specifically, considering all information you got about your opponents. You just have a lot more options to use psychological tricks or deceptive play. By that, the fight is oftentimes decided before the showdown. In many cases even the worse hand will prevail. This is by the way also the main reason, why strong players usually increase their earning rates at short-handed tables, while weak players should abstain from it. Stronger players are just much better at hand reading and are able to quickly adapt to their opponents.

Table and Seat Selection

Financial success at poker strongly depends on selecting the right tables. The weaker your opponents, the larger your profits. If you got a good PokerTracker database, you can even estimate the strength of a table before sitting down. To identify the different types of players, you just have to watch three values: VPIP, PFR and Aggression Factor. The most important value is the VPIP. Someone who plays more than 50% of his hands is definitely a losing player. But our favorite opponents are those who play too many hands and are passive, as well – the so-called calling stations. Try to avoid tables with a lot of tight-aggressive players, except there are also one or two really big fishes to gain your profits with.

A game is not profitable just because there are weak players at the table. You also need position on them. I like to have all the loose players to my right and the tight players to my left. By that, the loose players are already in the hand when I raise my strong hands. The article about “Table Selection” goes into detail about table and seat selection

Survey

Knowing your opponents is most important due to the following reasons:

1. Hand reading
2. Strategical adaption to the opponents’ styles (especially important if dealing with extreme styles)
3. Concentrating on the soft spots
4. Table and seat selection