How good is this guy?

[Bad Lobster]

> Is the player playing a lot of pots?

This will separate the bad from the medium, but not the medium from the best.

> When he plays a pot, does he always or nearly always raise or is he limping in a lot? Good players generally take control of the hand.

Sounds good, but it's necessary to separate them from the overaggressive raisers. There are a few guys who never just call before the blinds.

> Is the player playing more hands from later positions?

Good, but it could take a long time to build up a statistically significant database. Say, four times around the table to even begin to form an opinion.

> If the player was the aggressor PF, does he continue to bet on the flop to an uncoordinated board?

I'll keep an eye out for this. How reliable an indicator do you think it is?

> How often does the player win in a showdown?
> What hands is the player showing down?

Winning showdowns is a good indicator, in the long run. But the catches that I've noticed are:

- it can take a while to see enough showdowns to overcome statistical variance. On average, any given player wins once per time around the table, and many of those hands end without a showdown.

- Seeing terrible starting hands in a showdown alerts you to a bad player, but happens rarely. Seeing good hands in a showdown means little (unless the player played it too passively, another indicator of a fish). Everybody plays the good hands.

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Everybody keep in mind where I'm coming from: I play small stakes and I don't ever play for more than a few hours at a time, because I'm not a fanatic and I'm not a pro. I'm sure many of the people I'm playing against are better than I am, but at this level and without spending many, many hours getting to know them, I find it hard to pick out the really good ones.