Poker Strategy vs. Tactics: What’s the Real Difference?

10 Mar 2025

Beginner

This material is for beginner players

In today's topic, we're going to be delving into the finer aspects of poker strategy. We’ll discuss how to generate exploitative strategies, what to do in various nodes of a hand, and the key differences between strategy and tactics in poker.

Now, we'd like to start with one higher level concept that's going to give you a broad overview of how we think about hands in general, and it falls under the title strategy versus tactics. Let's start with a description of the difference between strategy and tactics. 

So to use the analogy of warfare, poker strategy is something that applies to the overall war or the overall campaign, whereas tactics applies to the specific battles. And in some cases, it could be okay to lose battles, provided the overall campaign or the overall war is progressing in a way that is favorable. 

The term strategy and tactics are used in games outside of poker. For example, a very common application is in the game of chess. Now, just to give you some examples from chess, hopefully many of you are familiar with the basics of the game. 

Chess players talk a lot about strategy versus tactics. Strategy in chess: these are decisions that tie in with fundamental solid positional principles. We usually see this in the earlier stages of a game of chess. Perhaps players are following a set opening. 

We just know that both players are proceeding in a way that ties in with the overall positional objectives. A tactic in chess is not something that applies to the whole game. It usually just applies to one move or a short sequence of moves. A tactic in chess is a specific fork, pin, skewer, discovery, or combination that results in a quantifiable material or positional advantage. 

After the use of a tactic, it's often quite clear to see that this particular player has an advantage because he's clearly up in material, or this player has clearly generated a positional advantage with that most recent tactic. So really we see that strategy applies to the bigger picture, whereas tactics are significantly smaller components that altogether help to comprise that bigger picture. 

Let's now think about a potential application of strategy and tactics to the domain of poker. This is not something that you will really see discussed elsewhere. It's not typically applied to the game of poker, but perhaps it should be. And if you understand how it applies to the game of poker, it's going to give you a stronger understanding of what our objectives are at any given moment in a hand of poker. 

Strategy, earlier street decisions where explicit EV is not calculable. And tactics, later street decisions where the profitability / EV is demonstrable. Let's take those one at a time. So strategy: earlier street decisions where explicit EV is not calculable. It's very common in poker that advanced players will sometimes give the impression, they might imply or directly tell you that they know what their expected value is at any point in a given hand of poker. And the truth is that they don't. Poker is too complex to know that. 

However, just because we don't know the EV, doesn't mean that we can't act in a way that is logical and ties in with our overall strategy. If you think about openings in chess, it's not always clear who has the advantage in the earlier stages, but both players are making logical positional decisions. 

Same with poker. Simple example: imagine that we are aware of what a GTO big blind defending range looks like, but a weaker player open raises at a table. The action is now on us in the big blind. Now we hopefully are aware of the fact that we should be defending wider than GTO in that scenario. Against a perfect player, we can defend a certain range. So if our opponent is making mistakes postflop, it means that we can defend an even wider range against that opponent. 

How many additional hands should we defend? Well, we don't really know unless we calculate the EV of those holdings. The problem we run into here is that calculating the EV of those additional preflop defence requires us to take into account every possible action that could occur postflop across every possible flop texture and turn and river run out. We're already thinking about a game tree, the size of which is approaching infinity. 

Calculating EV is simply not practical. Now, does that mean that we should just say, well, I can't actually calculate my EV in the spot. I better just defend the GTO range. This would be a bad conclusion to draw because we can clearly increase our EV by playing more hands against a weaker player. 

We don't precisely know our EV. Therefore, we don't precisely know how many additional hands that we can defend in that scenario. But we can make our best guess based on our intuition as poker players, based on an understanding of how certain types of holdings play postflop and an understanding of the types of mistakes that our opponent is making. 

This is strategy in poker. We don't know our precise EV, but we do have an idea in general about how to maneuver ourselves into especially profitable postflop situations. And on a side note, it does require a certain level of humility. It requires you to acknowledge that we don't know our EV at every point in a hand of poker, despite what advanced players may make out. We'll hear them say things like, well, my EV is this. This is what the solver says. 

Often our EV is not even going to be close to that because our opponent is not playing a perfect GTO game. There can sometimes be very large differences in the EV of using two different sizings. Even if the solver says mix across those two sizings, the EV is the same. In practice, the EV could be considerably different. We don't know exactly how different, but that doesn't stop us from pursuing the highest possible EV through sound strategic decisions.

Understanding the difference between strategy and tactics in poker is key to making the right decisions at the table. Strategy is your long-term game plan, while tactics are the specific moves you make in a given hand. To maximize your edge, use our EV calculators to analyze your decisions and ensure you're making the most profitable plays — try them now at Getcoach site!

Let's now think about tactics. Tactics we're referring to as later street decisions where the profitability / EV is demonstrable. In other words, we can calculate and make very decent estimates regarding our precise EV.

Now we have used the terms later street and earlier street. This is not always true. For example, sometimes tactics may exist on an earlier street because we're approaching the end of the game tree. Simple example, perhaps our opponent is just falling significantly too often to a 3-bet. And we can demonstrate that the EV of a three bet bluff is clearly profitable in that scenario. 

Technically, if our opponent sometimes defends, then we do have to factor in the postflop game tree to know our precise EV. So we can't always demonstrate the exact EV, but we can demonstrate that EV is clearly profitable even in the worst case scenario on earlier streets. 

What would be an example of a tactic in poker? Imagine we're in a triple barrel scenario. We've c-bet the flop, we've c-bet the turn. Let's say our opponent has checked to us on the river and we want to figure out if firing the third street as a bluff is going to be profitable. Well, if we take a look at population data, we'll see that the player pool is typically overfolding against triple barrels. 

We might expect to get 50% full equity with a two thirds river triple barrel, for example. So we know that the break-even threshold is 40%, but our opponent is folding 50%. We can then plug those numbers into an EV calculation and determine our precise EV. In other words, we can categorically demonstrate that this is a profitable bluff in this scenario. 

We can now refer to this as a tactic. The EV is known. There are many tactics in the game tree where we should be able to calculate at least to a reasonable level of accuracy, the EV. Another example might be the turn probe bet and river follow-up. Assuming we have an air combo, we can take a look at how often the player pool folds to a turn probe bet and how often they fold to the river follow-up bet. We can calculate our precise EV. Therefore, we can refer to this as a tactic. 

And tactics do go a little bit deeper than this. It's not just a case of finding a tactic that's plus EV. It's a case of finding the max EV tactic. So just because a probe bet turn plus river follow-up with air is plus EV, it doesn't mean that our search for the best play stops there. We should explore other tactics. For example, what if we were to delay and then go for a river one bet instead? Would the EV generated be higher? If yes, then we should take the higher EV option. 

We know what the EV of one line is. We know what the EV of a second line is. We can decide which generates the max EV and take that line. If we find the EV of the two lines is the same, that often means it's a good idea to just mix across both tactics. Because although it shouldn't change our EV if we always picked one option, that tends towards generating imbalance. Now we don't care about being imbalanced in general. 

So if one option is clearly higher EV, one tactic is better, it's okay to just repeatedly use that tactic. But we find when there are tactics that generate equivalent EV, there's not really an advantage to always picking one. We should actually mix our play across all of the available tactics that generate the same amount of EV. This way our win rate stays the same, but we're also not obviously exploitable from our opponent's perspective. 

So hopefully we understand the difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy, earlier street decisions, EV is not necessarily known, but we can use logic and intuition to maneuver ourselves into profitable later street scenarios. This is where we enter the realm of tactics. Here we can actually make projections regarding the EV of certain lines, and we can select the line that we think generates the highest EV or mix across tactics we assume generates similar EV based on our calculation. 

Now we can map that into a decision flow. So we're starting off on the earlier street play, making decisions that are logical, but the EV is not known. Could include something like iso-raising against a weaker player, for example. Kind of difficult to look that up in a solver because the solver doesn't have players open limping preflop anyway. 

We are already in the realm of intuition. It's difficult to calculate the EV. So we're making decisions that are logical, maneuvering us into good later street scenarios. We play in accordance with good strategy until we reach a point in the hand where the relevant tactic appears. 

Okay, now I'm in a triple barrel scenario. I know this is plus EV because I've looked at pool data. Here are my projections regarding the EV and the correct sizings to be using in this scenario based on pool data. I'm going to select a tactic with the highest EV. Should hopefully be able to incorporate our opponent profile into this as well because the best tactic will usually depend on the precise opponent profile we're playing against. 

So we play in accordance with good strategy until the relevant tactic appears. We then switch over into tactical mode and execute the tactic, whether it's a triple barrel, probe and follow up, stop and go line, float bet and follow up, float bet triple. We've analyzed the value of these tactics. We can switch over into tactical mode and execute the relevant tactic. Sometimes we hear in poker that the good players always seem to be the luckiest players. That applies here as well. 

Better tactics generally present themselves to players who are following good earlier street strategy. It's the difference between a weak player who's maybe checked down their nut flush draw. Perhaps a weak hold'em coach has told him, well, your ace high flush draw has showdown value. You need to check that down. Bad idea, by the way. 

So the weak player reaches the river, rivers the nut flush, but there's only six big blinds in the pot. It's very difficult for them to get a large payout. The better player follows good strategic principles. He sees he has a nut flush draw, deliberately grows a pot on the flop and turn. By the time we reach the river, perhaps there's a stack to pot ratio of one. When that player rivers the flush, he can now get all of the chips in and he wins an entire stack with the river tactic. 

Tactics are value bets as well, by the way. They're not just poker bluffs. We can also calculate the EV of various value bets and we can choose the best value bet tactic. And we can look at that and say, well, the good player got luckier. He won a whole stack with his flush, whereas the weaker player, he didn't get lucky. He didn't get paid out. But actually, it's not really to do with luck there. 

So if we play strategically well on the earlier streets, then more profitable tactics have a tendency to present themselves to us. Good strategy means more profitable tactics. Now we need both to be good poker players. We need strategy and tactics. Often you might find that a weaker player has an imbalance towards one or the other. We need both of them and they need to interact in the right way.