Pay Attention or Just Pay (how to develop your reads)

[droolie]

Most of us understand that poker profits come from outplaying the other players in the game. We also understand that in order to beat other players we would like for our edge to be as large as possible to account for random chance (variance). To that end we study books and posts and memorize starting hand charts and EV's. We are proud to master critical concepts and apply them at the table and watch our winrates improve and our bankrolls grow. Despite this we all make the same mistake almost every time we play. We allow ourselves to be distracted from the game at hand.

Poker is a game of information or more correctly incomplete information. We know what cards we have and can quickly compute the mathematical probabilities of what cards will come on the flop turn and river. If this was all there was to poker many of us would be as good as you can be. However I left out one obvious and critical piece of information that we do not know: what the other players have in their hands. We also don't know how they will behave with those hands. If we knew what the other players had in their hands and how they would play them, theoretically, we could play poker perfectly. I suggest that most of us (myself included) do not work hard enough to try to gain this valuable information.

We allow too many distractions...

We play too many tables at once.

We mess with pokertacker and Gametime+ and ignore the table.

We surf the web.

We watch tons of porn.

All of these extraneous activities distract us from the only thing that could actually give us an additional edge beyond what we brought to the table with us in the form of superior skills, namely paying attention to the way the other players play the game.

One thing I've learned about poker is that almost everybody plays according to their own set of principles. Many players are terribly misguided in these principles and some are extremely well versed in poker strategy theory. What they both have in common is that they will repeat similar actions when placed in a similar situation in the future. This means that their play will show a pattern. Almost every limit player has a defineable pattern. Oftentimes better players are actually more easily read due to the fact that they play according to more sound principles that are easily defined. Bad players can seem quite random in their behavior and it can take considerably longer to discover what it is they're trying to do in most situations. The real masters know when someone is onto their pattern and vary their play to keep their edge but these players are true rarities. Most internet players will be somewhat predictable if you just take the time to try to learn their pattern.

"How do we learn these patterns when players are so bad and tables turn over so quickly?" I hear you ask.

Stay attentive and active in the games when you aren't in the hand and you will develop as a player much more quickly than by adding tables. Try to guess the hole cards of the players in the hand when you have folded then click on the hand history and find out if you are right. This little game should help you to develop your hand reading which is a crucial skill when you move up in limits. If you aren't clicking on the hand histories and seeing what cards got mucked you are throwing away information that could be the difference between winning and losing in a future hand.

It doesn't matter that the players are bad, they aren't betting randomly. There is a pattern to their idiocy and the sooner you begin to understand it the sooner you will be able to win at a higher levels. Your player reads will be much better as well. Bad players do start showing similar mistakes in their patterns and you can start finding commonly repeated actions the more you try to think about the patterns of different players. In time it won't take many hands before you recognize a certain type of player and what he's likley to do. You'll know who only check-raises the turn with a monster and who likes to bluff or semi-bluff. You'll start noticing who likes to peel on the flop but will fold on the turn if they have nothing. You'll find the slowplayers, the players who pump draws, the players who wilt and call-down with anything less than the nuts. You'll also find the aggressive players who will fold in the face of a well-timed donk bet, 3-bet or C/R. You'll have a better understanding of who to value bet the river against and who you should check behind to. You'll know who is likely to be bluff raising that turn scare card and who very is very likely to have it.

Different players require different strategies in order to maximize your edge over them. If you aren't paying attention to these types of betting (and calling or folding) patterns, you're paying for it in terms of BB's. You are also stunting your growth as a player and needlessly delaying moving up to much more profitable games where the players are tougher and yet just as readable if not more so but where hand and player reading is of tantamount imprortance. Develop this skill now or pay for it dearly later.

I don't profess to be a master hand reader and I struggle to find the discipline to absorb this information as well. I speak from experience as I play tons of four-tabling and even 8-tabling bonus clearing sessions and my game does not improve when I do this. I'm playing the cards, the odds and some vague sense that a player is too loose or too aggressive. The only time I feel like I'm improving is when I play 2 tables (I have much practice at multi-tabling) and concentrate 100% of my energy on gathering every piece of information available to me at the table. This means watching hands when I've folded, checking the hand histories everytime a hand goes to showdown and thinking through the betting again to see who bet with what and when and then making a note on that player for future reference. Doing this at two tables is a ton of work for a seasoned veteran and I suggest doing it at just one table will be plently for most of you for a while.

Poker Tracker only gives you a rough picture of the general player type. This might give you an idea of where to sit and what range of hands they might be playing or betting but it won't do much in the way telling you specicifically what they do in certain situations. These types of observations are up to you to find yourself. If by applying the advice in this thread you find one player per session capable of bluff raising the river by simply checking a hand history that is available for free for all to see come back to this thread, give it a bump and thank me.