Adjust in Time

If you play anywhere between $ 1/$ 2 and $ 5/$ 10 you should be thinking about long-term adjustment, especially if you play professionally or semi-pro. If you are serious about long-term profit you should be looking to develop the skills to enable you to see a better yield, in addition to making the right decision in a specific hand. Your greatest concern is the overall picture.

Ideally, we want to try and make ourselves very tough to play against, staying one step ahead of our opponent’s adjustments, keeping them guessing, while maintaining the choice of being able to play in whatever style we feel is most profitable in any given situation. In this article, we will be incorporating some metagame theory, some balancing ideas and attempting to keep our tendencies as difficult to exploit as possible.

Working Nine to Five

To the part-time player, who plays less than 5,000 hands a month on a major site, long-term adjustments are never going to be that worthwhile. Making a -EV play, logging a donkey session or balancing a certain range will not result in greater end of year profit, simply because you are not playing enough to witness the fruits of your labour. Long-term adjustments are about exploiting extensive history and image, which requires a lot of time spent with specific opponents forming a table relationship.

Obviously, the smaller your chosen network, the less hands it will take to reach a point where your image is well defined. If you have played a lot of hands at a certain limit without adjusting, you should look into it now. If you are just moving up levels and are considering staying there for a reasonable amount of time, you should try and have a long-term structure of adaptation. And to do this you need to be aware of the key indicators of image.

Let’s imagine that our hero plays a loose-aggressive game and gets a triple-barrel bluff called down by 10c-10d on an Ad-3s-4c-9c-7d board by a good regular. At this point, it should be obvious that the hero’s cat is out the bag. His image is tarnished and a change of style is needed. This could have been avoided by pre-empting his opponent’s adjustment and tightening up his bluffing ranges. You should only be operating at the top of your value-betting range when you can feel opponents are viewing your activities as out of line.

If you play a tight-aggressive game and are being habitually floated on connecting boards, despite having noted the hands a decent regular is showing down, then you are being exploited. Your ranges have become too narrow versus thinking opponents, and you should be more proactive in adjustments. It is much more profitable if you anticipate and adjust faster.

Why adjust?

The most important reason to adjust is because good opponents will adjust to you. If you are habitually squeezing, people will four-bet, both as a bluff and for thin value. The same goes for most pre-flop tendencies. A standard example would be a very tight player that only three-bets 4% of hands, which as a pre-flop range looks like A-K+/J-J+. With this narrow range you will quickly become very exploitable.
Firstly, good opponents will only four-bet you pre-flop with A-A and K-K, folding other dominated holdings and therefore losing you value.

They will also adjust if you are deep, knowing you have a very tight range and knowing they can call with hands such as suited connectors and small pocket pairs. The deep implied odds of their hand plus the opportunity to put your one pair hands in difficult spots post-flop means they can make the situation profitable.

If you are a more open player they might be more wary about calling your three-bets as they are unsure if they can play these hands profitably post-flop. A player that adjusts can be a nightmare to play against, as you can make fundamental mistakes against them post-flop when you are assuming their range is polarised.

Let’s imagine that you are playing a very loose-aggressive player, who three-bets 9% of hands including all big pocket pairs, all big Broadway cards, some medium pocket pairs and some suited connectors. Playing against someone with a tendency to three-bet a large percentage of hands pre-flop and with a very aggressive post-flop style you can get into difficult situations if they suddenly adjust.
Say you have a $ 400 stack in a $ 2/$ 4 game and raise to $ 14 with Kd-Qd. Your opponent flat-calls in the blinds. The flop brings a pretty handsome 2c-2s-Qh. You continuation-bet and are flat called. The turn brings an 8s putting a flush draw out and your opponent checks again. You value-bet hoping to extract value from medium pocket pairs and worse Queens, but your opponent puts you to the test by raising. This is a very interesting spot.

It is a very reasonable assumption that the villain virtually never has a 2 here apart from 2-2 and would have three-bet all better Queens and overpairs pre-flop. This is a reasonable assumption if you have extensive notes on him to back it up. When you add all these factors together you end up with a range that, combined with his post-flop aggression, looks heavily weighted towards air or a turned flush draw.
On this turn you should happily shove it in or call the check-raise, planning to call any river. Because he has established an image, you have adjusted but he has anticipated and snap calls your shove with A-A/K-K/A-Q. As I have stated before, be wary about forming solid reads until you have a lot of hands and extensive history. Outthinking yourself is not big and not clever.

How to adjust

I like to think of long-term adjustments as similar to gear-changing in a tournament. The only difference is you are moving through the gears over the course of a year as opposed to a few hours. The key point, however, is in both cases you are anticipating how your opponents will adjust and adjusting your style to suit. You want to be able to play whatever style you feel is most profitable in certain situations, but good opponents will not allow you to do this if they know your game inside out.

For example, if you are consistently isolating fish with a wide range, your opponents will realise this and start getting aggressive pre-flop against you. If they are unsure how you are playing they will often just let you get on with it, happy to stay out of your way for the most part.
One of the easiest adjustments you can make is tightening and loosening your range. One incredibly useful feature of the software program Hold’em Manager is you can click a button in the top left to enable you to see the stats on your opponents for just that session. Don’t go overboard on this, however, as if an established tight regular three-bets you twice on the trot, chances are he is just on a card rush and there is no need to go partying with pocket nines.

Other ways to adapt are more fun, and you can set-up big winning sessions by doing dumb things sometimes. Say you decide to spew off chips one day, by getting it in ridiculously light and bluffing like mad. You are setting up an image that you can later abuse. But you don’t want to be doing this against some random fish who has just bought in for 70 big blinds and you likely won’t face again. You want to do this against regulars that you will play with a lot.

A good example of how one -EV play can make you lots of money is to effectively polarise your river overbets. This works fantastically well against loose-aggressive thinking opponents, but less so against tight-aggressive players who don’t tend to make hero calls for stacks with second pair. One of the best ways of doing this is showing down a three-barrel bluff with complete air.
You are trying to cultivate a LAG image before reaping the benefits of playing tight. Try to take the maximum amount of time, allowing you to set up a future reverse timing tell. If you decide to end your session, stay seated for a while to enable people to make wrong notes on you like ‘idiot donkey, time-down overbet shoves air on river’.

This image then allows you to set-up future pot-sized bets (or big overbets) on the river where you are good enough to read the villain’s range as some type of marginal hand that he wants to get to showdown. It should see you putting them right a few times before switching again. Don’t allow them to catch up and start folding too much again. The key to winning is to keep adjusting.