Actually the entire point of poker is to make your opponent make a mistake or play poorly. A mistake being if you had perfect information a move you would not make.

Clarification: If you played with cards face up no one would ever make a mistake. You could calculate the odds and the math would be perfect. The goal of poker is to make an opponent make a mathematically incorrect play.

This isn't quite correct although that's how poker was taught in the 90s. The goal of the top players these days is to play as close as possible to optimal poker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium) and not worry about the individual hand their opponent might have in a given moment.

This is only true when playing with others attempting to play optimally. If you only play optimal poker it may be difficult to take advantage of sub optimal players without modifying play.

A simple example is a rock paper scissors tournament. The nash equilibrium says you must always simply pick each with 1/3 chance. But if you play this you are almost gauranteed to finish in the middle of the pack. The winner is going to be someone who can take advantage of other players. There used to be a rps AI tournament years ago (UofAlberta I think), and this is why they wouldn’t take submissions that only played nash equilibrium play.

But you are right, in that usually the first step in getting good at poker is to simply play the strength of your cards based on your position. And this becomes more amd more important the higher the stakes since players tend to be better there.

> This is only true when playing with others attempting to play optimally.

It's also true against someone who is playing an exploitative strategy.

I don't think this is true. It's a better strategy to keep bad players in the game by giving them real advice. To ensure they grow and have fun. But not so much advice that they surpass you. That's their own responsibility to seek out.

When those bad players stop playing badly the games die. It is super boring to play live poker with players that don't make mistakes. I know from experience

If people are just folding and folding maybe try playing shorthanded? Then optimal play is much more aggressive and fun.

Nope, even heads-up is boring live with people that play well because you are wasting more time shuffling than playing.

Even on-line heads-up challenges are played on 2 tables in order to not be boring and that is 500-600+ hands per hour