How to Play Optimally Against Unknown Opponents [2025]

Something that a lot of people struggle with in poker is how to play against unknown opponents. This is especially the case for people who play Zoom because the player pools are often large and therefore you rarely see the same people. Unknown opponents are difficult to play against for anybody though because by definition we don't know anything about them. If you are using a HUD then you will have 10 or less hands on them. This is not a useful sample size for any statistic. However, I do think that there are some baseline strategies that can be effective at the micros in particular when dealing with unknown opponents. I am going to discuss them in this article. Do Not Give Unknowns Too Much Credit The first thing that I always suggest is to never give anyone at the micros too much credit especially when you know nothing about them. Most people at the micros (especially the lower end) have several large and glaring leaks in their game. This is why I always take a "wait and see approach" before giving anyone credit for being more than another mediocre reg or recreational player. However, this does not mean that we should assume that they are maniacs and make huge call downs with weak hands. Nor does this mean that we should value bet them insanely wide like we would versus a typical rec player fish. It simply means that we should assume that they are the typical break even or slightly losing weak/tight opponent that you see everywhere in today's games. We should never assume that they are thinking about the game on any kind of deep level but they aren't completely clueless either. We can probably expect to get a street or two of value with our big hands depending on what they have and we can also get away with a few bluffs here and there. On the flip side, when they apply a lot of pressure or fight back in a big way we can usually expect them to have what they are representing. This is something that I discuss in much more detail by the way in my free poker cheat sheet. Just follow the simple charts on exactly what hands to play.