Dive deep enough into the world of poker strategy, and you can quickly get lost in the weeds. Between poker solvers, ICM calculators, and hundreds of creators churning out strategy content, it’s easy to take on too much and lose sight of the forest for the trees.
I see it all the time in live games: players arguing about balancing their check-raising ranges while making fundamental logic mistakes. Or discussing the theory of over-betting the flop while playing hands they have no business being in. They, like the rest of us, could use getting back to absolute basics.
Because before we try to embody the spirit of Phil Ivey or Doug Polk, we should start by asking ourselves a simple question that cuts through all the noise:
How strong can my opponent be?
When I first started playing poker tournaments, I understood absolutely nothing. I didn’t know about hand ranges, pot odds, or ICM. And yet I found myself winning in games I had no business being in. Looking back at it now I can see that the only reason for it was because this question was burned deep in my subconscious—how strong can my opponent be?
This question drove all my actions at the poker table during those early days, helping negate the damage done by my many leaks. Today I can explain it in poker terms, that I was finding spots where players were “capped,” where they would rarely play their big hands that way. But all I knew back then is that I could ‘feel’ when my opponents couldn’t have a hand strong enough to put their whole stack at risk. Or, at the very least, had a hand requiring more courage to call than most players have.
Watching new players come into the game all these years later, it’s clear that even in the age of endless information, players would still be better for it if they asked themselves that simple question:
How strong can my opponent be?
Let’s imagine a scenario where your opponent raises preflop then checks back a Q97ss board in position. We can generally assume that most players would bet their overpairs, sets, and two pair combinations on that board. Flush and straight draws are also much more likely to bet than not.
Meaning that, until our opponent shows us evidence that they’re the type of player who deviates from the norm, when they check their option in that spot, we now have a profitable answer to the question of how strong can my opponent be…
Not very.
How we take advantage of this will depend on a number of factors: stack size, the player’s tendencies, whether we’re holding a value hand or a bluff.
We can choose to barrel the turn and river against tight opponents.
We can go for a check-raise with a weak draw if we think they’re the type of player who struggles to check back twice.
We can size down our value bets when trying to get calls from weaker holdings or induce a bluff.
The exact exploit we choose will vary, but the important thing is recognizing how rarely our opponent—almost never unless they’re skilled enough to truly balance their ranges—will be strong enough to withstand the heat in a spot like this.
What makes the question of how strong can my opponent be so powerful is that it works regardless of your technical knowledge. Even beginners can develop winning instincts by making it a default part of their process.
So if you’ve been struggling to turn a profit at the tables, or have noticed yourself trying to do too much, don’t forget to return to basics every now and again and remind yourself that sometimes the most profitable strategy is the simplest one.
