Leveling in poker is the practice of thinking beyond your own hand to consider what your opponent thinks you hold, and then potentially what they think you think they hold. The concept was introduced to serious poker players by David Sklansky, and it describes the recursive layers of thinking that players can engage in before making a decision.
I have spent decades playing poker at a professional level and teaching players how to play poker, and in that time, I have seen leveling produce brilliant plays and costly disasters in equal measure. In this guide, I will explain how the five levels of thinking work, when leveling gives you an edge, and why most elite players today have largely moved away from level-based thinking in favor of a GTO-grounded approach.
What Is Leveling in Poker?
The first question we must answer if we are going to discuss leveling in poker is what is leveling and how does it work?
The concept of leveling was first introduced to the poker world by David Sklansky in his book “The Theory of Poker,” and it is described as thinking about the game of poker at different possible levels.
Basically, anytime you think past the hand you are holding, you are engaging in poker leveling. However, there are different depths as to how deep you can go with leveling.
Here are a few examples of leveling in poker:
- First Level: What hand do I have?
- Second Level: What hand does my opponent have?
- Third Level: What hand does my opponent think I have?
- Fourth Level: What hand does my opponent think I think he has?
- Fifth Level: What hand does my opponent think I think he thinks I have?
You can go as deep down the rabbit hole as you want with leveling, but it is important to note that anytime you engage in leveling, you are also engaging in exploitative poker and thinking about ways to deviate from optimal poker strategy.
Note that anytime you deviate from optimal strategy in poker, you are also exposing yourself to getting exploited yourself, as your strategy now has flows.
The truth about leveling is that most elite poker players these days don’t engage in it at all, as they try to play a semblance of a GTO poker strategy, which does not concern itself with what anyone thinks or even what the opponent’s hand is in the first place.
More on that later, but for the time being, let’s take a look at an example of leveling in poker to demonstrate exactly how it looks and what it might entail.
Poker Leveling Example
The following hand illustrates exactly how leveling can spiral into a disaster. I want you to read through it not as an observer, but as the player holding JsTs. At each decision point, notice when the thinking shifts from “what hand do I have and what does my opponent likely have” into the territory of “what does my opponent think I am doing.”
That shift is the moment leveling begins. For most players at most stakes, it is the moment the hand stops being guided by sound poker reasoning and starts being guided by a mental chess match neither player may be equipped to win.
Playing in a $1/2 cash game at your local casino, you are sitting down with just over $700 in your stack. In the cutoff, you raise it to $6 holding JsTs, and you get called by both the small blind and the big blind, both of whom cover you.
With $18 in the pot, the dealer deals out As8c6c, and both your opponents check to you. You fire out a $12 c-bet, which gets called by both players.
The turn brings the Ks, and both your opponents check again. You decide to take the aggressive route and bet $45 into the $54 pot. This time around, only the big blind calls, and you go to the river.
With $144 now in the pot, you see the river card of 3d, a complete blank. Your opponent checks, and you bet $100, trying to get your opponent to fold a flush draw, a weak Ace, or a hand like 8x or 6x they might have stuck around with.
At this point, your opponent raises it to $250, and you still have $536 behind. You have only J-high, and your opponent is representing a big hand, so you should be folding.
However, this is where the leveling comes into play. You decide that your opponent is likely to have a busted club draw or a buster straight draw quite often. You don’t need to go all-in to get him to fold such a hand, so you 3-bet it right back to $350.
Your opponent looks back at his hand. Indeed, he has just 9d7d. Yet, he takes things to the next level and decides that you, too, are holding nothing more than a busted flush draw and are trying to bluff him off his hand.
Your opponent goes all-in, and you are forced to fold your J-high, although there have been extreme cases of leveling where players will even make a call with a hand as weak as this, putting their opponent on an exact hand.
Both players in this example took leveling to an extreme and decided to make plays that possibly deviated from the optimal strategy, engaging in the “I know that he knows” kind of thinking and opening themselves to getting exploited in return.
In this particular case, you got absolutely owned and lost the maximum due to engaging in leveling, while your opponent was lucky enough to win big.
However, leveling can easily go wrong both ways, and it is one of those things that can make you look like a genius or an idiot, depending simply on the outcome in one particular case.
Should I Be Leveling In Poker?
The honest answer, based on my experience coaching hundreds of players and reviewing thousands of student hands, is that leveling will cost you more money than it earns you in the vast majority of spots where players choose to engage in it.
The core problem is not that leveling is wrong in theory; it is that most players who think they are engaging in clever meta-thinking are actually just talking themselves into bad calls and over-complicated bluffs. I see this pattern constantly in hand reviews: a player makes a wild river bluff or an impossible call, and when asked why, they explain a chain of reasoning several levels deep that conveniently ends with the conclusion they already wanted to reach.
Against strong thinking players who are capable of multi-level reasoning, targeted leveling in the right spot can absolutely be a profitable move. Against the recreational players who make up the majority of opponents at most stakes, the play that looks straightforward is almost always correct.
One possible benefit of sometimes engaging in leveling is to make yourself unpredictable and a bit scary to play against, but this alone is probably not worth enough to allow yourself to make the costly mistakes that often come from leveling.
If you want to be a truly elite poker player, stay away from leveling too often and learn a fundamentally strong poker strategy based on the game theory optimal approach to the game.
How Should I Play Instead?
After decades of playing and studying poker at a professional level, my view is that the game is not fundamentally about hand-versus-hand decisions or the kind of nested psychological modeling that leveling involves. It is about playing the right hand ranges at the correct frequencies across all possible board textures and stack depths.
The framework that has replaced level-based thinking for serious students of the game is GTO poker strategy (game theory optimal play that does not ask “what does my opponent think I have” but instead asks “what strategy is unexploitable against any opponent?”). If you want to work on your GTO foundations, PokerCoaching’s own solver, PeakGTO, is the tool designed specifically for our training curriculum.
It lets you explore hand ranges, check bet sizing, and test how different strategies hold up against a variety of opponent adjustments, without needing to guess what level your opponent is thinking on.
If you want to compete at a serious level in poker these days, you should be trying to learn GTO poker strategy and all it entails instead of engaging in silly leveling and trying to outwit your opponents in this way.
While leveling can work at times, there is no guarantee it will, while a strong fundamental poker strategy will guarantee you come out on top over the long run and have plenty of fun in the process.
