Go Looking For The Mistakes

August 01 2008, Carl “The Dean” Sampson

In fact this is not strictly accurate because if you make even more mistakes than your opponents then you are still not going to win. But sometimes it can be to your advantage to create deliberate mistakes in your own game in order to create even bigger mistakes from your opponents.

Before you think that I have taken leave of my senses then think about this for a minute. It is considered bad practice to call raises in NLHE games and to do so would be making a mistake. But what if your opponent was so predictable that every time they raised you knew that they had a strong hand. Also what if they were the weak/passive type who could be also easily pushed off the hand whenever they miss the flop?

Now consider the following example, a predictable player in the UTG+1 seat open raises to $3.50 in a $0.50-$1.00 six handed NLHE cash game. You have the 10s-9s on the button and call. You both have $100 stacks at the start of the hand. Now this play is a mistake but it isn't a big mistake just a small one.

But you have observed your tight and predictable opponent make some huge errors in the past so how can you best exploit this weakness? Simple, by taking as many chances as possible to get involved in a pot with them. Mistakes come in many forms but the two that you are looking for are to stack your opponent when you flop a big hand and to also take the pot away from them when they miss.

When your opponent folds the best hand then they have made a far bigger mistake than if they had folded pre-flop for the simple reason that the pot is usually bigger on the flop and they have usually contributed more money to it. In this instance you have seen your opponent not only play tight predictable poker but also get stacked several times with hands like AK on a A-7-2 flop and AA on a K-J-7 board.

So you deduce that your opponent has great difficulty getting away from hands. But you have also observed your opponent raising pre-flop and then leading out and then folding to a raise on a 7-4-2 flop indicating that they made a continuation bet with overcards and then folded to the raise. So in the example given you made a questionable play by calling with the suited connector in order to try and create a much bigger mistake from your opponent.

Whenever I sit and watch low stakes players then they seem to have much the same tendency in that they seem to sit back too much and wait for mistakes to come to them. This used to be a far more viable strategy years ago when the players were looser and made far more mistakes than what they do now. But it is a far stronger strategy to actively go out and seek those mistakes and look to create them.

The Dean is sponsored by Pokerheaven.com

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