Too many players discuss the merits of playing certain hands in poker when what they should be discussing ideally is to develop a plan for playing against certain players. For example you may want to play A-Q against one player but muck it against someone else. When you first sit down at a poker table then many people say that you need to know where your profit will come from. This is perfectly true but that profit will come from different players in different ways. For example a tight playing reg in NLHE will be playing very solid poker.
This doesn’t mean that you can find big mistakes in their game or win big pots against them with them having weak hands. You will need big hands against these players in big pots because they will have strong hands themselves. You tend to make your money against tight regs by winning smaller pots in selected situations. Against weaker players then you tend to find that they do make mistakes in bigger pots but the way that you exploit both players and both their respective sets of mistakes is different.
If you do not identify who these players are and what mistakes they make then you will be making some horrendous mistakes yourself. You will be calling off with hands like A-4 on a 4-4-K-7-Q board when your solid eight tabling opponent has shown that they are prepared to play a 300BB pot for example. In deep stack NLHE full ring play then there is little chance that A-4 will be the best hand here and a fold is the better play. However consider a player with 60BB. No strong player would sit on the table with such an amount and if they limped with their hand from middle position and you have say the Q-7s then you can attack their limp because playing a pot in position against a weak limper will ultimately be profitable.
