Spread 501: Bum hunting with hybrids
Playing to your opponent’s weakness is better even than playing to your strength.
Alright time for Spread 501, now we’re getting beyond spread systems and principles into high level spread practice.
If you want to catch up before reading this…
Our metaphors today for spread 501 come from the world of poker. As Pam Beasley said in The Office,
The first lesson of watching World Poker Tour at 2:00 A.M.: You play the opponent, not the cards.
Or we could use my own definition of strategy from my first book:
The essence of strategy is to play to your strengths while trying to force your opponent to come to grips with their weaknesses.
The highest level of spread practice is to spread the defense out, then by utilizing dual-threats at quarterback and tight end, play to your opponent’s weakness. There’s another relevant poker metaphor here, it’s called “bum hunting.”
One of the biggest advantages you can have in poker against good players is to have a bigger stack of chips, so you can raise the stakes and force difficult decisions from your opponents which carry unbalanced risks. For instance, forcing them to go all-in to protect a decent hand before all the cards are on the table while holding a straight draw. You could miss your draw, lose, and still have way more chips left even if you lost and doubled up their stack. If you win? They’re done.
A good way to build a big stack? Identify the “bums” at the table and outplay them on hands in which they participate so you can take their chips. Then play at advantage against the better players.
You needn’t have good cards, you just need to make smart bets against bad players.
Spread 501 works similarly.