Quote Originally Posted by ImSavy View Post
I think my least favourite part about OP is that it kind of implies that you should go about learning poker in a way that just tries to exploit population reads when in reality this just leaves you not really knowing what you're doing and your only real way of gauging the situation is through experience.
Is it better to base our default strategy (meaning our strategy before implementing any reads of villain) on the expected tendencies of villains as they are in the actual games they're playing or on a model of how they should be playing if they're playing perfect theoretical poker in every spot.

Eg. If we open the BU really wide then our unknown villains in the blinds should be 3 betting some really high amount therefore we should be 4-bet bluffing some pretty high amount. Only this is horrible because it's 5NL and they're just not 3-betting some high amount for the most part. I'm not by any means saying we should try to guess at exactly what a villains range is and how to exploit him based on population reads, but ignoring them when it comes to our default strategy in the games we play leads us to do the nonsensical stupid stuff I'm referring to that's so out of touch with reality.

If you guys actually just learned how to hand read, put your opponent on a range and then play well vs that range and what you expect him to do then you'd get through the microstakes a hell of a lot faster.

Quick example, when I was playing 25NL a few years ago I'd basically be folding a huge amount of my range by the river vs aggression so much that if someone was playing optimally he'd have exploited the hell out of me and my play would have been horrible. As it was in the games at the time, hardly anyone was tripling as a bluff or 4 betting light so for me to start with the assumption they were playing optimally would have been a disaster. I'd have been calling the GTO advised amount and getting raped by a betting range that was grossly less bluff heavy than a range of someone playing "as he should" How did I know folding loads to aggression was just a solid base strategy? Population reads.

If you want to ignore the fact that probably 90% of your opponents don't have a call flop - min raise turn line in their arsenal as a bluff then go ahead and play sound mathematical poker by calling down X% vs optimal play - you'll just be at 5NL a lot longer.