Online Poker Opponents: Keeping Track of Poker Styles

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You don't have to keep track of every single play at your table, so don't get carried away with your notes. You are, after all, a poker player first and a private detective second, so you should focus the vast majority of your efforts on playing the game. However, you do want to get in the habit of keeping your unblinking surveillance eye on unusual plays and unusual players.

As your tournament gets going or as you play a few orbits during a ring game, you should watch for patterns your opponents start to display. You can exploit patterns if you discover them. Here are a few areas to keep an eye on:

  • The tightness of their play. A tight player only plays the absolute best cards in the absolute best positions. A loose player plays anything anywhere. Knowing this characteristic helps you plan your moves against opponents: Tight play against the loose players helps you take their foolishly cast bets; aggressive play against tight opponents can cause them to drop winning hands.
  • The aggressiveness of their betting. Some people come at you with their chips like a rabid junkyard dog on nothing but junky hands, and others hang back and merely call when they hold the nuts. Aggression directed back at bold players often demands respect, causing the aggressor to back down. And knowing a passive player only stays in with the best of hands can save you a few bets.
  • The amount they bluff. Heavy bluffers need to be called (and raised) more often. You should generally believe and carefully watch players who haven't been caught bluffing.
  • Their betting position style. Some people always make an opening bet of the pot size (especially on sites that have a "bet the pot" button) in the first betting position. If you see this happening repeatedly, make a note of it and assume that the player's opening bet is nothing more than random noise. Obviously, you want to avoid folding good hands that have a good chance of winning. In fact, you may want to sporadically raise these aggressors back when they launch those big first bets to see how they react. Make a note of their reaction).
  • Their sneaky tendencies. Players who get too caught up in the notion of fooling their opponents can become predictable by too frequently representing strong hands as weak and vice versa. You should avoid betting your marginal hands into someone slowplaying a great hand, and you can sometimes call an apparently strong bet when you think you have a sneaky player's weak hand beat.
  • Their reaction to raises. If a player drops anything but the best hand every time he's raised, use this to your advantage by betting on weaker hands to take down a pot or by folding hands he stays in on. Likewise, if a player in early position bets, you raise, and then he does nothing more than check-and-call from that point on, take your cue to bet if you have a strong hand (to maximize your return), but check if you have something lesser.

You can't catch the body language tells of your opponents over the Net, but your opponents may interact with your site's software in telling ways.
As you read the following samples about pauses, think about the underlying psychology of what they represent and start building a list of things to watch for.

Make sure when you observe these behaviors that you judge them against the player's recent activity. If someone pauses before most actions, he may be playing at multiple tables at the same time or just doing something else on his computer while he gets his poker fix. In fact, if a slow opponent starts acting quickly, it may be because he has picked up a real hand and put aside the spreadsheet for the moment. Dramatic changes in behavior make great online clues.

Pausing post-flop. Whenever you play Hold'em or Omaha against someone who always acts quickly (either checking or betting) in the first betting position post-flop, be very careful if you see her pause, especially if she pauses and then checks. When most players flop a big hand, their natural tendency is to stop, read it over to make sure they see it correctly (possibly with a little internal gloating as well), and then act. The reason you see this happen more often in first position is because you don't have ample time to react in the first position. In other spots people have time to evaluate or use advance action buttons.
Unless your nemesis has gone to get some ice cream out of the freezer, an unusual pause is highly suspect.

Pausing on large calls. A large-call pauser is even scarier for you than an opponent who pauses post-flop. If you have an opponent who pauses until his action timer is almost out, and then he does it again in the same hand, you can bet 99 times out of 100 that his hand can clobber any callers. What he wants to do is make it look like he has to make a difficult call, when, in fact, he has an extremely strong hand.
Players who pause and truly struggle with a betting decision nearly always fold.