Sizing Up the Opposition

I’ve played the main event of the World Series of Poker every year since 2006. However, this year I have already played more preliminary WSOP events than I did in all previous years combined. I didn’t used to enjoy live poker as much as I do now, and there were always other things I wanted to do with my summer.

This is the first year that I’m spending the better part of the summer in Las Vegas, and I’m already realizing what a unique challenge and opportunity the preliminary events present. Because these tournaments attract players of a variety of skill levels from all over the world, it can be hard to guess how your opponents will play when you first sit down with them. However, many of these players will make big mistakes that you’d like to exploit. Compounding the problem, the events’ shallow structures make it unlikely that you will play with the same people long enough to get an in-depth look at their games. How, then, to take full advantage of the many errors you’re likely to encounter?

The key is to pay careful attention to every hand that is played and to wring as much information as you possibly can from everything that happens. Even a single hand can provide important clues about how you ought to approach the players involved.

When extrapolating from what you see, try to think not just about how an opponent is playing, but about what specifically you are going to do about it. Whether or not you are actually writing them down, aim to express your reads in the form of actionable information: “Against this player, I will….”

Your information won’t be perfect, but it never is in poker. You just have to make the best assumptions that you can and remain open to revising them as you learn more. I’ll give you a few examples from my own experiences in the preliminary tournaments so far. Note that these are just reads that I formed from my observations in a single hand, not necessarily anything I ever actually got to act upon.

The first is from a $1,000 no-limit hold ‘em event. Blinds were 25-25, and the player in the cutoff open limped. This tells me that he is passive and more interested in making hands than in fighting for pots and trying to win even when he isn’t ahead, at least in small pots. I plan to make liberal use of continuation bets and expect him to give up easily if he didn’t get a piece of the flop. When he does raise, I need to take it seriously, because he will limp with some of the weaker hands that other players would raise.

The blinds checked their option, and the three of them saw a Q-9-5 flop. The action checked to the cutoff, who bet 75, the size of the pot. The small blind folded and the big blind called. They checked it down the rest of the way, the big blind showed J-5, and the cutoff won the pot with 10-9 offsuit.

Upon seeing the big blind’s hand and reviewing the way he played in light of that new information, I can make some notes about him. He seems to have made no attempt to think about what the cutoff might have had, and called just because he himself had a pair. It also seems like he evaluated the bet in terms of its absolute size (“It’s just 75 in chips, I’ve got 3,000”) rather than its size relative to the pot, which was actually quite large.

If he’s going to call the flop with such weak hands, then he’ll frequently make it to the turn and river with very weak hands, which means he will be a good target for multi-barrel bluffs. When bluffing, I won’t worry as much about what I’m representing and will aim merely to frighten him with the size of my bets. Likewise, I’ll need to keep my value bets small in absolute terms if I’m trying to get him to call with relatively weak hands.

Another good example came when I moved tables in a $1,500 no-limit event. A table change presents you with the interesting challenge of needing to size up eight or nine new players who all already know something about each other. It also presents you with the unique opportunity to decipher what they all think about each other based on how they play against one another.

In my first hand at this table, blinds were 200-400 with a 50 ante. A player in early position opened with a raise to 1,025 and was called by the player in the big blind. The big blind checked a Q-8-4 rainbow flop, the preflop raiser bet 1,400, the big blind check-raised to 3,000 and folded quickly when he was put all-in for about 9,000 more.

Although I didn’t see either player’s hand, I still feel comfortable drawing some tentative conclusions. The big blind was clearly either bluffing or raising for information with his check-raise, since his hand wasn’t good enough to call a shove. Given how quickly he folded, I think it was more likely the former.

His willingness to check-raise bluff indicates that he may not give up easily in spots where he realizes his opponents don’t necessarily have strong hands. I’ll have to put some thought into balancing my ranges against him in common bluffing spots and giving up on some flop textures where I might try to bluff other players.

It’s worth noting, though, that this wasn’t a very sophisticated bluff. There are probably very few hands that he would check-raise for value in this spot, maybe just K-Q and better, so it doesn’t seem like he put too much thought into what he was representing. He merely raised because he thought his opponent wasn’t likely to have a hand. Against more sophisticated players, I’m actually reluctant to bluff catch in “obvious” spots, because I know that they know that those spots are obvious. That won’t be a concern against this player.

His bluff also indicates something about the other player, though. Most people don’t check-raise bluff an early position raiser for no reason, so probably this guy had been raising a lot preflop and generally bullying the table. His position alone wouldn’t suggest that his range was particularly weak, so something else must have motivated the big blind to try to bluff him.

If this player really is the sort to open a lot of pots preflop, then he probably has a lot of experience with people trying to play back at him in various ways. That means that he probably read the big blind’s check-raise the same way that I did and saw it for the weak hand that it was. Consequently, I’d expect him to slow play a really strong hand in this spot, since the big blind is unlikely to call a shove. More likely, he was either rebluffing or protecting something much weaker than a queen that he nevertheless thought was good.

Even when he raises in early position, I can’t necessarily give this guy credit for a big hand. Nevertheless, I’ll have to be careful to tell a good story when I bluff him, because it seems like he has the skills and the courage to pull the trigger if he doesn’t believe me. If I’m fortunate enough to get a big hand against him, though, I can try to trap him by representing a weak bluff like this one.

If you’re thinking that that’s an awful lot to infer from a single hand, you’re right. I could easily be way off, and I’ll remain open to refining or revising these reads as more information becomes available. I could be called upon to make big decisions against either of these players as soon as the very next hand, though, and I’d rather be armed with tentative assumptions about their play than none at all. ♠

Andrew Brokos is a professional poker player, writer and coach. He blogs about poker strategy on ThinkingPoker.net and is co-host of the Thinking Poker Podcast. Andrew is also interested in education reform and founded an after-school debate program for urban youth.