Poker Strategy: Four Mistakes Poker Players Make, And How To Counter Them

The Upswing Poker Lab is a poker training course taught by Doug Polk, Ryan Fee, and other top poker pros. The Lab is updated regularly with in-depth learning modules, theory videos, and a wealth of information to make you a better poker player.

by Dan B.

Identifying and exploiting holes in your opponents’ games is how you really take your win-rate to the next level. I’m going to walk you through four mistakes commonly made by poker players, and give you the counter-strategy you can use to beat them down.

Let’s dive in.

1. Limping with a lot of hands preflop

Open-limping is the most common leak that you will encounter when playing live or at the smallest stakes online.

How to exploit limpers

You can take advantage of these players by raising over their limp with a pretty wide range. The goal is to isolate yourself with them so you play post-flop in a heads-up pot, which is why this play is known as iso-raising.

With regards to sizing, you should generally raise to four big blinds (bb) (plus an additional 1bb for each extra limper) when you have position over them and five bb (plus an additional 1bb for each extra limper) when you are out of position against them.

2. Raising with too many hands preflop

This second mistake loses even more money than the first one.

Raising with too many hands preflop is a sure-fire way to lose at a high rate, regardless of how skillful you are post-flop. It’s worse than limping because the leak-ridden player is building exponentially bigger pots (compared to just limping) with far too weak of a range.

How to exploit raise-happy players

The main way you exploit this mistake is by widening your three-betting range. You can expand your cold-calling range too, but since three-betting is the most effective way to beat these guys, let’s focus on that.

The way you should approach three-betting versus these players depends on how often your opponent folds to three-bets. If he seems to fold often (more than half the time), you can exploit him with a polarized three-betting strategy. This entails three-betting with strong hands and hands that are barely not strong enough to call with, but still have good playability with flush and straight potential. Such hands are small suited connectors (like 7-6 suited, 6-5 suited, 5-4 suited, 4-3 suited), small suited one-gappers (like 8-6 suited, 7-5 suited, 6-4 suited) and suited A-x and K-x hands (A-2 suited through A-6 suited and K-2 suited through K-9 suited).

If he’s the type of player that will call a lot of three-bets, you can exploit him with a merged three-betting strategy. Simply widen your value range to include more marginally-strong hands like A-J, A-10 suited, A-9 suited, K-Q, K-J suited. You can actually three-bet with even weaker kickers depending on the severity of his leak. For example, if you’ve seen him call a three-bet with K-8 offsuit, then you can widen your value range to include K-J offsuit and K-10 suited.

3. Three-betting too few hands preflop

This mistake is extremely common among live players (at most levels) and micro-stakes players online. These guys tend to have a value-only range made of J-J+, A-Q+ when they re-raise preflop. This approach is sub optimal due to the fact that it is easy to spot and very exploitable.

How to exploit tight three-bettors

There are two main ways to exploit this type of opponent.

• Tighten your three-bet calling range to include only medium pocket pairs up to Q-Q and A-Q suited+.

All of the other Broadway hands (K-Q, K-J, etc.) are too weak to call when your opponent’s three-betting range is so tight. Against such a strong range, premium hands like Q-Q and A-K drop in equity and are no longer value four-bets.

• Tighten your preflop four-betting range to include only K-K and A-A.

You should typically include some bluffs in your four-betting range, but you should stick to just K-K+ when your opponent’s range is so strong that he won’t fold many (or any) hands.

4. Continuation-betting out of position on the flop too often

When the preflop raiser gets cold-called by a player who is in position, he should check on the flop with most of his range. This is the best strategy because the preflop caller usually has a stronger range.

This might seem counter-intuitive at first since the preflop raiser will have many strong hands that the caller can’t have (A-A, A-K, etc.). But the raiser will usually also have a lot of Broadways and suited A-x hands that will miss on most flops, and the caller won’t have such hands as frequently.

Many players don’t know this, so they tend to continuation-bet (c-bet) at a high frequency on the flop out of position as the preflop raiser.

How to exploit players who c-bet out of position too often

There are a couple of ways to extract chips from these guys.

• Raise versus the c-bet at a much higher frequency than normal.

This is the best way to counter an overly-aggressive c-bet strategy (that is also not going to three-bet with a balanced range). We will raise with almost all of the hands that we want to continue in the hand with. This way we will make him fold his air hands that still had a bunch of equity, force him to put more money in the pot with the draws, put a lot of pressure on most of his value range as he won’t be really happy to see a raise when he holds anything other than a set and get to realize all of our hand’s equity by being able to see the river for free.

• When they check, bet with most of your range.

Since these players tend to bet with almost all their value range, you will have both a nut advantage and a range advantage versus their checking range. You can take advantage of this leak by using a high frequency, large bet size strategy, which puts their stupidly weak range in a very tough spot.

Final Thoughts

I would advise you to read each subsection again and really try to understand the reasoning behind each exploit. Understanding them fully will help you identify spots to adjust against the specific opponents in your games.

If you really want to take your poker skills to the next level, I highly recommend joining the Upswing Lab training course. You get 245 hours of coaching videos, 259 preflop charts, and you get to join the members-only community so you can share what’s working and get help with what isn’t.

The Lab is how I got my start in poker. When I joined three years ago, I still played micro-stakes mainly for fun. Now, I’m a successful part-time pro whose strategy articles are published in Card Player magazine.

Sign up for the Upswing Poker Lab today for step-by-step instructions and examples to master both the fundamental theories and situational exploits to greatly increase your skill and earnings.

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