In poker there is no crime worse than giving free information regarding the strength of one’s hand to opponents at the table. I have fallen foul of this grievous contravention a number of times and in spite of my better judgement, I know I will fall foul yet again. The reason for it I think can be pinned out squarely on boredom or on being too tired to play, hence not playing my “A” game.
This leads me to another important concept when considering the problem of leaking information out to the table, the idea of focus. Poker is a highly skilled endeavour, true you can just throw your chips in and hope for the best, but doing so will ultimately lead to losses which are seldom recouped. If skill plays a part, I would like to think it plays a significant part of the game, it is vital to enter into a game feeling the best you possibly can.
It doesn’t help if you feel tired or are just dropping by a game because you have nothing better to do, if that is the attitude losses will pile. The truth is that most players today are very well-read when it comes to poker; no one approaches the table any longer without knowing the importance of position, pot odds and expected value. Sure some may give these factors greater or lesser importance depending on personal views, but no one gets to the final table of any tournament without having at least grasped these notions.
Yet as any true poker aficionado will tell you, poker is not only about playing the cards and the statistics, poker is about playing the players across the table. This is where poker tells come in and where substantial profit is reaped or concretised. A comprehensive poker education implies that you just have to go about learning what a player’s baseline behaviour is, what happens when he starts feeling uncomfortable or how he manages himself when he starts feeling comfortable. More importantly it becomes valuable to perceive transitions in the emotional states of your opponents the deeper one runs into a tournament.
As time lapses and players wade deeper through level after level of poker play, weariness always takes its toll. The deeper you go the more important mental stamina becomes. Consider that an average player at a full table has to contend with the behaviourisms and playing styles of eight distinct players. He needs to consider their individual play and how it is affected by position and their stack sizes. He needs to consider whether they have a history with any other player at the table since this will affect the way they play against specific players. He needs to understand their emotional states as discussed earlier, and he needs to come to terms with whatever compensatory behaviourism they exhibit in the process. Additionally a player needs to consider how others behave to his bets, whether a a specific bet will take down a pot or at least help him in winning a pot later. He must also concern himself about his personal table image, not how he wishes to present himself but rather how the table perceives him. With online games in particular, bet sizing becomes a vital tool. Varying bet sizes for instance could lead to an important information leak, especially pre-flop where no cards are yet face up.
A good friend of mine reminded me of one crucial lesson in this regards, keep your initial bet sizes constant regardless of your holding. If you decide to play, your initial bet should always be the same, or as a minimum played in the same fashion without emphasis. The more you mess around with either the size of this initial bet or how it is played the more information can potentially be leaked out to the table.
So betting consistently pre-flop can actually make your actions more undecipherable while keeping your opponents wondering what you might be holding on to. This is a vital concept and which could save you a lot of chips in the long term.
Yet there are other situations that could result in involuntary information leaks. For instance, just after winning a hand, you should refrain from any uncontrolled emotional outbursts; because you can still inadvertently give away information even after a hand is over. Just pick up your chips, stack them in the same way you always do and prepare yourself for the next hand. Refrain from discussing what you had or what you thought the others might have had. Any extra information might benefit others at the table who might not have even considered any of the possibilities you might wrongly choose to discuss.
Obviously there’s also the other side of the medal so to speak. You could decide to offer doctored information to the table in order to change a particular table image you might have. This is not far removed from the using of deviatory tactics to mislead opponents regarding your playing style or strength of hand. For instance if you have a solid table image, and players are putting you on strong hands refusing to offer you any action when you play, then it might be a good idea to show a suited connector now and again or maybe a marginal holding you do not normally play. However let me be clear, if you do not win a hand, show nothing. There’s no point in flashing cards if you cannot make a statement of sorts.
Back to information leaks, the greatest culprit can indeed be weariness or boredom. Poker is not for the faint of heart, it is not easy to fold hand after hand when the situation warrants it, and bluffing may not be an option. Coping with weariness can take many forms; some simply get coffee to the table which helps to some extent. Boredom however is harder to tackle but it should be!
When not in a hand, and there will be several hands you will not be playing in, you should try and focus on what the other players are doing and to focus your mental capacities on deciphering as much information as you can from the plays others make. Great players do this all of the time, it keeps them focused and it might also offer some information they might find helpful in the future hands. More importantly it also helps them stay focused on what really matters.
If you allow boredom to kick in, you will definitely stop enjoying the game and you will start seeing the game as a chore. When this happens, our minds tend to play tricks on us. Suddenly we tend to forget the basics, we forget not to play seven-deuce off-suit, we may even stop reading board texture or betting patterns. In short we turn ourselves into mindless automata whose stack will ultimately find itself heaped on another player’s pile. Boredom also has the unsavoury habit of distorting our perceptions of what other players may be doing. We tend to focus on the one hand the player to our left showed us, say a suited-connector, and not on the fact that he really has not been in that many hands after all. In other words boredom tries to convince us that any two card will do the trick.
It is true, on the other hand, that some players give the impression of being in way too many pots. Yet playing trash hands out of position is never a solid long term plan. Sure some hands may look attractive when you haven’t had a decent hand coming your way in a while, but better judgement should always prevail if you really intend to run deep into a tournament. There will be moments when semi-bluffs will win you big pots, but in the long run don’t expect to win consistently if you’re charging in with Q3 suited or J2 or K8. You might pair your big card but your kicker will more often than not come back to haunt you.
ABC poker dictates that you will play a narrow range of strong starting cards when you’re in early position. It also dictates that you will widen the range of starting hands as you progress from middle to late position. In late position then you will play the widest range of valid starting hands possible including suited connectors, (e.g. 7-8 suited or 6-7 suited or 9-T suited) Ax suited, Kx suited and small pairs from sevens to deuces. That is what works, what will earn you extra chips most of the time. Occasionally you may throw in a wild combination of starting hands, perhaps see the flop cheaply if that combo is played from the Big Blind…but don’t marry it. If the flop does not connect, scrap your trash hand and forget about it.
Many players and I fall in this category occasionally, also fall victim of what I call Bluff paranoia, which gets stronger the more bored they feel. Let me explain, you’re playing Holdem, a player to your immediate left calls your three big blinds pre-flop. The turn comes Kh9d4c, you hold pocket Aces. On such a raggedy board you bet three-fourths pot and get called yet again by the guy to your left who by the way is in the cut-off position. The Turn comes 7s, you opt to check, the guy to your left checks also, so no check raising here. The River card’s a Jc, you check again, the guy to your left drops a pot-sized bet. What do you do?
Here we have a somewhat tight player who from late position limped in suspiciously by calling a bet equal to three times the big blind. You know the guy likes to occasionally play somewhat erratically, throwing in some weak starting hands. Basically he likes to mix things up a little. On the Flop he was also willing to call your three-fourths bet but was slow to open any bets when you checked on the Turn. This guy clearly has something, he might have had pocket kings but being essentially a tight player he would have most likely played differently pre-flop, maybe re-raised. Post flop the behaviour suggests he connected somewhat significantly to the flop but still not enough for him to raise your bet. Remember you know this guy to be mostly tight with occasional loose plays. His final pot-sized opening bet on the river however should alert that something must be afoot. He now believes that whatever he holds has somehow passed a crucial test and can therefore win the pot.
In this instance the player to your left had K9 suited for two pair.
While it is never really good practice to muck pocket Aces, still many will fall victim of falling in love with such a strong starting hand. This while also rationalising that the other player must always be bluffing. Often we try to justify our decision making by any means available to us, even by attributing non-existent bluffing manoeuvres when there would be none.
Judgement in these situations would be heavily impaired if we were to add weariness to the equation. It is proven fact that most people will show a gradual deterioration in decision-making the more fatigued they get, poker players are no exception to the rule. Marathon tournaments will inexorably wear out even the most resilient brain. Players need to understand that you need to work your way up the stamina ladder, in order to ensure that all decisions are taken lucidly, and in full control of one’s mental faculties.
What this tells us is that a good tournament poker player has to learn to sustain the level of focus and attention to detail that is required in order to prevail. Through focus and improved stamina he can then hope to curb the information leak he might be unwittingly offering to his adversaries. The method one uses then depends squarely on the individual’s character as well as his unique brain chemistry. Some people just cannot perform under stress, others cannot perform if they happen to be too tired. Unless they find a sure way of addressing these factors they cannot hope to play optimally most of the time.
The process of learning how to handle weariness and boredom, also makes you aware of what information you might be leaking as a consequence. Observation is often the best exploratory tool because we might spot our own defects in others and in so doing learn ways to counter them.
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