Against weaker players , whose hand-reading skills or general poker ability is not of a high order, you’ll usually make the most money by adopting a straightforward style where you just aim to exploit the holes in their game to the maximum.

If they are too loose, you can make big bets and raises with your strong hands for value; too tight and you can play aggressively and force them to surrender more hands than they should.

If they themselves are too aggressive you can trap them easily. If too passive you can take them on when they are out of position or in spots where stronger players would punish you. Similarly, if they are just playing their own cards, you don’t need to worry about being too deceptive, as they are not even thinking on that level.

However, as you rise up the ranks these sort of players will become less and less abundant, and even when you do find them you will usually be sitting at a table that consists of a number of other tough, aggressive players who are competing with each other for the dead money. If you rise high enough, say to $10/$20 no-limit hold’em and above, you might even find yourself competing mainly against other strong, thinking players.

At this stage, a lot of the strategies that proved useful against the weaker players will become of little value. As a result, your game plan will need to evolve into one that is attuned to mixing up your play and balancing your overall game, so that observant opponents are not able to exploit holes in your style.

Last time we talked about hand reading and opponent ranges, and at the higher levels this is an exercise that good players will automatically carry out at every stage of a hand – assigning you possible holdings based on your action and narrowing them down through the hand depending on further information.

Closed book

Therefore, your task when playing against tough opposition is to remain as unreadable as possible by varying your actions with various hands, while simultaneously trying to narrow down your opponent’s hand ranges. Previously this process has been described in terms of basic thought processes. For example, ‘what do I think my opponent has?’, ‘what do I think my opponent thinks I have?’ – and so on.

More recently, however, game theorists like Chris Ferguson and Bill Chen have reformulated this into a battle of hand ranges, which is what all good players have been implicitly, or explicitly, thinking about for decades. In short, not only must you attempt to read your opponent’s hand range, but you must also ‘read your own hand’, which means being aware of the hand range your opponent is able to put you on given your actions and how this changes throughout a hand, as well as how your range is best played against your opponent’s.

The information war begins pre-flop, and so obviously this is the correct time to start broadening your hand ranges based on certain actions. If you typically only raise under the gun with premium hands like A-A, K-K and A-K in a full ring game, you need to widen your range to include other useful hands like suited connectors and smaller pairs to avoid your opponents being able to confidently put you on a hand post flop.

Similarly, if you only re-raise in late position for value with the above premium hands (and a few more against a late-position raiser) you need to throw in some raises with non-premium hands as well in order to stay deceptive. And if you often call a raise with speculative hands like small pairs or suited connectors, you also need to occasionally be doing this with premium hands where you would typically raise.

The idea is not to make these plays because they are immediately profitable (for example, playing 6-7 suited under the gun is probably a losing play in isolation), but so that they add more profitability to your other stronger hands than they themselves sacrifice, by introducing an element of uncertainty into your game.

Frequency modulation

The above describes a reasonably balanced overall pre- flop strategy, however it is important that you also grasp the concept of frequency when trying to employ such an approach. When skilled poker players talk about certain general aspects of the game, the answer is rarely a fixed one like, ‘I would always raise there.’ Rather it is more often along the lines of, ‘I would raise 75% of the time and call 25%’ or, ‘I’d flip a coin’ (metaphorically, of course!). Following on from the idea of playing slightly unprofitable hands under the gun then, your general goal should be to find frequencies that maximise your profitability and adjust them as situations dictate.

For example, on the button against one tight-aggressive mid-position raiser you might re-raise with Aces 80% of the time and call 20% of the time, whereas with 4-4 or 10-J suited, the numbers would be reversed. If the raise came from a loose early-position player and five players called, you would basically never call with Aces or raise with a small pair as you would sacrifice too much profit in your attempt to be deceptive. However, you might now also make a big raise with suited connectors 10% of the time to help protect your premium hands.

The story is a similar one post-flop, and you need to remember to vary your play enough to stay deceptive in certain recurring aspects of the game, from continuation betting to how you play overpairs, flopped sets, big (and small) draws and of course, bluffs. In this respect, flop play is often straightforward as it is standard for tough aggressive players to continuation bet as much as 90% of the time, but many players give up a lot of equity on the turn by not firing additional barrels with draws or bluffs against players who are likely to float (or fold), or being too passive in the face of aggression with drawing hands.

Similarly, on the river you need to create effective balances between value betting and bluffing (this will be the topic of a future article). Remember that one of the toughest things to do in poker is to effectively mix up your play and balance your overall game in order to stay deceptive. However, it is also one of the most profitable.