It can get mighty hot at times during late summer in Las Vegas, so I decided to take a trip north to visit with my Canadian friend Grant in Waterloo, Ontario, play a little golf in some cool weather, and check out the poker games in Brantford, a government-run casino just outside Toronto that has a poker room. Every Tuesday, they play $50-$100 limit hold'em as a signature game. On other days, the highest limit is $20-$40. The $50-$100 game generates a lot of local interest and a lot of action.
I like playing in different environments. Oftentimes, your game can get stale playing in the same location. Familiarity often leads to complacency. Sure, you lose your "home-field advantage," because you know your players and their game styles, but playing in a new location forces you to adapt to a new group of people whose styles and game plays you do not know. It forces you to think conceptually to adapt your game to the new environment, and it can be a quality learning experience.
When I go to a new game, I want to get a feel for the game, and get to know the players and determine the best plays to make against them. When you play without any feel, your game loses much of its edge. When you're a new player in a game, you also have the opportunity to create any image you choose as your opponents do not know your style. I generally start off playing very conservatively, trying not to risk my chips in any marginal situations in which I will be faced with making decisions when I am unsure of all of the components. I use this time to intensely focus on my opponents, checking out their hand selection, noticing how they play their hands, determining their knowledge level, and picking up any tells they have. I invest the time and energy not just to observe, but to analyze my opponents' thought processes and get inside their heads.
Once I get a feel for my opponents, I open up my game a bit more. My decisions are based on a higher level of information, making for better quality of play. I'll know whom I can bluff, whom I can value-bet more liberally, from whom I can induce bluffs, whom to give action, and whom to avoid. Having that information
greatly increases the value of any hand I play, thereby enabling me to profitably play a wider range of hands. Conceptually, the greater your ability to outplay your opponents, the more hands/situations you can play. That said, don't take the concept too far and start playing too many hands/situations that find you making the second-best hand too often.
When you sit down with a new group, your opponents are also unfamiliar with your style of play. This gives you the opportunity to manipulate their thinking in order to create the image you find most profitable in the game. I find that it is better to lead your opponents in the direction that they naturally want to head. If your opponents are making the mistake of calling too loosely, you want to lead them in the direction of calling even more loosely, while playing a solid style that best takes advantage of their errors. If your opponents are weak-tight, you want to induce them to play weaker and tighter while you pick them apart, robbing them in situations in which they are weak, and giving them no action when they pick up strong hands.
After observing the $50-$100 game in which I was playing for a while, I determined that most of the players were playing too loosely. Wanting to create a situation in which they would give me even more action on my good hands later in the session, I played some draws fast, gambling it up with them and creating some big pots. While I missed the draws and in some cases even gave up some small edge value in those hands, the image I created produced more value for my future hands than what I gave up in those hands.
If the game were full of weak-tight players, I would have created an image in which I was perceived as playing only good hands, adding value to my bluffs and semibluffs. To create that image, I would show big hands with which I robbed the blinds, talk up a tight game, and try to be as intimidating as possible without offending any of the players.
During my observations, I noticed one player who charged at every pot. If he thought an aggressive play could work, he went for it. He won some pots that way, but as a whole, he was far too aggressive. I made a note to play my made hands passively against him, and let him bluff at pots and call him down. I won a lot of extra bets that way. I also made a lot of check-raise plays against him, either to protect my hand from other opponents or gain the extra value of the bet. Also, I made a lot of aggressive plays against him with drawing hands, and even some with total blanks. Since he was bluffing in many of those situations, it was possible to take the pot away from him when he had nothing.
Analyze and adjust your play based on the styles and knowledge of your opponents. Having one style of play doesn't cut it; you must be able to adjust and read the game in a manner that enables you to adjust correctly.
And when you're feeling the summertime blues, consider a trip to north of the border to cool off; you'll find fired-up games to warm a player's soul!
Roy Cooke has played winning professional poker since 1972, and has been a Card Player columnist since 1992. He serves as a freelance consultant to the I-poker industry and has a successful Las Vegas real estate brokerage. He has written six poker books, which are available from www.conjelco.com/cooke. His website is www.roycooke.com. Roy's collaborator, John Bond, is a freelance writer in South Florida.
