Exploitative Strategy

Exploitative poker strategy is a type of poker strategy that relies on finding weaknesses and mistakes in your opponents’ play. It is the opposite of the GTO strategy, which adheres to game theory optimal solutions and largely disregards other players’ actions.

Adhering to an exploitative strategy means deviating from what would be considered the theoretical best approach and targeting a particular weakness or flaw that you were able to recognize.

Exploitative play can be used both preflop and postflop. If you notice someone not defending the blinds enough, you raise more often to take advantage of that. If a particular player overfolds to 3-bets, you include more bluff in your 3-betting ranges and do not try to balance it out with value hands.

The same goes postflop. If you know that someone is only c-betting when they hit the flop, you can be massively overfolding against that play and print money. There are many examples where you can use exploitative strategies and have better results than sticking to GTO play.

Here’s an overly simplified example of this. You arrive at the river with the nuts on a four-flush board. A theoretically sound approach would be to bet fairly small, allowing your opponent to call you with a weaker hand. However, you know your opponent and that he loves bluff catching and is likely to be calling way too much int this situation. So, you move all in for 3x the pot, and they do end up calling with two pairs, just as you predicted.

This is an extreme situation, of course, but it serves to describe what exploitative strategy is all about. It relies on playing the player as much as it does on math and numbers. This approach is especially effective in lower-stakes games, where players tend to make significant theoretical mistakes, opening doors for many exploitative plays.

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