Exploiting Poker Opponents Preflop Using Stats - Part 1

Reading your opponents at the poker table is a more and more important skill nowadays. Being put in the situation where your ABC game isn’t working anymore, and recreational players go all in more and more with stronger holdings, tabling the likes of sets, flushes and hands that you never thought they could have, an age where regs are getting better and better at reading you and playing perfect game against you, your edges are diminishing by the second and you’re forced to find new ones.

To be successful at poker you have to work ,not necessarily harder than your opponents, but smarter. 

The best edge that you can have at the poker table, both online and in live, is of course to have great reads on adversaries so you can play perfectly against them, and bluff them in the right spots, make great folds postflop and take them to Value Town when the time is right.

In this article I’m going to tell you how to read stats more efficiently, which stats you can exploit right out of the box, and how not go into any of the pitfalls that non-experienced or sometimes even experienced players fall into when considering the validity of opponent’s stats.

The How

First of all you’re going to want to add some stats to your HUD" title="Click to learn more about "HUD"">HUD, but there are NO (Strict) rules when it comes to this; you can add as many and be as descriptive as you want, but watch out! The more detailed/deep a stat gets, the more hands you need on your opponent for the stat to be as accurate as you want it to be.

For example, if you consider the VPIP stat, let’s say the real VPIP of a poker player is 20, and he’s played only 20 hands, so ideally he’s supposed to play only 4 hands, but he’s gotten pretty good cards, and he’s played 7 of them, meaning that the VPIP your HUD shows is 35.

Even if we don’t have that many intel on the player, we know that he’s not a maniac, or a nit, because a maniac would have played at least 10 hands out of 20 no matter what cards he had received, and the nit would have played at most 5 because it’s actually hard to get 5 really good hands out of 20. 

What’s over that is phenomenally improbable. So with 35 VPIP in 20 hands, you can either say that he’s a reg that caught cards or a loose passive that’s playing at his normal limit, You can make this differentiation using another stat, namely PFR: if it’s close to the VPIP then he probably is a reg, otherwise he’s a passive player that usually plays the strength of his hand and wants to see the flop as cheap as possible, because he needs at least a pair or a strong draw to continue.

When you know this about a player, you can proceed to play perfect against him. Bluff-Raise the nit, balance with the reg and value-bet the loose guys. The more in-depth you get into stat-reading, the more you can tell about their game and make better decisions.

The problem here is, where do you draw the line on a stat? When do you have enough hands to make it accurate enough?

I’m going to give you a bunch of stats and tell you how many hands you need on each one of them so you’re absolutely sure it’s legit.

Preflop

PFR/VPIP – 100 hands at least. Of course, the more you have, the better it will be, but after 100 it will not differ that much. If you’re looking for bad players, look for the ones that have a big difference between these two stats and always have them on your right. This means that they will limp a lot and you can isolation raise them and value, value, value until either they give up or give over all their money.

Total Fold to Steal – If you’re wondering what range to open from the button, and what is a good percentage, look no more because you’re usually supposed to place down either 3 blinds or 2.5 or 2, depending on your usual button open sizing (don’t vary it against regs), to win another 1.5 blinds.

What does this mean? This is the mathematical answer:

• 2 blinds to win total 3.5 - > 2/3.5 = 57% breakeven frequency. You need the SB TOT Fold to Steal multiplied by the BB TOT Fold to Steal to be at minimum 57% to open profitably 100% range, so any two cards.
• 2.5 blinds to win total 4 -> 2.5/4 = 62% BE frequency.
• 3 blinds to win total 4.5 -> 3/4.5 = 66% BE frequency.

The correct way to find out BB and SB TOT Fold to Steal if by multiplying, but the general rule is that you can add them up, and if they add up to at least 140, or for more brave and aggressive challengers 130, you can open any two cards from the button and you’ll be profitable if you only play good hands postflop.

Limp/fold – this stat is very important and if you don’t have it in your HUD I suggest adding it immediately, because it’s very efficient against loose-passive players. It tells you if they only get to the flop with their stronger holdings, or fold a lot of junk preflop when they get raised. 

The way to exploit them here is, if they limp/fold over 50% then you can raise hands in position like Q4s and K8s because they’re going to fold a lot and you’re going to rake in all that dead money. If they don’t fold that often, you have to raise a more value-oriented range like AT+ KJ+ 22+ QJs JTs etc., because they’re going to call with a lot of smaller aces and kings and you want to be dominating those hands, so a polarized range just won’t do.

In the next part we’ll talk about  3-bet, 4-bet, fold to 3b/4b, very specific stats like 3b vs Sb open, and how you can use these to your advantage, and get on with the post-flop stats, and how to play against really aggressive opponents.

I’ll leave you with a great quote from the master Sun Tzu that should make you think about how important studying away from the tables actually is:

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. Sun Tzu

Thank you for reading and expect the next article to have some great knowledge-bombs that will improve your game a lot!