7 Easy Steps to No-Limit Hold’em Success — Step 6: Adjust To Your Opponents

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The Mission: Get you winning in your local $1-$2 no-limit game with 7 easy steps.

Welcome to Step 6: Adjust To Your Opponents. If you haven’t done so already, make sure to check out the previous articles in the series:

• Step 1: Play Tight
• Step 2: Don’t Play Out of Position
• Step 3: Don’t Overcommit in Small Pots
• Step 4: Big Pots for Big Hands
• Step 5: Pull the Trigger

Adjust To Your Opponents

Steps 1 through 5 have given you some easy-to-apply, basic rules of thumb for good no-limit play. Steps 6 and 7 are a little different. They require a little more interpretation from you, the reader, but if you master them, you’ll use them for the rest of your no-limit career.

This article is about adjusting to your opponents. All players have weaknesses. In your local $1-$2 game, you’ll find most of your opponents have huge, glaring weaknesses. Winning poker is about playing tight and staying in position and pulling the trigger, but more fundamentally it’s about attacking your opponent’s weaknesses. Every dollar you win comes from an opponent. Every opponent plays well in some situations and poorly in others. If you want to win the most money, you need to find the situations where your opponents give their money away and create them again and again. That’s what adjusting is all about.

Player Classification

You are probably familiar with the “standard” player classes: loose-aggressive, weak-tight, loose-passive/calling station, tight-aggressive, etc. I dislike those classes because they are way too general. Three players might all play a lot of hands and raise a lot, thus falling under the “loose-aggressive” umbrella, yet play very differently and have very different weaknesses. Players aren’t defined just by how many hands they play and how often they raise. You also should look for what kinds of hands they play, how often they slowplay or checkraise, how often they like to bluff and in what situations, which hands they take to showdown, how deeply do they think when reading hands, and much more.

Nevertheless, I will use the “umbrellas” listed above for this article. Don’t take them too literally; weaknesses can show up large and small, and you want to exploit them all. But since you’re probably most familiar with the umbrellas, we’ll talk about how to adjust to exploit them.

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