The first poker lesson that most people learn, perhaps incorrect, is that they should bet when they’re in position and check when they’re out of position. It’s a natural tendency, and it’s the basis of most lines that we take. As skilled poker players, though, we ought to take a step back from this obsessive concern with position and examine our thinking a little bit more, in particular, whether our tendency toward such passivity out of position is warranted and optimal. Now I’m not advocating that we return to the lack of proper positional awareness we all had when we started playing. The advantage of position is certainly something we want to account for properly, but when we do decide to play a hand out of position, can we find a better post-flop line than checking by default?
The first thing to consider is whether or not our adjustments to the playing styles of our opponents are timely enough. While it is necessary to have a default strategy playing against someone who we have little or no information on, we want to ensure that we’re not persisting with this initial strategy past the scope of its usefulness. The whole point of having a default strategy is to have something to fall back on when we do not have any or enough reads on a player. As we gain more information, we must then direct our focus toward our reads and start individualizing on what techniques would be best for each player.
For example if we discover that a player tends to fold to our leads too often, we’re going to be much more disposed to take advantage of this by leading out more often than usual. If he is prone to betting a lot but will fold more often if led into, we’ll be looking to let him build the pots for us when we have value and at the same time took to take advantage of our fold equity to get him out of pots when we do not have much. If he is loose and we do not have a lot of fold equity, we’ll only be bluffing to the extent that we set ourselves up to get net maximum value from our good hands. There are numerous situations that are potentially exploitable, and our mission is to determine what would work best specifically in a given situation based upon the valid information about our opponents that we have at our disposal.
