Exploitability

[stevepa]

I meant to post something about this in aejones' thread, but I kind of forgot about it and the subject probably deserves it's own thread, so...

First of all, I think a lot of people simply don't understand what the term means (if you do, skip this paragraph). If a play is exploitable, it essentially means that someone could play a way (i.e. have a calling/raising/folding range) such that your play (i.e. your betting/calling/checking/etc. range) is unprofitable. So an unexploitable play is one for which whatever strategy your opponent uses, you are guaranteed to make a profit. The easiest examples of these are always from hu play, so for example: pushing 10 big blinds with any two cards heads up is obviously exploitable and any decent player would quickly realize how to make your shoves -EV. You can use sngpt to figure out exactly what the unexploitable pushing range is (it's pretty damn wide but not any two). Now that certainly doesn't mean that's what your pushing range should be. In fact, unless you're heads up with another person who's pushing/calling unexploitably, you most certainly should not use the unexploitable range. Doing so costs you substantial money. Your average small-mid stakes (probably high stakes too but I don't know) pushes way too few hands and calls way too few hands. So to adjust to that, you should be pushing more than the unexploitable range and calling less. The unexploitable range guarantees you a profit, but by adjusting your ranges to your opponents you can increase your profit.

So obviously, the goal when playing poker is not to play unexploitably but to play the most profitably. In some cases they're the same (when you're playing opponents who adjust as well or better than you). In most cases they most certainly aren't. In fact, watch timex or ansky or someone like that play a tournament and you'll see a lot of exploitable play, particularly in restealing. That's because people are horrible at adjusting to it. Playing with an unexploitable restealing strategy is basically burning money because you pass on so many spots where you could have profitably restolen. They make money by exploiting others' mistakes, but in doing so play in an exploitable manner.

But it's also not just tournament players who play exploitably, watch some high stakes cash games. The best players are opening and 3 betting super wide because other people just don't adjust well to it (they don't 4bet nearly enough and don't play well in reraised pots). I know I'm repeating myself a lot but the key is that UNEXPLOITABLE DOES NOT EQUAL GOOD.

Anyways, basically all I'm trying to say is that this idea of unexploitable play is largely useless when you're better than most people in the game. You're much better off adjusting to changing game conditions and opponents play because THAT'S WHAT MAKES YOU BETTER THAN THEM.

And to kind of directly reply to one thing aejones said in his thread:

[ QUOTE ]
It seems to me like all tournament players know that other tournament players are doing exploitable things, and they exploit them but that continue to to exploitable things themselves, wtf???

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Playing exploitably is how you make the most money against opponents who are worse than you. You adjust better than them and make better decisions than them. Many of your decisions are super exploitable but it doesn't matter if your opponents aren't good enough to exploit them. Think about this: You sit in a 2/4NL game and the two players on your left are pretty big nits. What is your opening range on the button? If they 3-bet, what range do you call? What range do you 4-bet? If your play in that spot isn't ridiculously exploitable, then you're playing really badly.

I have more to say about this, but can't really put it into words at the moment, so I'll stop here for now.

Steve