The competitive aspect of poker has always drawn me, more than cash games. This is why you will most often see me regularly play competition formats online. Likewise, when I put together a home game, I normally opt to offer a tournament style game that so far has proven popular with my guests. Through these games, both the several thousand hands I have played so far online and the few hundreds I have played off-line, I have discovered that while books and theories do help you towards developing your skill-base, they can never really prepare you for the people you eventually meet at the tables.
The basic premise here is that in the real world, you will frequently find people who do not think about a hand in the same way you do, nor will they play a hand in the same way you do. This may be because either they are reckless by nature, or simply because they have no formal poker training.
Most people I have played casually with, play poker instinctually, at times emotionally. What this means is that the moment they pick a pair for instance, any pair, they will play it as if they are holding gold. They will play A-x, K-x or any high card for that matter, the same way they would play better holdings. Perhaps nobody told them they are playing it all wrong; yet there again who am I to tell them they are? What I have learnt is that in such circumstances I must learn to revisit the way I play the game, not my opponent. I must think differently, I cannot blame a casual opponent for playing pocket deuces as though they were holding Aces, but rather I should blame myself for my unfounded assumptions.
The first unfounded assumption, that could really cost you many chips, is to assume that your opponents will play a hand in the same way you do. If I feel that pocket aces need betting aggressively pre-flop, this does not imply my opponents do so too. Maybe they believe calling is sufficient, not because they might want to trap me, but because calling for them is more natural than raising. Alternatively, they might value any pair regardless of rank. Let me illustrate this point with an example.
A while ago, I was playing some poker with friends, most of whom had not played Texas Holdem at all. To be fair most had played some variation of 5-card draw but nothing more than that. Therefore, feeling very proud of my set-up and my newfound knowledge up until then, I set about explaining how the game plays as well as what beats what in poker. Confident that everyone had grasped the notions, we began to play.
Halfway through the evening, a friend of mine whom I shall call Sally, and on whom I had the advantage of position at the table, opened pre-flop with a bet. This was by no means unique for her, she had been opening with a minimum bet all evening, and I was admiring that to tell you the truth. This time round however, I looked at my pocket cards to find Jacks. Knowing that she had a tendency to play a whole lot of marginal and rubbish hands and wanting to thin out the field, perhaps play her heads-up, I decided to raise her bet by a further two big blinds. I need to specify that at the time I was playing in the cut-off position, which made Sally’s opening bet from middle position an interesting proposition.
My raise had the desired effect of getting the other players on the table to fold, except Sally of course who called my bet. The flop came down 2-4-9 rainbow, no flush or straight draws possible, and no scary high-cards to challenge my Jacks. Sally bets almost half the pot, this action itself confused me in that if she connected to the flop and made a pair she was not going to be a threat, but I had to give her credence for a pair. There again, she could be holding trips, perhaps she started with pocket nines or maybe fours and now she made a set. Still, my re-raise pre-flop must have signalled I had a strong pair so why did she call my raise, if indeed she had a small pair. At this point I began to think she might be holding on to a strong pair, queens or higher. I decided that the best course of action would be to call her bet and have a look at the turn. The turn came Jack of hearts; I had turned my pocket Jacks into trips! I was ecstatic, if indeed, she held pocket queens or higher I now had the nuts. Eager to get my hands on the pot, I opted for a pot-sized bet, surely she will fold I thought! Was I wrong!
Sally just came over the top, doubling my bet; I began to think she had gone crazy. No trips on the board could beat my Jacks; she was drawing dead with her queens or better. Still, the feeling was that whatever I would be throwing at her, she would call, it was useless raising, and she would not fold. I opted to call.
The river card came a deuce, indeed there now was a pair on the table, but surely, this would not help Sally, not with her high pair. Yet, once again, Sally bets and this time, she just shoved her chips all into the middle. I just kept telling myself, the girl is nuts, you want to do this so let us do it! I called.
“Three Jacks!” I announce while turning my hand over.
“I think I beat that, four twos!” she calls while showing me her pocket deuces.
Besides feeling utterly belittled and outplayed, that hand made me realise what a terrible mistake I had made earlier. I had wrongly reasoned that she would somehow play that hand the same way I would. I would find it very difficult not to dump a small pair pre-flop if someone re-raises me, yet she did just that. Following that line of thought, I therefore wrongly excluded the possibility of her turning a pocket pair into trips on the flop; she just could not have called my re-raise with a low pair…big mistake!
This little anecdote leads me to a second erroneous assumption we sometimes make about our opponents. We assume, once again very wrongly, that our opponents know or at least can reason what we might be holding. This is again a very dangerous assumption. In the previous example, I was assuming that Sally could interpret my re-raise pre-flop to mean I had a strong pair. That she would somehow know, as she entered the flop, that I had something she needed to beat with a stronger hand. This was not what she thought at all. Sally being Sally, she was simply happy to be holding on to a pair, perhaps that was the first pocket pair she had seen in a few hands and she just wanted to play at all costs. She was definitely not reasoning that I might have a higher pair; her pair was as good as money in the bank for all she knew.
The next logical step in our reasoning would be determining how best to play against a player such as Sally, that is how should one play against a player that observes none of the conventions I might be taking for granted? There is no easy answer to this question other than choosing your spots more wisely. Depending squarely on the manner in which a player normally plays a hand, or maybe on his patterns of play, one should then extrapolate a strategy that will counter his behaviourisms and favour your own skilful play.
For instance if a player comes across as loose passive, calling with weak or marginal holdings, it may indeed pay to bet into this player with nut hands because he will most certainly call any bet you lay on the table. On the other hand, if your opponent is more of a loose aggressive, it may make better sense to check to him and allow him to set the bar, especially if you do hold an unbeatable nut hand. In this way you can hope, or at least attempt to maximize profits per hand with your good hands. Likewise, with weaker holding, you need to thread carefully especially if your opponent has a proven history of playing drawing hands to the extreme consequence. Drawing hands do get lucky some times and you do not want to be there when it happens with most of your chips on the line.
It is also advisable to weigh carefully those instances where you might opt to bluff. Against some players, for instance the loose passive, bluffing may be hard to almost impossible. If you happen to be playing against a calling station, you may fair better if you opt not to bluff at all and wait for premium starting hands in order to attack.
Another assumption is an intriguing one indeed. At times we fall foul of labelling a person as being a rock or maybe, not a bluffer, when in fact that person might be throwing in a couple of bluffs occasionally. You should therefore never base your entire decision process on the premise that a given player is playing too tight to be bluffing. There might be instances it is true, that a player may fold hand after hand and play straightforward with good to premium holdings, but it does not follow that this same player might not try to slip a bluff under the radar, precisely because of the image he might have at the table. For this reason, it pays to consider other factors, such as the pattern of betting shown by that player in question, his behaviour when he is in late position as opposed to when he is in early position, so on and so forth.
While the above arguments seem to only address playing amateurs or casual players, they also apply to other players you might encounter. It is true that more experienced players will use deceptive manoeuvres in an attempt to mislead opponents, yet you need to take yourself out of the equation if you are to approximate an optimal decision given the information at hand. You do this by not assuming anything, but rather by gathering information at the table in an unbiased manner.
In the previous example, given that I knew that Sally would play a lot of hands and that, she valued any pair that came her way; my reasoning should have followed a different path. First, I should have disregarded her opening bet, since she always opened with the same sized bet. However, more importantly, post flop if she did not make any kind of drawing hand or pair Sally would have normally folded her hand. This is where I should have stopped to think that her hand was sufficiently valuable to lead her into betting with it, to open bets. So here, I had a habitual caller who was now actively betting. This of itself should have alerted me that she must have connected to the flop, and since there were no straights or flushes possible, the only way she would have connected was with a pair that she had now turned into a set. So essentially, she could now have trip deuces, fours or nines. In any case, my Jacks were beat at this point.
In hindsight, the only way to minimise losses on the turn with the appearance of a Jack, could have been to check to her and see what kind of bet she would have lain down. I would not have been surprised had she simply bet the minimum on the turn, indicating what she perceived to be a strong hand. Some may argue that going all-in at this point would have really shaken her sufficiently to reassess and possibly fold, yet I had nothing to indicate that she would indeed throw away her trips, regardless of the Jack on the turn. On the river then with the table pairing, a reassessment would have been in order. I still believe that my smooth call on the turn to a hypothetical smaller bet by Sally would still have led her then to go all-in the moment she realised she had made four deuces. The only difference would have been less commitment on my part in terms of chips in play.
The bottom line is this, never assume your opponents play the same way you do and never assume they think the same way you do. Poker is fun because it brings diverse characters together in a game of incomplete information, and the trick is to remember this diversity and keep it in mind. Definitely, there are many other skills to acquire along the way, but learning how to approach the game objectively will definitely give you an edge over the competition.
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