The first thing you should probably do is celebrate, as strange as that sounds, because recognizing that you might be in over your head means several things:
1. You’re paying a lot of attention to your opponents’ skills and tendencies. That by itself is an accomplishment, and puts you ahead of most players.
2. You’ve spent some time evaluating your own skill level. It is important to understand your strengths and weaknesses in order to avoid unprofitable situations.
3. You don’t have the dangerous “I know it all” poker ego that has gotten so many players into trouble over the years. Understanding that you still have things you can learn is the first step in learning them.
In the long run, then, you do indeed have reasons to celebrate, and these reasons bode well for your chances of improving to the point where you don’t encounter too many superior opponents.
In the short run, though, you still have to face the problem of that superior opponent or opponents. You can encounter that problem in any one of several variations:
1. Are there many players in the game who are superior to you, or only one or two?
2. Is it a tournament or a cash game?
3. Is the game limit or no-limit?
4. If the game is a cash game, is it relatively simple to switch to another table, where you might be the best player in the game, or are you essentially forced to decide to continue playing at that table or go home?
There’s a big difference between playing at a table where you’re the third-best player and one where you’re the eighth-best player. It is fairly simple to just stay out of the way of the stronger players. What you do is to just take steps to try and isolate the weaker players against yourself. Just be careful that you don’t take this approach too far. I’ve seen many good players so eager to get into pots against weak players that they lower their starting hand requirements too far for their skill edge to matter. Similarly, you can’t throw two queens away in Holdem just because it was Doyle Brunson who made the first raise in the pot.
Having one or two superior players at your table is far more dangerous when you’re playing no limit, because those superior players can bust you in one hand. Where as in a limit game, all they can do is cost you an extra bet or two.
Now, suppose that you are in a tournament and the table you have drawn just happens to be the “table of death”. While this is unfortunate, eventually it is going to happen and you can’t just give up.
Start by checking the “table break” list. If you see that your table is due to break sometime soon, you can opt to play more conservatively than you might ordinarily, hoping that when you move to your next table, you may get an easier mix of players. Of course, if you stay in the tournament long enough, eventually, all the tables become tough tables, but if you can dodge the toughest players for a while, it’s in your best interest to do so.
If you’re trapped at a tournament table that isn’t going to break anytime soon, you’re left to make the best of a difficult situation. You can study your opponents to see if they are indeed trying to get into pots with you: If one plays very conservatively most of the time, entering few pots, but seems to play much more often when you’re in, it’s a good bet that he has indeed lowered his starting hand requirements, and that he’s hoping to be able to outplay you later on in the hand. If you push back, hard, you may be able to get him to lay his hand down. Don’t worry about how confident he looks, or that he re-raised you. Go ahead and bet right into him on the next card. He may decide he’s found the right opponent but at the wrong time. Just be careful about pushing this play too far. At a certain point, the pot will become so large that your opponent may decide to call you down if he has any kind of hand. You can’t pull this play too often, or your opponents will figure you out. Just keep in mind that one of the best ways to deal with a bully is to bully him right back.
If you have correctly assessed your status as the weakest player at the table, you’re obviously not in a good situation, but you can make it better by not playing the other guy’s game. Great players tend to be fairly dynamic and aggressive, and if you’re not ready to match their speed, don’t try. Wait for real starting hands and push them aggressively. One of the best ways to level out the skill factor is to get a lot, or all in some situations, of the chips in the pot before the flop. For instance, if all you ever did was to either move all in, or fold, than your opponents would never be able to outplay you. They would be forced to gamble and get all of their chips in the middle. Then, you are both simply at the mercy of the deck.
In the long run, the only way to deal with stronger opponents is to get stronger yourself. But in the meantime, try to avoid them, unless there are enough players weaker than you to balance the scales, and be especially careful about playing no limit against those better players.
It’s a delicate tightrope you must walk, because it’s hard to improve if you only play against weak players, no matter how much reading or computer simulating you do. If you play against great players only one or two at a time, you might be able to learn enough so that soon you’ll be capable of taking them on three or four at a time. Who knows, maybe soon you will be the one that everyone is trying to avoid.