0

Here is an exercise, the result of which may surprise you.

Type “poker strategy” into your favorite search engine. You will be confronted with hundreds of results featuring poker podcasts, videos, and articles, including many produced by Red Chip Poker.

Now enter “poker tactics” into the search field. What happens? All of the top results include “poker strategy” in their titles or summaries, with an explicit mention of “poker tactics” being almost entirely absent. To a first approximation, these two searches return the same collection of online content.

And yet poker strategy and tactics are not the same.

In this article, we will explore the differences between strategy and tactics in poker, and discuss why understanding this distinction can deepen your understanding of poker and improve your poker results.

Poker Tactics And Strategy: The Difference.

In many games, sports, and other competitive areas of life, most people with any interest in the topic have an understanding of the distinction between tactics and strategy.

The game of chess provides a particularly clear example, as well as illustrating how strategic and tactical thinking evolve as a game matures. (If you do not play chess, we will provide a more general explanation shortly.)

During the classical era of chess in which Paul Morphy dominated allcomers, the most common strategy for white was to unleash a rapid attack on the enemy king. The tactics for achieving this goal frequently included pawn and even piece sacrifices to batter the black king’s defenses, ultimately leading to checkmate.

As chess evolved, more emphasis was placed on opening moves that secured king safety, with pieces protecting each other in a harmonious configuration. The player who best succeeded in this strategy would invariably find that subsequent tactics favored them. Tactics (move combinations) that involve winning material, for example, are much easier to find when your pieces are all protected and your opponent’s are not. This idea is discussed in more depth in our “Poker For Chess Players” article.

You can identify similar useful strategy and tactics distinctions in nearly every competitive area, from the stock market and war to the NFL and cricket.

In military conflict, strategies will often reflect the goals of an overall war. In many theatres, for example, establishing air dominance may be a key strategic goal. In granular detail, the tactics might range from destroying enemy airfields to individual combat tactics employed by pilots in dogfights.

In football, a coach may decide on a strategy of a run-heavy offense, perhaps taking advantage of personnel strengths on their team and weaknesses of the opponents. The tactics they employ are again more granular. At the most detailed level, they are described by specific plays, including blocking schemes and routes.

Notice that word “plays.” To address the puzzling absence of “poker tactics” in search engine results, a large part of the issue is that poker players typically refer to plays rather than tactics. For example, Red Chip’s Doug Hull published the two-volume set “Poker Plays You Can Use.”

Let us look at some specific poker strategies and tactics that cement the distinction, then turn to the more important question of how differentiating these two elements of poker can make us better at the game.

Poker Strategies And Tactics: Some Examples

Let us start off with working definitions of poker strategies and tactics.

Poker strategies are principled decisions (usually made on early streets) in which the specific EV is not known in detail.

The most important such decision is the range of hands we play preflop. For that decision to be principled, it requires some established theoretical basis. Most commonly in modern poker, our strategy will be to use GTO-based ranges such as those in the Red Chip Poker GTO ranges app. The crafted exploitative ranges in that app represent a different strategy to a pure GTO one, but again constitute ranges based on solid theory.

The reason we use such ranges is that we have empirical evidence that they are +EV. However, in any given hand, we have very little idea of the precise EV generated by opening with our specific hand. This is because we do not know our opponent’s hand, nor even the preflop ranges they are using.

Poker tactics are specific lines where the EV is known to be positive. As we move later into the hand, the precise value of the EV we generate becomes easier to determine. Of particular interest in this context are auto-profit spots, where we deduce from population data or stats on our individual opponent that we can generate profit by betting or raising with any two cards.

These kinds of auto-profit spots are particularly clear from an EV perspective when the action terminates the hand by virtue of players being all-in. Similarly in river spots where we are either bluffing all-in or bluff-catching, fairly definitive EV calculations can be made. For those of you who have studied SplitSuit’s workbooks, you will have noticed that explicit calculations of EV invariably involve the hand terminating, either though an all-in situation or because our opponent folds.

To develop these points, here is coach w34z3l:

Poker Tactics And The GTO Problem

We suspect one reason the concept of poker tactics has been downgraded in modern theory is the overarching influence of GTO.

You may have heard players claim that they “play GTO.” What they presumably mean by such a statement is that they attempt to emulate GTO betting lines and sizes at every decision point in every hand they play.

This is impossible for a couple of reasons. First, a full GTO solution to no-limit hold’em is not known. One can run simulations for specified game trees that include a restricted set of bet sizes, but current theory has only probed a tiny fraction of parameter space. Second, even with these restricted solutions, no human can possibly reproduce the GTO line for every situation.

Perhaps far more importantly, GTO will not provide an optimal strategy against real opponents, simply because our opponents deviate from GTO lines themselves.

Someone who genuinely believes they are playing a GTO strategy has no room for tactics. Their entire approach to the game is purely strategic. This is a serious flaw in their approach, and provides significant opportunities to exploit such players. Because despite the poker folklore, pseudo-GTO strategies are not unexploitable, as discussed in detail in this podcast episode.

In our training material, we emphasize that exploitative poker is the most effective approach to maximizing win-rate. The strategy we employ may still be based on GTO play, particularly preflop, but our exploitative deviations from GTO solutions will, in many cases, be largely tactical.

Sometimes the distinction between strategy and tactics gets a little fuzzy. Suppose, for instance, we have a very weak player a seat or two to our right. While we still need to maintain a solid preflop strategy since there are others at the table, we would like to play more pots against the weak player, preferably heads up.

How do we accomplish this strategic goal? By using the tactics of isolation raising their limps and 3-betting their opens with wider ranges than usual. You can likely think of many preflop adjustments that we make against specific player types, such as over-stealing against tight blinds.

Tactics And Hand Reading

When we move to postflop, hand reading takes center stage in developing and implementing tactics. We may, for example, c-bet much wider against a fit-or-fold player. Against a calling station, our aggressive lines should be heavily weighted towards value.

A strong poker tactician is therefore required to be an excellent hand reader. How does one develop this skill? Here’s a video that breaks down the process into seven principles.

Let us summarize the seven hand-reading principles discussed in the video.

1. What is likely. We are not interested in what is possible, but what is likely. This allows us to aggressively remove combos from out opponent’s range. When a showdown indicates our assumptions were wrong, we update them for this player.

2. Capped ranges. Identifying them is one of the most important hand-reading skills in no-limit hold’em. Ed Miller used this idea in his Live Cash series in CORE to ask the critical question: do they want to play for stacks? When the answer is “no,” our tactical approach is to attack our opponent with committing bets. More generally, a lack of aggression tends to cap ranges. If the flop action caps our opponent’s range and the turn is a blank, the relative strength of our hand increases. This in turn informs our betting/sizing decisions. When the turn uncaps our opponent’s range, we have to tread more carefully.

3. Tricky lines. When an opponent pulls off an unexpected line such as a double check-raise, it invariably skews them to strong value. Players tend not to be this creative with bluffs. The likely psychological reason for this is that players want their bluffs to make sense. If a line does not make sense, or appears somehow suspicious, it is more likely to be strong value.

4. Down the betting tree. Earlier in the betting tree, play tends to be closer to GTO. For example, preflop raise-first-in ranges and thus frequencies will be close to GTO for somewhat studied players, thanks in large part to readily-available ranges. As we get into 3-bet and 4-bet situations, however, deviations from GTO grow. Similarly, a flop 3-bet is rare in practice, but more common in GTO. The same applies to raises on the turn and river. Down the game tree, the raises are rarely light.

5. Sizing tells. Pot-sized bets in hold’em are typically strong. A pot-pot-pot sequence will usually be nutted. Interestingly, overbets are also strong, but typically made with a weaker range than pot-sized bets. Overbet jams are also weaker than overbets that are not all-in.

6. Player profiles. Hand reading is easiest and most powerful when we have specific information on an opponent. Failing that, population trends are extremely useful. Contrary to what some players believe, recreational players bluff more than regs. Thus we bluff-catch more against recs than regs. On the river, recs tend to merge, betting medium-value hands when they should not. When regs bet the river, they are more likely to be polarized. Nits fold less often than recs later in the hand.

7. Board texture. Betting action combined with board texture constrains our opponents’ ranges. Typically the information combines the nature of the flop, and how the run-out impacted that nature, or equivalently how the nuts changed, if at all.

Hand reading is so central to effective poker that the above outline only scratches the surface of the topic. Further resources for studying this topic are given at the end of this article.

Finding Exploits On And Off The Table

The discussion so far illustrates that poker tactics are frequently associated with specific exploits, either against a player pool or a specific opponent. But how does one identify tactical opportunities and arrive at the optimal tactical maneuver? Here is coach w34z3l on the topic.

As the above video explains, identifying exploits can be accomplished via two different strategies. Once again, we see specific tactics growing out of overarching strategic considerations.

Vacuumed EV analysis involves what coach w34z3l refers to as primitive poker calculations. By looking at population pool data, specifically at the frequencies of various poker actions, one can derive tactics that exploit the population as a whole. These include betting lines that exploit spots where players overfold, thereby generating automatic profit. Similarly, we can identify scenarios where bluff-catching wide can be profitable due to overbluffed lines.

A more mainstream approach is one adopted in our “Deviate” course available to PRO subscribers and as a standalone course. This strategy involves comparing population data to a GTO baseline, looking for significant deviations in the play of our opponents, and crafting the exploit. It is particularly easy to find exploitative tactics against players who, in specific situations, overfold. As explained above, this is because folding terminates the game tree, making EV estimates easier to perform.

When such an analysis reveals portions of the game tree where the population is underfolding, our exploitative response is better described as a strategy. This is simply because when our opponent does not fold, we are definitionally in a non-terminating part of the game tree. Thus a strategy is required to handle the remaining action down multiple possible paths, rather than a one-shot tactic we know to be profitable.

In live play, we have much less data to carry out these types of analyses. In fact, the only training material we know of that makes a start at such an analysis (using data from live streamed games) is our PRO course “Live Poker Analysis.” That study provides a starting point for live players to craft data-based strategic and tactical exploits that online players have enjoyed for years.

And while online players enjoy a clear edge in population data analysis, live players have the advantage of being able to see their opponents. The topic of physical tells is beyond the scope of this article, but those of you who play live will be aware that simply gauging the emotional state of an opponent can help you devise exploitative tactics against them. Examples are given in our article on poker intuition and featured in SplitSuit’s Live Cash Game workbook.

Summary

Our overarching poker strategy in any session is simple: to maximize EV in every hand we play. Tactics are commonly the betting lines and actions we employ to achieve that goal.

The strategic elements of no-limit hold’em tend to dominate early in the hand. Preflop ranges, for example, are essentially a mathematically-sound strategy to set up the rest of the hand, much like a sound opening in chess leads to tactical opportunities in the middle game.

Tactics occur later in the hand and tend to become more pronounced when we can identify opponents making exploitable errors. Even when such information is unavailable for specific individuals, population analysis reveals tactical exploits against the pool as a whole.

Finally, opportunistic tactics can arise in specific spots in which our hand-reading skills have limited our opponent’s range. If you don’t have much of a hand yourself, but have concluded that your opponent does not want to play for stacks, it may be an ideal time to test that theory with a big bluff.

Related Links

 

Leave a Comment