Maximally and Minimally Exploitative Play

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These days it’s hard to get involved in any high-level poker strategy discussion without someone needing to frame the discussion in terms of whether we’re talking about Game-Theoretically Optimal or ‘GTO’ play, or its alternate, commonly referred to as exploitative play.

You would be forgiven for perhaps doing what many people do, and assuming that these terms are used in a more abstract sense to refer to general concepts that are otherwise hard to pin down – in fact, the opposite is true. I want to outline in this article not just how exploitative play differs from GTO play, but more specifically how we can use different types of exploitative play to help us expand our understanding of poker theory.

What is Exploitative Play?

I hate to start by defining a negative, but in simple terms, exploitative play is the opposite of GTO play. While GTO play seeks to leave no weaknesses for an opponent to exploit, making itself the best possible strategy on a unilateral basis against any possible opponent, exploitative play is what most people are much more familiar with – it’s a strategy that endeavours to make the best possible play right here, right now, against this opponent, based on an understanding of how this opponent plays.

Sounds a lot like regular poker, right? Well, the truth is that before people became aware of GTO play, all the poker analysis that was ever done was purely exploitative. People had to simply make an estimate of their opponent’s range based on a limited understanding of that player’s strategy, and make the best decision for their own range according to that. Of course, they are frequently wrong about their opponent’s strategy, which is what leads to those classic spots where the guy calls down with bottom pair and runs into the nuts, but we’ll get to that later.

Usually we don’t have time in the moment of playing a specific hand to work out our opponent’s exact strategy – only very high-level players can sit there and calculate the exact number of hand combos in their opponent’s range, figure out how many are bluffs, and calculate their opponent’s bluffing frequency as it relates to the pot odds being offered. But what we frequently do is make approximations – “I don’t think this guy is bluffing much here”, etc – and adapt based on those. This is, very simply, exploitative play. You do it all the time. However, it may not be maximally exploitative play, which is what brings us to the next point.

Maximally Exploitative Play

Maximally exploitative play is, at least to some extent, exactly what it sounds like – it takes exploitative play to the extreme, to work out the absolute best possible strategy with all hands in your range versus the strategy you expect your opponent to employ. The problem is though, that while we might be striving to play this way every time we play, there are certain practical considerations that will prevent us from ever getting there.

Firstly, we never truly know our opponent’s strategy. We can make some very accurate estimates from time to time, but unless they actually tell us beforehand, we really don’t know for sure. Even if they do tell us, they might be bluffing! This means that in real-game situations, any exploitative adjustment to our play that we make is likely to be at least slightly incorrect. The trick is to make sure that we ground our adjustments in enough information that we’re right more often than we’re wrong.

Secondly, we run into the problem that a maximally exploitative playing strategy (as outlined by a GTO calculator such as Simple Postflop) involves a tremendous amount of regulation of our own frequencies, to the point where that strategy may tell us to 3-bet a certain hand 71% of the time or flat-call 23% of the time. How could we possibly execute such a precise strategy? We can’t, and we never will be able to. It’s too complex, so we need to simplify it.

Minimally Exploitative Play

When running calculations that allow us to study in-game scenarios to provide a baseline for our exploitative adaptations, there’s another form of analysis that can help us, called minimally exploitative play. What this means is that we’re still exploiting our opponent, but we’re changing as little as possible from the GTO version of the strategy for that spot – we’re taking one specific strategic change that we believe our opponent will make, and measuring the effects of that alone.

This particular analytical approach helps us to figure out a couple of things – firstly, it tells us exactly how costly our opponent’s specific leak is, given that we can isolate it and identify how much they lose by playing that way, even if they play perfectly everywhere else. This can help us to mirror these conclusions and ensure we don’t replicate our opponents’ mistakes.

Beyond that, it can also help us to identify exploitative adjustments to our game that don’t require adapting our entire strategy to the point where it will cost us a huge amount of EV if we happen to be slightly wrong about our opponent’s strategy – we cover ourselves in the event that we do make a mistake. It’s the equivalent of deciding “I’m going to c-bet a little bit more frequently to expose this leak, but otherwise keep things the same”, rather than saying, “I’m going to c-bet 100% because I’m convinced this guy is folding too often”. The latter might be more profitable if you’re correct, but if you’re even slightly wrong, it could be disastrous.

Applications of these ideas

Of course, both strategies are difficult to implement in-game, and are more theoretical considerations for use during off-the-table analysis than anything else. But these theoretical considerations underpin the thought processes that teach us how to make decisions during play, so it’s important that we study these things, even if we find them hard to implement at first.

The most practical way to implement these concepts into your game is to help yourself shift towards thinking of everything in terms of strategies. Poker is a game, and thus everyone has a strategy, even your weaker opponents who aren’t thinking clearly about what their strategy actually is. Finding the most effective way to beat your opponents isn’t just about playing the two cards in your hand as best you can, it’s about developing ways to beat your opponents’ strategies before they even get the chance to implement them. Studying these ideas away from the table is the best way to get that extra step ahead.