Switching From Online To Brick and Mortar Poker Adjust To The Painfully Slow Pace

If you were a typical multitabling online player, your biggest complaint about B&M games is, “They’re too damned slow!”

You probably dislike nearly everything about the slow pace, especially its dramatic impact on your profits. You obviously can’t win as much in about thirty hands per hour as you once won playing hundreds.

Slowness also causes boredom, impatience, general irritability, and decreased concentration. That combination will almost certainly cause mistakes you wouldn’t make online.

For example, you may get so tired of waiting for good cards that you play ones you would usually fold. And you may get so bored waiting for something interesting to happen that your mind just drifts away. Some former online players get so bored that they play with their cell phones, even when they’re playing a pot!

If you don’t concentrate, you’ll miss important information. You may even look at someone who just raised and wonder, “Who’s he?” Because you didn’t notice that he sat down, you have no idea how he plays.

The slow pace will always be irritating and concentration-destroying. Even people who never played online get bored, irritated, and careless. Four steps will reduce the negatives and occasionally convert them into positives:

Carefully study the players.

Monitor yourself.

Check out other games.

Think more thoroughly.

CAREFULLY STUDY THE PLAYERS

When you were multitabling online, you had much less time to study the players, nor did you have a great need to do it. Your software kept track of every bet they made and converted that data into statistics. By combining statistics and observations, you had a clearer picture of your opponents than you can get while playing live.
Carefully studying opponents can convert the slow pace from an irritation to an opportunity. Instead of being bored, you’ve got a demanding task that you know will put chips into your stack.

Better yet, because you’re not under time pressure, you can study whomever you like, and do it whenever and however you prefer. If you don’t know how to study players, you can easily get help. Many writers recommend ways to observe opponents, keep track of what you see, use that information to evaluate them, and develop your abilities to understand body language and betting patterns. Because you have so much time, you can cherry pick those recommendations or develop your own system for studying opponents.

MONITOR YOURSELF

Exactly the same points apply to monitoring yourself, but they should be made more forcefully. Everyone understands the value of understanding how their opponents play, even players who do it poorly. But most poker players don’t seriously monitor themselves.

Since understanding their own strengths and weaknesses is so obviously valuable, I asked Dr. Daniel Kessler, a clinical psychologist, why so many people didn’t seriously analyze themselves. He said, “Most people don’t look hard at themselves.
They really don’t want to know how what’s wrong. Because luck has such powerful short-term effects, most poker players are especially likely to feel this way. They would rather blame bad luck than analyze their own weaknesses.”

Online games’ speed and software reinforced that tendency. You didn’t have enough time to analyze your own play, and your software showed you what you were doing right and wrong. You saw too many or too few flops, raised too often or not often enough, won a high or low percentage of your showdowns. Without that computer-generated profile, you need to observe yourself carefully and evaluate how well you’re playing.

CHECK OUT THE OTHER GAMES

Game selection is your most important decision, and it’s much harder when you’re playing live. You won’t have the statistics that websites and software once provided. Websites told you how many people were seeing the flop and the average pot size. Various programs identified the weak and strong players.

The slower pace lets you look or walk around the room, checking out the other games. You may see that a terrible player is giving away chips, or that someone is on tilt, or that a table has several weak players. Then you can change games.

THINK MORE THOROUGHLY

The other recommendations will provide you with important information, probably more than you can understand and apply immediately. We’ve all made stupid mistakes by acting too quickly. We bet, raised, or folded, and then berated ourselves, “Why didn’t I think?”

While multitabling online, you had so little time that you had to react very quickly. In live games there’s no reason to act without thinking carefully.

I mentioned this discussion in an earlier column, but I’ll expand it here. A coaching client is a middle-limit pro. When I told him to slow down, observe, and think more carefully, he objected, “I don’t want to look weak and indecisive. Besides, it would irritate the other players.”

I asked, “Who’s the slowest player you know?”

“Roy Cooke. He often goes into what he calls ‘The Roy Cooke Huddle.’”

“Do his ‘huddles’ irritate people?”

“They sure do.”

“You’re a pro. Do you play to win money or to make friends?”

“To make money. I’m paying you to help me win more.”

“Is Roy a big winner?”

“Yes.”

“Does anyone think Roy is weak and indecisive?”

He nodded his head and smiled ruefully, finally getting the point, “Of course not. We all know he’s an excellent player.”

Roy is a big winner precisely because he thinks so thoroughly. Other writers explain general principles, but Roy shows us how he applies those principles in specific situations. He invites us “into his head” by reporting the way he played a hand against a carefully described opponent in a specific situation.

He explains how and why he takes so many factors into account, including ones we rarely think about. In addition to describing a player’s general skill and style, he tells us how he plays in this kind of situation. He also says what he expects this opponent to do if this or that happens on future streets. He doesn’t just teach us what to look for; he also tells us how to interpret and use that information.

He couldn’t take all that information into account and analyze it so well if he didn’t take much more time than most players. He knows that some opponents resent his slowness. That’s their problem, not his. He wants to make the best possible decisions, and he can’t do it without taking the time to think carefully. Neither can you.

So stop yielding to your annoyance about the slow pace. Instead, convert that slow pace into an asset by studying your opponents, monitoring yourself, checking out other games, and then thinking thoroughly about all that information. ♠

Do you often wonder, “Why are my results so disappointing?” Ask Dr. Al, [email protected]. He’s David Sklansky’s co-author for DUCY? and the sole author of five poker psychology books.