The «Art of War» principles that help us win at poker

15 Aug 2024

In this article, high stakes player Rene «TheWakko» Kuhlman shares his insights into the world of reg wars. He explains how he made +$157,942 playing 3- and 4-max against professional poker players using the ancient wisdom of Chinese strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu, as outlined in his book «The Art of War». Next are his words.

Today I'll show you how I was able to use the ancient wisdom outlined in the famous treatise on military strategy to win over +$150,000 at high stakes against the best players in the world with a +9.2bb/100 win rate.

In the 5th century BC, Chinese military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu wrote the book «The Art of War». In it, Sun Tzu described the strategic principles and tactics needed to achieve victory in battles and wars. Even today, it is considered one of the most valuable and influential treatises on the topic of strategy in any form and, of course, in the art of war.

When I was trying to become the best at poker, I constantly re-read this book, and it helped me break through a lot of limits up to NL10k. Here are 3 principles that had the greatest impact on my success.

Principle #1: Know Yourself and Your Enemy

Or, to quote Sun Tzu directly,

This quote essentially highlights the importance of self-awareness and how your opponents play:

• If you know both yourself and your opponents, you will win.
• If you only know yourself, you will lose often.
• If you know neither yourself nor your opponents, you have no chance of winning.

And that was my background throughout my entire move up in stakes and winning that $150k. 

Just like you and every other poker player, I have and have had my weaknesses and inconsistencies in the way I play. To assess how much of a winning player I am in the current field, I needed to take an objective look at my strengths and weaknesses and see how they compare to those of my opponents:

• Do my opponents play against me in a special way?
• Does my opponent's strategy neutralize even my strongest exploits?

And you always have to remember that in addition to the opponents on the other side of the screen, there is also the strongest one in your life - yourself.

Sun Tzu wrote:

In poker, this means that you always need to soberly understand what your mental and physical state is and, if the state is unsatisfactory, do not enter the battle - do not even open the client. Because it is not enough to know the strategy and remember the main branches of tactics - you also need to be ready to carry them out with your hands. This also includes the perception of what is happening.

And you should also evaluate your state not only at the beginning of the game, but also during its course - approximately every hour - regarding whether you are still playing well and whether you are still showing an A-game. If the first signs are detected that you are sliding onto the rails of a C-game (sensations, perceptions, decisions), then you need to urgently take a break.

Many lose in win rate because

• They play in a bad state,
• They play in bad lineups,
• They think that their opponents could not study them and readjust,
• They play being tired from the stress - this can be either in one session or accumulated.

An ancient philosopher also emphasized the importance of making plans for the battle:

Or, in other words - each battle is won before it begins.

It was exactly the same with me. Many of my «battles» were predetermined even before I sat down at the table and the first card was dealt. - We are talking about the quality of the game here, and not the result of a single session.

In addition to the fact that I always played in an optimal mental state, I also prepared a full «dossier» on each opponent with whom I crossed paths at least occasionally. It had a full description of his stats, notes, and most importantly, what leaks he had. And at the end of the document, I wrote how I could exploit all of this and gain such a significant advantage that money would start flowing to me and eventually I would take his entire bankroll. Usually, I would write 5 key features of my opponents in such dossiers and then exploit them.

Such detailed analysis of regular opponents is probably one of the best ways to start winning in wars with them. Note that you can also analyze fish, thus taking away from them even more than you could under normal conditions.

Each of their techniques, tendencies, and even seemingly unexpected moves should be carefully analyzed and exploited before the actual game.

As a final step before Victory, I close my eyes and visualize the entire process of how chips gradually flow in my direction and multiply my stack. I also run before my eyes how I successfully apply a profitable strategy and how I feel in excellent condition at the tables. And everything is under control.

Principle #2: Avoid the Strong and Attack the Weak

Winning +$150k with a win rate of +9.2 bb/100 was the result of meticulously analyzing my opponents and being able to clearly describe their strengths and weaknesses, not fighting where they were strong and attacking them in the spots where they had holes in their game. Avoiding fights with a strong range (or anything strong in general) is also a full-fledged exploit, but aimed at preserving your stack and refusing to pay opponents.

Well, as for the fact that you need to exploit weaknesses, you all know well. This is done by personally collecting information or searching for it on websites, in HUDs, etc. Then I assessed the degree to which the opponents' stats differed from those that cannot be exploited and thought through the type of countermeasure and bet sizes. The greater the deviation from GTO, the more it can be exploited.

There is another very important reason for searching for exploits - it is how opponents build their ranges. Since people are not GTO bots, they will not be able to build a perfect range for every situation, which means that in some spots they will be too weak, and in others - the opposite. Therefore, we will watch them and avoid playing where there is a bias towards value, and play more often and more expensively where there is a bias towards weak hands and bluffs.

However, the space for exploits in poker is truly huge and they can manifest themselves not in such pinpoint spots, but on a completely global scale. For example, I remember how many high-stakes players simply continued to fight against me through force, being in a bad state - they were tired, irritated, had already played at a bunch of tables before I arrived, etc. - just because they did not want to give up the lobby to me.

Completely avoiding strong ranges (or anything strong at all) in poker is not always possible, but it can be minimized.

In poker, this means trying to control the flow of both the hand and the entire session.

For example, you are playing with an opponent who plays perfectly on the BB against the BU, who bets 1/3 of the pot on the flop. Then, every time you play this line, you help your opponent - after all, he is in his comfort zone and confident play. As a result, you give him EV.

Instead, I will immediately exclude c-bets for 1/3 of the pot in this spot and will either bet big or check-back. Entire poker is exploit.

If he doesn't make mistakes - where will the profit come from? And when he makes mistakes often and grossly - that's where the profit is born. And this philosophy is applied at any stage of the hand.

For example, on the preflop you are on SB vs BB. If your opponent on BB plays perfectly against steals from SB, then you have problems. Therefore, I choose other ways to enter the hand and at the same time knock the opponent off his usual rails. For example, if I limp with 98o, then the opponent will often play suboptimally with his trash, because he does not know how to play with it. And if he checks to the limp, then we understand the strength of his range ...

This also includes the strength of his game on the postflop - if he plays worse than you, then you should play with him as many pots as possible, knocking him out preflop less often and winning much more on the postflop.

If your opponent is too complex postflop, you should knock him out of your hand preflop more often, rather than letting him get into situations where he is almost 100% likely to outplay you and to take your money.

What if you don't know how to exploit your opponents' weaknesses or if they aren't visible at all?

To win maximum money at high stakes or at any limit in general, you don't have to fight strong opponents - it's enough to play as often as possible with those who are weaker than you and as rarely as possible with those who are stronger strategically or more "charged" at a particular moment in time.

When I moved up to NL10k, I focused on analyzing my opponents using the examples described above. I distributed them by game difficulty from strongest to weakest and then tried to play more often with those who played worse and avoided fights with more advanced opponents.

If there were three of us at the table, then when a 4th player sat down who could play stronger than me, I would press sit-out and figure out how profitable the game was now and how I should play it now - after all, adding a potentially (or really) stronger regular would change how often I could play with weaker opponents than me. If I had to play much more often with someone who played better than me and much less often with someone who played worse than me, then the EV would become negative and the flow of chips would go not into my stack, but out of it. - Towards the player from whom it would be very difficult to win them back later.

Playing day after day, I became more and more accurate and experienced in noticing and exploiting the weaknesses and strengths of my opponents, my confidence in the game grew and eventually there was no one left at the current limit who wanted to fight me. This meant that it was time to go to a new limit and repeat the whole process there.

And at the very top limit, Linus and Stefan would be waiting for me, with whom I would repeat the same thing - do not fight against the strong ... At the peak of my career, I played with all the top players of that time, and since I quickly realized + accepted that they play head and shoulders above, they must be avoided - otherwise I will give them my money. And, probably, forever.

But fortunately, even at the very top limits, sometimes there were players who neglected the described principles (or did not know them at all) and continued to desperately play with those who were stronger than them and, as a rule, it did not end well for them.

Principle #3: Flexibility and Adaptability

In 6-max cash, and especially in the tight EP and MP positions, it is easy to hide your weaknesses by playing a narrow and strong range that dominates your opponents' ranges and, roughly speaking, wins on its own. Plus, you have 5 opponents, and you play each of them much less often than if it were 3-max.

Tight strategies rarely need mixes, because the owner of the narrowest range of open-raises will most often have a significant advantage in equity. In 6-max, you make money on the execution of a tight and solid strategy, where you do not need to see and exploit so much compared to much more comparable in equity ranges in 3-max and, especially, heads-up.

In 3- and 4-max, where players do not have much time to choose hands rigorously (because the blinds are posted much more often), the difference in equity between ranges becomes much smaller (the ranges are not so strongly protected). Here you won't be able to open a 10-12% range from EP and press like a tank, because there you almost always had a big advantage in equity and kickers, so the opponent couldn't do anything special with you.

In games with fewer participants, the skill of playing comes to the fore - exploiting the weaknesses and strengths of opponents. And besides that, here you need to

• Be even more flexible in your ranges,
• Adapt to the opponents you play against,
• And also be flexible in your own strategies and tactics,
• Think ahead about the counter-strategies that the opponent might use,
• See the first signs that the opponent has started to restructure the game,
• And also what counter-strategy you need to apply to their counter-strategy ...

This means that you should always try to knock your opponent out of his usual conditions and make as many actions as possible that the opponent does not expect from you.

During my climb up the high-stakes ladder, I regularly used open-raises and 3-bets of sizes that were very strange for my opponents, so they often spent half a time bank to understand my reasons, goals and what my ranges look like. And, accordingly, their range of reactions.

On the postflop, I also «broke the brains» of my opponents, constantly changing my strategies and tactics, sometimes placing rangebets as usual, sometimes switching to a line with a continuation bet of an overbet size or playing without a continuation bet at all. - These are all elements of psychological warfare in high-stakes poker.

How do bots fight?

Bots cannot exploit live opponents to the maximum because they are mostly (1) unable to observe and (2) not programmed to exploit the tendencies of a specific opponent.

Recently, there was a debate between two well-known personalities in poker - Zoom-500+ reg, coach and GTO adept Saulo Costa and George «You-Mad-Br0» Froggatt about the players from Saulo Costa's stable being destroyed at high limits.

Saulo countered this by saying that his students train on GTO bots and, accordingly, play close to GTO, so no one will be able to destroy them with any devastating lose rate - the maximum they will lose is -2 bb/100. - If they lose at all.

An important psychological aspect of poker

How close to his technical ability can a normal NL500 regular play against a very strong high stakes pro?

There will be a huge difference between a bot hero-calling him and Linus Loeliger hero-calling him. The bot calls because it is programmed to do so and it is part of its strategy to call with certain frequencies with different hands just to avoid being exploited. Linus can call for a number of reasons. For example, because you yourself are not aware of how you are out-bluffing in some spots, but he sees it and exploits it.

The same principle will be visible when you hero-call Linus, but he will show super-thin value.

When playing with a bot, you always know what to expect from him - even though he plays according to a near-perfect GTO, his game, nevertheless, does not change and even remains partly studyable.

Looking at the stats of Linus / Stefan, you will have an illusory idea of ​​​​how they can be exploited, but it is very likely that they will show you a completely different game than they should, judging by their statistics. And you will lose to them pot after pot.

• This is the art of war in poker.

This article was written from the How I Won $157,942 Battling High Stakes Poker video by Vladimir «ABIVPlus».