Understanding Table Dynamics in Low and Mid Stakes Tournaments
A big problem for the majority of players in low to mid-stakes tournaments is that they are unable to understand how their opponents are thinking. Exploiting this lack of understanding is the foundation I have used to consistently crush at these limits over the course of many years. Learning to exploit both the uncreative tighter players and the less-experienced bad players is the key to long-term success in these fields. Both of these types of players tend to imagine what they’d do with someone else’s hand, which is exactly the wrong question to ask. The question should be, “What will the other player do with the other player’s hand.” Here’s how to punish them for asking the wrong question.
Nate Singer is a senior poker instructor at PokerPwnage.comwho specializes in Omaha cash games and tournaments. He has well over $650,000 in career online tournament cashes in events tracked by PocketFives. Nate’s recent results include dual runner-up performances in the PokerStars weekly $35k Guaranteed ($200+15 Pot Limit Omaha). If you are interested in receiving training from Nate or any other PokerPwnage instructor, you can JOIN NOWand receive instruction for as low as $24.99/month.
Something that I try to teach my students is how to best exploit the weaker players at the table. Using exploitable bet sizing to maximize your winnings against weak players is incredibly important to building your stack, particularly early in tournaments. I can’t count the number of times friends have said to me, “People just donate their stack to you more than anyone else I know.” This is by design, as I understand how these players will think and act a lot of the time.
One of the things I do that works extremely well against bad aggressive players is three-betting small with big hands and then making atypically small continuation-bets on flops, as these players will almost always think you’re weak because that’s not something that they would ever do with a big hand. You can then make uncharacteristically big bets on later streets and they will pay you off, as they have usually decided, based on your flop bet, that you can’t have the hand you actually do have. On the other hand, if they are the type that is relatively weak and passive, I will just jam an absurd amount like 100 big blinds over their open raise when I have Aces or Kings near the start of a tournament because their opening range is fairly narrow and they won’t often fold a hand like TT or AQ. And because this is a play they would never make, they assume that you would never make it either.
A common bet-sizing tell inexperienced players use is making pot or close to pot size flop bets when they have a big overpair. Because this is something that is ingrained in their play, they will think that if you three bet them and then bet 25-30% of the pot on a raggedy flop that you simply can’t have a big hand like Aces or Kings because that’s something they would never do with that particular hand. A lot of how I play against bad players will be completely transparent to a good player, but what that good player will often not recognize is that I’m going to play my hands completely differently, and likely in a much less transparent fashion, against him than I will against those bad players. For a good player who is playing 12 or 15 tables, they’ll tend to make to make faulty assumptions about how good I am because they see me doing something that’s so weird or exploitable. Thus I somewhat incidentally increase my expectation against good players while simultaneously increasing my expectation against bad players.
You’ll find this phenomenon happening late in tournaments as well against weaker opponents. In a spot where the weak opponent has something like 12 big blinds and opens a pot, the uncreative, solid players will often not reraise without a strong hand because they will think to themselves, “Well with that stack size, the player probably knows that he can’t open for a raise and then fold, so I’m not going to three bet him here.” What they don’t understand is that the weak player has probably never read an article about stack size in tournaments and what you should be avoiding in terms of mistakes, so he’ll often raise and fold to a reraise with that 12 big blind stack or, if he has something like 18-25 big blinds, flat a reraise and then fold the majority of the time on the flop. The great part about this is that the solid, uncreative player is unintentionally reinforcing that behavior in the weak player because the weak player isn’t often getting three-bet when he opens with 12 big blinds precisely because the uncreative player doesn’t think the weak player will ever fold. And because the weak player isn’t likely distinguishing between the other solid players at the table and a creative opponent, he’ll tend to give you credit when you three-bet him because the frequency of it happening is so low.
I’ve noticed that in the last six months or so especially, the lack of capacity for understanding different types of opponents in three-bet pots has had a huge effect in lower and mid-stakes no limit tournaments. A lot of the players in these tournaments who get deep will be very aggressive three-bettors but somewhat indiscriminately so. I recall a tournament two weeks ago where I made a deep run despite being absurdly tight simply because the players at my table were so hyper-aggressive that I had people jam 25-30 bbs with hands like A9 offsuit and 44 over my opens because the table was playing so aggressive in general. Nevermind that I wasn’t opening light at all and wasn’t ever folding to these players shoves. A chain reaction tends to take place at tables when a lot of three-betting is happening as players generally get more gambly and willing to shove and often fail to distinguish between which players are actually opening a ton and which aren’t. They see AJ, think they have a monster, and indiscriminately jam their stack in.
Understanding the psychology of a lot of the more standard tight-aggressive players in these types of tournaments will also allow you to exploit them in a completely different way than you exploit the inexperienced or bad players. The most common flaw that you’ll see in these player’s game is a fundamental inflexibility or lack of creativity in their thinking. This is a truly huge group of players who will often be characterized by very specific types of HUD stats. The most common look you’ll see is something like 16/9 vpip/pfr with a 4% three bet. These players tend to have a solid basic understanding of stack sizes and hand strengths. They’ll usually be winning players at the lower limit tournaments just by not making big mistakes and letting the plentiful bad players donate stacks to them when the tighter player just simply has a better hand.
That said, they have a big flaw in their game in that they’ll often consider the way that they’re playing to be “correct.” So when they see me play a hand against a bad player where I’m going to be using some different maneuvers that they consider to be fundamentally “incorrect,” they are assuming that I’m not a smart or skilled player. And when that happens they are typically going to approach me in a similar way to the other players they consider to be playing incorrectly. The good news for me here is that this group of tighter, by-the-book players will tend to play their hands transparently against me the same way they do against the bad players. This allows you to constantly apply pressure to them in smallish pots and just generally play relatively mistake-free against them. It took me a long time to develop the discipline to do it, but I can make more big folds of overpairs in deeper stacked situations on rag boards against them because they will tend to play sets in the exact same manner most of the time and allow you an opportunity to get away from your hand. Likewise, you can three bet them regularly because very few of them will be willing to four-bet you light at all.
The place where you can really take maximum advantage of these types of players is late in tournaments when the tables become shorthanded. A lot of them just won’t adjust well at all and will continue to wait for good hands to try to take advantage of the bad players because that’s their usual mode. The thing that they don’t realize is that there might not be any of those types of terrible players they’re good at beating at the table anymore. On the other hand, some of these players will feel bullied and get frustrated and then overcompensate and become reckless but in the kind of way where they will make tons of mistakes because they are not at all used to playing loose and aggressive and will tend to three-bet in bad spots or make nonsensical bluffs. This again allows you the opportunity to misrepresent yourself by playing really aggressively against the players that are playing much too tight for the shorthanded tables and then ratcheting it back to a tighter gear against the players that have overcompensated for the shorthanded play, thereby maximizing your ability to take advantage of both of them.
Flexible thinking is perhaps the biggest key to consistently winning big at low to midstakes tournaments. Striving to understand how your opponents think (or don’t think) and will react to you will make a huge difference in your bottom line.
