Poker Articles
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Be Prepared To Be An Azzhole - When Profitable
Poker prop article posted August 5th, 2006There's a lot of advantages to online play versus brick and mortar, but none more profitable than all the information that you can have at your fingertips augmented by the information that others provide during play.
First and foremost, before sitting down to play, you've got to be prepared. Every serious player should sign up for an account on thepokerdb.com and keep a browser window open next to your poker screen. I'm in no way affiliated with thepokerdb.com except for having an account on there myself, but I have found it so useful that I don't hesitate to laud its praises to anyone who will listen. It keeps a record of all the multi-table cash tournament results from PokerStars.com, searchable by screen name (and they're in the process of adding results from other major sites as well).
Why does this matter to you? Well, even if you don't play on PokerStars, you'll find that by and large, most avid online players play on more than one site and a vast majority of them use the same screen name on every site. So let's say you're sitting down to play a tourney at some online poker site. The first thing you should do is start looking up the other players on your table at thepokerdb.com. Well, actually the first thing you should do is take a bathroom break, so you won't have to later in the tourney and have your pocket rockets auto-folded. But immediately after that, start doing your user lookups. Then, for any matches you see, make an assessment of how strong that player's results are. Keep in mind that those results are for multi-table tourneys and that PokerStars is upper-middle tier in terms of quality of players (tougher than PartyPoker, not as tough as FullTilt), so anybody that has a history of consistent cashing those tourneys, you now have a bit of information on them that you would not have had otherwise.
Now take advantage of that other sweet benefit of online play - the player notes feature. Make a note of your assessment for each player you found so that it will save you some time if you ever run into the same player again. Be careful of course, since players can use different screen names, so a lack of a match in the db doesn't necessarily mean that the player is a fish.
Ok, so you've found two of the 9 players at your table have extensive history of cashing and winning multi-table tourneys. How you use this information is up to you and your playing style, but there are some clear cases where this info can save your butt in close decisions. For the most part, if you're in the early stages of a big tourney and one of these guys puts you all-in and you're holding anything less than the nuts, you are going to be better off folding and waiting for a better spot and accumulating chips from the weaker opponents. There's no guarantee that they have you beat, but I can guarantee that there will be easier chips to be won if you stuck around the table instead of clashing with the titans in the first couple of levels. Of course if you're of the mind set that you need to push every advantage and win every pot that you think you might have the best hand in, then all the information in the world isn't going to save you from yourself. For the rest of us, the smart play, especially in bigger tourneys, is to avoid tough decisions against the better players and save your ammo for the weaker players.
In online play, you get all sorts of bad players and the best variety of those are the ones who readily give you information through that other fabulous money-making tool of online play - the chat box. Almost every time someone types something into the chat box other than "nh" or "ty", they're giving away info. You've all seen whining and crying after bad beats. A player who takes a bad beat and types nothing, you don't really have a clue if they're steaming or whether or not it will affect their play, it isn't a card room where you can look over and see pursed lips and shaking heads to make that kind of judgement. But online - oh baby - these guys will come right out and start berating the suck-out artists, often-times spewing so much trash that you can pretty much peg exactly the type of player they are. I especially love the players who try to spout odds, and love it even more when they spout them incorrectly. These are the players that have just read a few books and have convinced themselves that they suddenly know the "right" way to play and want everyone else to know it. This is terrific news for us, because nobody plays more predictably than a by-the-book player and these guys are basically using the chat box to advertise that this is exactly what they are! The best opportunities come when these kinds of players go on tilt. So this is where your preparation and experience can come into play.
First, you have to understand something about their personality. A player who gripes and moans about bad beats is basically someone whom is begging for respect. Not only are they trying to make themselves feel better by rationalizing their losses as bad beats by bad players, but they've also got an external frame of reference, meaning they actually care what other players at the table think of them. More good news for us!
Now I don't typically endorse being an "azzhole" at the poker table, online or otherwise, but if you so choose, it's profitable to know that players with an external frame of reference are the easiest to tilt. All you have to do is speak down to them. If they miscalculated odds, point it out and type "LOL" (if you're playing online). If they make a subsequent lay-down, tell them that you knew they were going to fold. Anything that belittles them will fire them up and make them play on tilt. All you're hoping for is that you catch a hand when they take it personally and try to fire back at you in every pot. It's quite a profitable setup when it works.
Of course, the downside is that everybody else at your table will think you're a "azzhole". But then again, you probably are. ;)
- Poker Article written by MoneyMoy
The above poker prop article was posted on August 5th, 2006. If you have questions about Mad Poker Props or poker propping please contact us.