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Dear Poker Counselor,
I have a hard time catching reads on the other players
at the table. What can I do to improve this aspect of
my game?
Steve Walas, submitted via email
Well Steve, reading others is a key psychological and
social skill that has been practiced and honed by human
beings since the dawn of time. Trying to get a basic
understanding of another person and their motivations
can be a difficult and complicated undertaking, but
is certainly one that you must improve to ensure greater
success at the poker tables. There are many poker books
and articles written saying that you can catch clues
by watching how other players stack their chips, how
they dress, and how they place their bets into the pot.
These may be good starting points, but I feel that in
order to understand how you should go about reading
your opponents in poker, you must do much more intellectual
work than this. Your first step should be to evaluate
and understand how we normally judge and read others
in our normal daily lives.
Social psychologists have long researched and written
about the concept of attribution. This concept highlights
how we are continually looking for stable traits and
underlying motives of those that we encounter and interact
with. We want to know what to predict or expect from
them, based on our previous interactions. This will
help guide us in our next interaction with that same
individual. It truly shapes and influences how we interact
with people around us. For instance, isn’t it
obvious that you interact differently with your grandmother
than your boss? We change our behavior with them because
we are aware of how to behave toward them in order to
get the desired outcome. Our accuracy in attribution
is even more vital in timesensitive and high-pressure
endeavors such as a job interview, a first date, or
a poker table with several unknown players.
Basically, we often use attribution to assign blame
or give credit to others based on whether we attribute
their actions and motivations to external or internal
factors. Did that man that cut you off in traffic do
so because he is an egotistical jerk (internal motivation),
or because the kids in the back of his car were distracting
him as he drove (external motivation)? How we interpret
that situation would directly affect the outcome of
our own feelings and emotions, either with anger (if
you see him as a jerk) or forgiveness and understanding
(if you think his kids distracted him.) Our daily life
consists of a series of such judgments and interpretations,
molding our vision of the world and directly affecting
our emotional state.
We can see this dramatically at the poker tables. You
may often find yourself thinking that the other players
are getting lucky, getting a great run of cards, and
that they are making bad calls and consistently catching
their outs. This type of thinking assigns them in your
mind to people with an external center of control. You
would see them as less skilled and perhaps reckless.
You are likely to call them down, and you are more likely
to grow more and more frustrated as they win pots against
you. On the other hand, those who you peg as internally
driven are likely to be seen in your mind as skillful,
intelligent, and measured players. You may feel more
intimidated by them, and you may look to avoid playing
pots against them. With these players, you can become
frustrated when you feel obliged to continually fold
as you play against them.
When you write that you can’t catch a read on
your opponents, you are actually implying that you can’t
catch an accurate read. You see, as per the concept
of attribution, you automatically assign a judgment
on everyone that you encounter. Attribution happens
nearly automatically within our minds, but automatically
does certainly not mean accurately. The way to catch
a good read on your opponents is to first evaluate how
and why you attributed them with certain traits. If
you think a player is loose and externally motivated,
think of why you feel this. Perhaps you’ve misread
him completely, or perhaps you’ve only read the
signals that he’s intended to show. Players often
have a hard time seeing that understanding others players
at the table starts by understanding themselves. Think
about your thinking and go make it happen.
In addition to being a poker enthusiast,
John is a certified Counselor in the state of Pennsylvania.
He has a Master of Arts degree in Counseling from West
Virginia University, and a Bachelor’s degree in
Psychology with a minor in Sociology from Lock Haven
University. You can find out more about the psychology
of poker from “the Counselor” at carlisle14@hotmail.
com or at the psychology of poker forum of www.pokerstrategyforum.com.
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