Small Stakes No-Limit Hold'em

I can tell you from my perspective as an opponent, your cbet stats would mark you as exploitable to me, and I put these stats on my hud and use them.

87% flop is, imo, too high.  Maybe some would disagree but essentially this means you're always c-betting.  It won't be 100% ever because people will donk bet into you occassionally depriving you of a c-bet opportunity, but anything over 85% I know I can count on my opponent to fire the c-bet for me religiously.  Obviously if you're doing this all the time, it's exploitable.

One of the ways I love exploiting auto-c-bettors relates to your c-bet turn of 37%… I would float you in position a lot.  Essentially, your stats are classic numbers for someone who blindly fires a flop c-bet, then abandon's ship on the turn when they've missed and have been called.  Not trying to be harsh, but I eat stats like that for lunch when I get on your left, it's one of my favorite TAG type opponents to play against. 

In my personal opinion, a good flop c-bet % is roughly 2/3rds of the time.  Now obviously you'll have sits where the table is such that 90% is good… players that play fit or fold too much and aren't tricky at all will beg to be c-bet to death, and that's fine.  But long term 87% is leaving you open to exploitation, ESPECIALLY when you routinely give up your missed hands on the turn. 

What you can do:  Stop blindly c-betting the flop.  It's ok to check the flop instead of bet once in a while.  If you've got a lot of opponents, or a scary board that you've missed, it's not mandatory that you throw money away blasting.  You can balance this by sometimes also checking the flop when you've hit.  I usually like to do this with good small pot hands that are not committed on deep money, both for pot control and to keep my opponents range wide.  Once opponents know you will sometimes check AK on an A84 flop instead of blast it, they won't be so quick to think when you DO check the flop instead of c-bet it means "I missed", because they'll know you could have a hand anyway that's not a "monster" that you're trapping with… failing to include some of these hands in your "check" range polarizes you to trapping monsters and air.  And, when you don't auto-c-bet, your c-bets carry more weight, so you WILL be able to pick up some pots with air as the preflop raiser.  Against your stats, the flop c-bet would mean nothing to me honestly.  But if you c-bet the flop only 65-70% of the time, I would tend to give you more credit when you do barrell the flop. 

On the turn, you can adjust by occassionally barrelling again, and/or by check-raising aggressive opponents who have position on you… particularly if you've identified them as solid players, because if they are you can be sure they are looking at your 87/37 and floating you quite a bit just like I would be.

rastapete said:

Bear in mind that what is exploitable can be optimal.

Are you suggesting his stats look optimal because most players won't know how to adjust or even be paying attention to them?  I don't think his stats look optimal to me, but the idea has a lot of merit… if the villains at a table are weak-tight, c-betting 90% of the time, while exploitable, is going to be optimal because they won't exploit it but will rather fall victim to it again and again.

Can you expand on your thoughts if I've mis-interpreted?

RML604 said:

I like to think of exploitation theory in terms of rock paper scissors.  If you were playing heads-up with someone and you knew they threw rock 80% of the time, you should be throwing paper 100% of the time.  However, by exploiting them, your play is now obviously exploitable.  So if the player caught on but you didn't change your strategy, they could exploit you by throwing scissors 100% of the time.

But if you're playing against the same guy who throws rock 80% and you decide to throw each option 33% of the time, you now have an unexploitable strategy, but you are no longer exploiting him.

In other words, expoiting someone is almost always going to leave you open for exploitation as well.  But until someone starts exploiting you, you shouldn't change your strategy of exploiting others as much as possible.

Yes, absolutely.  Very well said.