Knowing your competition means success in poker. Watch their plays, their bet sizes, along with studying GTO strategy. It could take you all the way to the top.
Watching their table image lets you know if they are playing tight or loose, and then you can play a tight hand tight, or a loose hand loose so that you don’t give them too many tells, and you are also keeping tabs on what’s going on at the table so that you don’t get read the way that other people are expecting you to be read.
Identifying Your Opponents
To be able to expertly employ advanced poker strategies you need to be able to put your opponent on a range, the type of game they play and the style they adopt in doing so. This makes life so much easier at the tables and, more importantly, can be a vital aid in making the right decision at the right time – just get better at putting your opponent on a range and playing in tune with what you perceive they are doing.
By observing your opponent’s seat, his playing style, his bet-sizing, our physical tells, and establishing their range based upon such probabilities: we can play better ourselves. If we do our homework, we can not just survive, but profit in the face of it.
And also primer-level knowledge and luck would likely get you ahead at the poker tables of small-stakes casinos but, if you take your game online, you’ll need to play at a much higher level, so rewarding learning and adaptation. Here’s five advanced tips: firstly, read the good players better, secondly, you’ll need to shove your big draws more aggressively, thirdly, fold your mediocre hands and hinder your opponent’s ability to read your game by not showing your hands.
Recognizing Patterns
As Tooley adds: ‘I think we all can detect the pattern of someone’s betting, and so it’s just part and parcel of what you would consider an adjustment of your style [at the tables].’ As such, following is the practice behind more elevated techniques which are designed to have a ‘swing’ effect – that is, with the goal of changing the ‘flow’ of the game at the tables. This type of bet-sizing conveys all sorts of psychological information about one’s opponent – his propensity to bluff, his aggression and table image, to name just three examples.
Knowing when your opponent is bluffing will allow you to tailor your strategy accordingly, and his re-raise frequency will let you calculate his range of possible hand holdings to gain a competitive advantage.
Advanced players have also learned about pot control and value betting, which they use to get the most money when they win and the least amount of money when they lose. Pot control might escape the notice of novices as an advanced poker tactic, but experienced players use it to avoid overcommitments with a weak hand by making bets of a size that protects them from overcommitting and factoring in opponents’ betting patterns to further minimise losses.
Recognizing Weaknesses
To be a good poker player, you have to know which opponents to pick on, and also, which tells and leaks to beat them with. Mastering the fundamentals of playing poker is only the beginning, you need a combination of skill, strategy and psychology in order to beat your opponent. Advanced tactics might involve: reading the table dynamics, recognising particular hand-reading tells or using exploitative tactics. Once you master these advanced techniques, you’ll be dominating at the tables!
Table Dynamics: Get a feel for the way your opponents’ ranges, sizing, reads, tells, behaviour or moods change as the game moves along.
Selective bluff in behaviour that is inconsistent with your hand strength so as to cause mistakes in how your opponents will characterise the bluffs that you make.
Exploiting Weaknesses
In contrast to its top opponents, however, poker frequently resembles a game of psychological warfare that ultimately comes down to will power. Poker is more about peeling away all the noise and trickery and doubling down on the small details that make a player mask their tells and exploit their opponent’s weaknesses for huge margins of success. This requires a balance of practice and study – two key pillars of poker success.
Experienced players know that it’s the element of playing without intention that is valuable. Sometimes you will deviate from your ‘normal’ betting pattern, maybe even alter the tells for whatever reason. Other players will start chasing. The key is to throw them off the scent.
Josh Waitzkin used to be one of the top poker players in the world. To minimise tells he’d switch between sincere and fake faces and utter blank expressions of indifference that could make opponents think he had a monster hand when he was stone broke.