Recognising player types

In this lesson

• Place a player by two questions: how many hands, and how aggressively.
• Read a type from the opponents panel, with the sample behind it.
• Name the main adjustment against folders, callers, passive players and bluffers.
• Treat a type as a read that can be wrong, and fall back to the baseline.

Read first: Calling down with a bluff-catcher, Thin value · Advice, not a lock: every lesson opens.

Concepts used: GTO and exploitative play

Two questions about a player

Every label players use for each other answers two questions. How many hands does this player play? And when he plays one, does he bet and raise, or check and call? Tight or loose is the first answer, passive or aggressive the second, and the four corners are the familiar types: tight and passive, loose and passive (the calling station), tight and aggressive, loose and aggressive (the maniac, at the far end).

Rail's opponents panel answers both from your own hands: how often a player puts money in and raises before the flop for the first question, and how often he bets or raises after the flop for the second. A number is only as good as the chances behind it. A player who played 40% of 100 hands could just as well be a 30% or a 50% player: the 95% interval reaches about 9.6 points either way. The next lesson does that arithmetic properly.

Each type has one main adjustment

A type is useful only if it changes what you do. Rail's exploit lab locks one tendency of the opponent on a river it solves and computes the best response; over many rivers the adjustments it finds are these:

• A player who folds too much to bets: bluff with far more of the hands that cannot win at showdown, turn weak pairs and ace-high into bluffs, and bet your strongest hands smaller.
• A player who calls too much: stop bluffing, bet your strong hands bigger, and bet some middle pairs you would check against the solve.
• A player who never raises: bet thinner, since nothing punishes a thin bet.
• A player who bluffs too little: fold more of your bluff-catchers.
• A player who bluffs too much: call down wider with your pairs and ace-high.

A type is a read, not a fact

Putting a player in a corner is a guess about how he plays the spots you have not seen yet. Each adjustment above gives something back if the guess is wrong, and the lab measures how much (lesson X3-L1). A label made on a thin sample, or one a player has outgrown, is worse than none: the baseline is what you play while the read is unclear.

The adjustments come from Rail's exploit lab: one tendency locked on a river solved on demand, the rest of the opponent's strategy kept at the solve, and the best response against it. The ranges rest on Rail's narrowing model, and a lock is a model of a player, not the player.

Rules of thumb

• Ask two questions: how many hands, and how aggressively.
• Turn a type into one adjustment, or it is only a label.
• Against folders, bluff more; against callers, value bet more and bluff less.
• Read the sample before the number.

When they break

• A player can be loose before the flop and tight after it: type him by the spot you are in.
• Players change during a session; a label from last month may be wrong tonight.

Example hands

Your own pool

Practice

The lesson is mastered when every exercise below that Rail can grade is passed. Missed items come back later as review cards.