Killer Poker Online/2: Advanced Strategies For Crushing The Internet Game. John Vorhaus
not much and it’s not nearly enough, so you just default to your straight up tight-aggressive style of play and hope your hands hold up. Over time, though, you become aware of online poker’s peculiar brand of tells: uncharacteristic hesitation from a consistently instant bettor; the odd size of a bet tipping a trap or a bluff; or a line of chat betraying ignorance, arrogance, or some other exploitable mental state. Over time, you’ve discovered some other online information giveaways, and these include:
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Some of these tells are so subtle you almost don’t know they’re there—and you’d certainly miss them if you weren’t tuned in. Say your opponent pauses before he bets. Is it real hesitation derived from indecision, or is he sitting on a monster and trying to suck you in with a hoover bet? Your answer to this question lies in the sum of your past experience with this foe, in what you’ve come to understand as his norm, in prior evidence of deceptive play, or just in “a rift in the fabric of space” that makes you feel like he’s lying. Does that sound too hokey? I mean, seriously, a rift in the fabric of space? Yet, every online player with any sensitivity sooner or later experiences this phenomenon and can distinguish with some certainty the hesitation of indecision from the stall of a slowplay. Though online poker seems to give us slim intelligence to work with, there’s actually plenty of information out there allowing us to make our reads. And as we gain experience in online play, we come to trust our reads as solidly as we would in any realworld game.
In a sense, we can be even more certain of our online reads because aside from the odd false stall there’s not much our foes can show us by way of fake tells. Plus, since we’re seeing so many hands in so short a space of time, it takes less time for our opponents’ patterns of play to emerge. It’s these patterns we become attuned to, and these patterns that give us real insight into their game. If they’re smart enough to mix up their play, well, that tells us something, too. But most online foes (like most poker players in the realworld) are remarkably consistent in their actions. You need only see someone check-fold a few times to be able to identify him as weak or cautious and to trust that assessment until he gives you reason to believe otherwise. Yes, he could feign weakness a few times to lull you into an underestimation, but what he can’t do is try to deceive you with his eyes, face, body, or breathing. If you disable his chat, he can’t even deceive you with his words. He’s reduced to his patterns, and his patterns will give him away.
Viewed through a certain filter, then, online poker is a code-breaking exercise. The sum of our opponents’ patterns of betting, raising, calling, and folding amounts to the code they’re transmitting. Sure, they can transmit false code—smart players do—but most people try to play mostly correctly according to their understanding of what correct play is. It’s this effort to play correctly that gives you your rock-solid reads. Consider these cases:
In a ten handed ring game, you notice that player Mudhead routinely raises from the button or the cutoff seat. The first time he makes this move, you might credit him with a hand, but by the third or fourth iteration you can surmise that he’s a fan of the real estate raise, the pure position steal. This tells you several things about him. First, you know that he’s capable of raising without a terribly strong hand (because he raises too frequently to be strong every time). Second, you know he’s sufficiently schooled to go for the real estate raise. Third…well, you tell me third. >>
You’re playing heads up against one Porgy Tirebiter, who seems to be a loose, passive player. A flop comes two-suited or two-straighted. You bet into it. He calls. The turn is a blank. You bet. He folds. Probably, he was on a draw. At first you can’t be sure, but if it happens again and again, you can be sure, and the information not only guides you tactically through this particular situation but also it fully lays bare your opponent’s strategic thinking, or lack thereof. You now know that he’ll take draws when the pot odds don’t justify. You also know he’s more interested in trapping than bluffing, since he’ll willingly surrender hands he doesn’t hit. You further know… >>
The player to your right, More_Science, seems to be playing his small blind correctly, according to his conservative mindset. He rarely calls raises from that position, nor will he even complete an unraised blind unless a bunch of limpers give him odds for his call. Suddenly from out of nowhere he makes a big preflop bet out of the small blind into a large field. What hand, or range of hands, would you put him on? What can you deduce from this action about his approach to the game? >>
I’m feeling a little self-consciously schoolmarmish right now, telling you things you no doubt already know. More_Science, for example, clearly holds A-A, K-K, or Q-Q; we’d be shocked to see him turn over anything else. He has given us no reason to believe that he’s capable of a frisky out-of-position bluff, and every reason to believe that he’s playing a real hand in a real way. But it’s worth going through the analysis just the same, and not just for the sake of playing your hand correctly (folding in almost all cases). You also move closer to acquiring a clear sense of this player’s profile, a reliable yardstick with which you can measure future actions against past behavior. Profiling, then—deducing an online poker player’s mindset and capabilities from his actions—is something we should routinely do if we want to make money at this game.
Profiling your foes gives you the further benefit of keeping your focus fixed on the game. If you’re like me, the sort of player who’s pretty much bored by every pot he’s not in, profiling will give you something interesting and challenging to do when you’re out of the hand. You could even keep score, using your knowledge of your enemies’ patterns to predict what they hold, and awarding yourself points when you’re right. It sounds silly, I know, but it’s better than letting your mind wander, for a wandering mind is a reliable crippler of online play.
With the warp-speed pace of internet poker play, it becomes important not just to profile your foes but to do so quickly and efficiently, so that you know how to respond to them in the moment. This is not so much about storing long-term information on an enemy (though you can do that, and it’s helpful) but about observing a player’s patterns, assigning those patterns a label, and then using the label to clarify what kind of player you’re dealing with right here and right now. Players will switch gears, of course—and when they do, you amend your label. But your first order of business is to assign a label, so that you can derive a probability of someone playing a certain way.
Yes, you’re making a number of assumptions, and no, those assumptions are not backed by massive statistical support. Yet, I contend that a player who has demonstrated the ability to check-raise bluff deserves a different designation—even if it’s a tentative, speculative one—from a player who has shown strong tendencies to call and fold. So I watch the patterns to crack the codes, and then sum up my sense of my foes by labeling them and typing their labels in the text box that every site now routinely provides for our note taking pleasure.
Many online players disparage this effort. They so rarely see a given foe more than once that they see no point in making book (taking notes) on him just on the off chance that they’ll play together again later. But you’re playing together now, aren’t you? So why not record salient information as it becomes available to you? To name a thing is to own a thing. Just ask Adam and Eve, to whom God gave dominion over all living things, plus naming rights. Once you’ve distilled a foe’s patterns down to a definable handle, you know, well, how to handle him. Even if your assessment is only 50 percent right, that’s better than blundering lunkenly into an unlabeled opponent. Especially when it’s so easy to apply the tag.
What follows are some of the handles I routinely assign to the profiles of the players I face, along with associated characteristics and characteristic plays. Take a moment to amplify my definitions. Guess, in other words, what you would expect to encounter from a player with a certain label. Note how much information about a player is implied from just his handle and not much more. Don’t be afraid to be wrong in your assessments. It’s learning to make assessments that’s important—and more than most players bother with. If to name a thing is to own a thing, then to define an opponent, and to extend and expand your definition, is to own the deed to his house.
KOSHER. A kosher player is simply simple.