Poker is, for the most part, a game of exploitation. The profitability – or lack thereof – of any given poker player is directly related to his ability to ascertain the strategies of opponents and identify the most profitable responses to those strategies. This is part and parcel of being a poker player and most players who reach a certain level are able to comfortably shift their mindset toward analyzing their opponents almost without thinking, at least to some degree.

Sometimes, however, this unconscious and almost instinctive analysis can actually reflect back onto our own game. On occasion, we slip so far into the mentality of focusing on our opponents’ strengths and weaknesses that we forget to consider our own. We think so hard during a hand about how to play optimally versus our opponent’s range that we fail to incorporate into our analysis the possibility that our opponent may already be adapting to a weakness in our own game and changing his strategy accordingly.

What’s happening here is that we’re being too shortsighted – we’re not giving our opponent enough credit and we’re neglecting to anticipate how our attempts to exploit them might leave holes in our defenses. What can we do about this? Well, there are two options. One is very difficult and takes a lot of practice and the other is a lot simpler.

The first option is to work towards playing a more un-exploitable or “game theory optimal” strategy. This kind of strategy is hard to actually identify since any estimation of GTO post-flop play relies upon accurate estimations of our opponents’ ranges in the first place and it’s even harder to execute correctly in-game.

It takes a very, very long time and a lot of experience to even come close to playing GTO post-flop poker and even then no human will probably ever be able to achieve it on a unilateral basis simply because of the unbelievably complex nature of No Limit Hold’em at the highest level of detail.

The second option, therefore, is preferable in almost all circumstances. It relies upon the practice from which this article draws its title – if you want to improve your ability to anticipate your opponents’ responses to your play and learn more about the strengths and weaknesses in your game overall, it’s time to start playing devil’s advocate. We must put ourselves in our opponents’ shoes and consider how a thinking opponent might approach the process of trying to beat us.

This sounds like a difficult thing to do, but it’s actually a lot easier than you might think. Let’s assume for the purposes of this discussion that you’re actively and regularly engaged in reviewing and analyzing your own poker performance and you frequently look back at hands you’ve played in order to correct flaws in your game (hint: if you’re not doing this, you should be). All it requires to learn to exploit yourself is to simply shift your perspective when you conduct these analyses.

Ordinarily, you might analyses your game by opening up your favorite piece of poker analysis software, running through a hand, considering your opponent’s range, and evaluating whether you made the right play. However, if you want to go one step further, you need to start looking from your opponent’s point of view and considering your entire range in each spot.

This is a pretty simple process – if you’re using HoldemResources Calculator or CardRunnersEV, these two programs both have built-in facilities for calculating maximum exploitative play solutions, which will tell you how you can exploit your opponents in a given spot and, in turn, how your opponent could exploit your exploitation of them.

If you’re using a simpler program, however, or if you’re merely hoping to improve your theoretical understanding of your own game and where your leaks might be located, the process is as simple as hiding your hole cards during a review and asking the right questions.

Hiding your own hole cards forces you to consider your entire range in a specific spot rather than thinking purely about what hand you have at a given moment. It puts the plays you make and the bet sizes you choose into a new context and allows you to identify spots where you might be telegraphing your hand to a great extent. It’s almost guaranteed that the first time you review a tournament with your hole cards hidden, you’ll find at least a few spots where you think to yourself, “Well, damn, I guess it looks like I have the nuts here!”

This is the point where you can start to really think about how you would play against yourself if you were in your opponent’s shoes. What tendencies do you exhibit? Would you be floating more flops against you? Would you check-raise the turn more often? How would you approach defending the big blind? How often should your opponent be folding in that previous spot where your bet looked like the nuts? All of these issues and many others will come into play once you start to get a feel for what your game looks like from your opponents’ perspectives.

If you feel inclined to do so, you can end the process by looking at what hand you actually had and evaluating the play you made. However, it’s generally more useful to continue looking at things from a self-exploitation perspective and think less about how good or bad your play was and more about what the hand you ended up having says about your range.

If you had a weak hand that you originally thought you would have folded pre-flop, then perhaps your range was wider than you expected – you can then evaluate the potential adjustments you would expect your opponent to make versus that wider range, for example.

The process of adaptation and counter-adaptation, exploitation and counter-exploitation, and adjustment and counter-adjustment never ends in poker. The second you make an adjustment to a play your opponent makes, it becomes a possibility that they’ll start adapting in a different way that will completely invalidate your attempt to exploit them. Their attempts to exploit you will dictate what your options are when it comes to exploiting them in return.

In effect, what we’re doing by learning to practice theoretical self-exploitation is to jump to the next level of poker thinking – people often talk about the “levelling game” and spend time trying to figure out “What level is my opponent on,” but until you’ve learned to self-exploit and identify the appropriate strategy for a player playing one level above you and tried to exploit your own strategy, you can’t really do anything with the knowledge of what level your opponent is on in the first place.

There are many areas of life where playing devil’s advocate can be a useful tool. The phrase itself is a simple colloquialism, but the practice is actually a much more complex process that requires a well-developed ability to examine one’s own opinion or one’s own behaviors in a new light. If you’re never playing devil’s advocate, you’re not testing yourself as hard as you could be, and if you’re not testing yourself, you’re probably not learning.