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David Williams takes time off from taking on tournaments in Las Vegas to help WPT Poker readers join him at the final table.
I’ve heard many players complain that they can’t beat bad players. They never know where a bad player is in a hand, and they call too much when they shouldn’t. I’ve even heard friends that are professional players talk about how they prefer to play against good players so there is reason and logic to their plays. If you are a professional poker player, then all of these statements are exactly the opposite of the right line of thinking. In what other business do you ever prefer to go up against stiffer competition? Can you imagine the Colts saying how glad they are to be playing the Patriots instead of the Lions?
Players that make this statement are not recognizing that your average dead money poker player generally fits into one of four categories, all highly exploitable to the experienced professional:
1. Maniacs are the players that seem to think the goal of the tournament is to raise every pot, throw their weight around, and try to accumulate every chip on the table in the first level of play. These players generally fail in one of two ways; they build a large stack early and never change their gears, or they have a steady decline from starting stack until they are pushing every hand with ten big blinds or less.
2. Weak-Weak players like to see flops with all sorts of marginal hands. If they flop any sort of pair or draw they hang on for dear life calling raises and re-raises to see if they can hit their miracles.
3. Weak-Tight players wait for one of the top 10-20 starting hands but then play it passively to the river because they are afraid to bet their own hands.
4. A-B-C players are highly predictable players with no creativity or blind stealing attempts. If an A-B-C player raises, they’ve got a good hand and if they fold, they had a bad one.
With the maniacs, you have to wait for a good hand and try and isolate them so the only place their donations can go are to you. Sometimes the ‘maniac’ style of play frustrates players because they are constantly putting the pressure on you, but it’s a style that also works to your advantage in the long run. If a player can’t slow down, then all you need to do is be patient and let the player bet into a trap when you have the best hand. Often times the little pots you lose here and there to an opponent like this will be more than made up for when you hit your monster and your opponent is running an ill-timed bluff with Ace-high.
Against weak-weak players make sure to control the situation so that it best suits your needs. If you have a draw, you can try and take free cards until you hit, since they are unlikely to bet their own hand, and then make bigger than usual value bets with the expectation of getting called by marginal hands. You do not want to bluff these players because they call way too often to make a bluff profitable.
For weak-tight players, your best bet is to use coordinated board textures like 3 to a straight or flush, as an opportunity to throw out bluff-feeler bets to really force this type of player to make a decision. If they have something, they’ll obviously call and you can safely give up, but most times they buckle to the pressure and give up fighting for the pot because they are afraid you might have them beat. These players are tricky in the fact that they like to limp in with A-K and J-J, so sometimes when they do have a hand, they’ll call you down to the river. When your in a hand situation where you sense some strength, you can safely use pot control to minimize the damage. You aren’t going to make much money off of them, but it’s good to always try and determine where you are in the hand because they could go either way.
A-B-C players are non-issues for the most part, unless you both pick up a hand at the same time. You can narrow their hand range down pretty easily after spending some time at the table with them. You want to be betting into these players every time they check after a pre-flop raise because you can be certain that they are rarely slow playing. You also want to play suited connectors and small pairs a bit more liberally against them because they are the most likely players that go broke with one pair, like kings or aces, on a king or ace high board. Often times a straight draw, flush draw, or two pair on the flop against these types of players are hands with huge implied odds, because this player cannot lay down big pairs.
It may seem like an easier task to beat higher thinking players because they think like you. I tend to believe that in the long run, you are just passing money back and forth against opponents of a similar skill level as myself. However, when you play lower buy-in, higher-entrant tournaments, “donkaments” as they are sometimes called, this is when you are able to strip down the bad players and exploit their weakness, which is why they are referred to as dead money in the first place. |
