Poker - Know Your Opponent
What shouldn’t you do when you sit down to play for the first? You shouldn’t allow your mind to wander. You shouldn’t think on what you are planning to do when you leave.
You shouldn’t think about what you will have for breakfast next day. Thus what should you do? When I sit down first at the table, I expend some time making attempts to figure out other players’ personalities. I thought about such things as ‘Are they in the game to make money?’, if not, ‘What is their aim?’ It proved to be quite simple to figure out the players who were there for having fun. They are usually very talkative chatting about their kids, sports, or any bad beat they occurred to hear or see about. Beware of the quieter players, those who seem to be the coolest, they are there in order to win.
As a universal rule of thumb, when play starts, it does take me as a minimum an hour to discover who is loose-aggressive, who is tight and so on, on the whole, their styles of play. You want a good example to review, you require seeing everybody play a good number of hands and collect patterns of their play. After that you can adapt accordingly. For instance, if there is an aggressive rival, I could play a bit more passively than often, flat calling pre-flop, quite reraising, since I need to get reraised just on the flop and beat him. If there is a passive opponent, I will take an advantage, reraising much before the flop and attempt to win the pot just right there. It is important to make adjustments concerning the way you have analyzed and determined your rival. Is it clear why to pay attention early is very significant?
But I am not telling you not to pay attention to the players gambling to have a good time. You need also figure them out. If I watch recurring plays which suggest they simply fancy gambling and they do not care actually about the result at all, then I shall wait it out. I shall just play with them if I’ve got a strong hand. If they appear to want to take risks and they hope to be lucky, they will go on big draws, thus you could make laydowns.
Tournaments are a bit different. Being in tournaments, I enjoy watching many flops cheaply through the early levels. Thus, I make efforts to win as many chips as possible while there are low blinds. After that, when the antes and blinds rise, I may make many raises and take blinds preflop with the help of my high stack since I’m able to afford to. It’s one of my main strategies call more hands just in early levels. Usual wisdom does completely against this kind of method in general. After lots of experimenting, this strategy works in the best way for me.
The essential thing is to keep in mind that the best way to turn into a good gambler is to test a lot of different strategies and make experiments with your game. Try to play as many tourneys as possible till you discover what works just for you, and stick to it. The amounts of books that you’ve read or what people say don’t matter. If it works just for you, continue to do it and polish it up.