Know Your Opponent
What should you not do when you first sit down at the table. You should not let your mind wander. You should not think about what you’re going to do once you leave.
You should not be thinking about what you’re going to have for breakfast the next day. So what should you be doing? Well, when I first sit down at I table, I spend some time trying to figure out my opponents’ personalities. I ask myself things like, are they into the game and there to make money? If not, what’s their purpose? It should be very easy to figure out what players are there to have fun. Normally, they are very talkative just chatting away about sports, their kids or some bad beat that they happened to see or heard about. Be aware of the quieter ones, the ones that seem the coolest, they’re the ones who are there to win.
As a general rule of thumb, once play begins, it takes me at least an hour to figure out who is tight, who is loose-aggressive, etc, basically, their playing styles. You need a good enough sample to review, you need to see everyone play a good few hands and pick up patterns in their play. Then you can adjust accordingly. For example, with an aggressive opponent, I might play a little more passively than usual, flat-calling pre-flop rather reraising, because I want to get reraised on the flop and outplay him. With a passive player, I’ll take advantage, reraising a lot before the flop and try to win the pot right there. The important thing is to make adjustments depending on the way you’ve analyzed and profiled your opponent. See why paying attention early is so important?
I’m not saying to give a free pass to the guys playing to have fun. You need to figure them out as well. If I see repetitive plays that suggest they just want to gamble and they don’t really care at all about the outcome, then I’ll wait it out. I’ll only gamble with them if I have a strong hand. If they look like they want to take some risks and hope to get lucky, they’ll be going on big draws, so you might have to make some laydowns.
Tournaments it a bit different. In tournaments, I like to see a lot of flops cheaply during the early levels. This way, I try to pick up as many chips as I can when the blinds are low. Then, when the blinds and antes go up, I can make a lot of raises and pick up blinds preflop with my big stack because I can afford to. This is one of my key strategies see more hands in early levels. Conventional wisdom normally does directly against this method. After doing a lot of experimenting, this is the one that works best for me. The important thing is to remember that the best way to become a good player is to try out many different strategies and experiment with your game. Play as many tournaments as you can until you find what works for you, and stick with it. It doesn’t matter how many books you read or what other people say. If it works for you, keep on doing it and perfect it.
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