While these sound like meaningful questions, they’re all structurally oriented—as though they are questions in search of a formulaic approach to playing poker. And that’s their weakness. While questions like, “What should you do with which hands in these positions?” are the very questions beginners ask first, their weakness is that the answers lead players into looking for a formula for winning play. It’s just not that easy.

While these questions are fine in the sense that they give new players a perspective of sorts from which to approach the game, there really is no magic formula that leads to winning play in all situations.

When you’ve been playing poker for a while and have the mechanics down pat, the questions you should ask ought to revolve around:

What are you trying to accomplish with your hand? and,

What action can you take to get there?

Do you want your opponent to fold? Well, he’s certainly not going to fold if you check, so you have to bet. In a no-limit game, you have decide how much to bet. The bigger the bet, the more likely it is that your opponent will fold. But there’s no guarantee there, either. Your opponent might have a powerhouse hand and will call or even raise your big bet. If he does, you risk losing most or all of your stack.

Your opponent might also have a good read on your play and figure the only reason you’re betting so much in this particular situation is because you’re bluffing, and even though his hand can beat a bluff but would lose to a really big hand—if you happened to actually have the hand you’re representing—he’s going to call and beat you.

The amount of money at risk is also a big issue in determining the options at your disposal to try to order to move an opponent in one direction or another. If both of you are deep stacked, you can put more of his chips at risk, but it’s a two-way street and he can do the same to you. If either or both of you are short stacked, it’s tougher to move an opponent in one direction or another because there’s less to lose and the cost of a misplaced risk is more easily absorbed.

When you’re playing poker, you can’t just play your own hand; you also have to consider what your opponents are trying to do to you. If you’re in a very aggressive game, where virtually every pot is raised, you simply can’t play many hand from early position because you don’t know whether your opponents’ raises represent strong hands or bluffs, and you have to act first—thereby having to guess again—on each betting round.

If your opponents are passive, and unlikely to raise on a regular basis though likely to call a big bet even when they’re beaten, you can play small pairs in hopes of flopping a set from early position. Set mining becomes profitable in a way they never can be when the cost to see the flop is likely to be increased multifold by the expected raises from aggressive players who act after you.

We could go on and on with examples of situational play, but the bigger point is that poker doesn’t lend itself to formulaic play at all but the most elementary levels, and that to play well, you have to continue to think about how you can move your opponent in the direction you want him to go, while puzzling out what he’s trying to accomplish with his hand.

When we answer poker questions with that often-quoted, “It depends,” those are some of the things it depends upon.