[DrNick]

paulie,

A quick followup.

While you will certainly not go broke at $3/$6 by assuming that your opponents play/think as you do, you are likely going to miss out on bets.

Yes, QJo is a marginal limping hand from early middle position. However, some fairly typical opponents will play QT, Q7, Q5s and a whole array of crazy "garbage" hands in any position.

My personal approach is to assume a truly unknown opponent plays reasonably, but makes the wrong choice on every close decision. This tends to put him/her around the 60th percentile in low-limit play in my estimation.

Within three orbits of the table, I hope to already have my picture of the opponent revised to a much closer approximation of his actual playing style. The two main things I look for are looseness preflop and aggressiveness post-flop. Next, I try to get a sense on what the player's idea of a "big hand" is. Will he slowplay, or does he bet regularly up on improving?

In brick and mortar cardrooms, you will play with the same opponents over an over, so it is easy to build up a repretoire of knowledge about their playing styles. Online, it is a bit more difficult. I would keep notes on handles that you have seen, and how they played. I would recommend going to pokertracker.com to see what kind of stats tracking is available. (I'm cheap, so I write my own software, but you might find it useful.)

Cheers,
DrNick