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You’ve just been moved to a new table. There’s a momentary pause and a new window pops open with eight new names, a collection of numbers, and a few pictures – if you’re lucky. In a brick and mortar casino the eight blank faces staring up at you as you unrack your chips can be dull, but most players find their online opponents even more confounding. Part of the challenge of tournament poker is that tables constantly break. A skilled tournament player can have hours of analysis wiped away at any moment; one table move and he’s reduced to guessing how his “average” opponent plays.
But in fact, the average tournament poker player is astonishingly predictable. Not only do most minds reach the same conclusion when thinking about certain situations organically, but there is also a lot of very prevalent “general wisdom” among gamblers. The result is that in a game of deception most of the players bet their hands in a way that is anything but deceptive. I want to describe some common patterns that many players have in their betting, what hand ranges those actions indicate, and explain the justification that those players have for their play. I don’t intend to advocate any of the ideas I’m describing; if anything I want to caution the reader against being too predictable.
The first way to restrict a player’s range is to look at how he entered the pot. Did he limp in or did he raise? If he raised, how large was his raise? Be cautious about players who always raise the same amount; a raise you attach meaning to might just be his default number. Usually a player’s pre-flop action is very straightforward: The more chips he puts in the pot, the more he likes his hand, with a few exceptions. Unlike in an online cash game, isolating limpers is relatively rare in an online tournament. A player who raises after a bunch of limpers probably has a strong hand, but it’s hard to tell specifically against the average opponent. The main situation in which players are likely to give away their hands is when they are the first to enter a pot.
In online tournaments I rarely encounter players who like to limp in with hands like AK, A-Q, A-J, Q-Q, J-J, 10-10, or 9-9. When a player just calls the big blind I already start discounting those hands. A lot of solid tournament players tend to either raise first in or fold with speculative hands that are suited, connected, or have Broadway cards. Some players might occasionally limp first in with something really marginal like 10-7 suited, but with a hand like K-Q they usually raise. The only really popular hands to limp are small pocket pairs. When a player limps first to enter the pot in early or middle position, and then just calls a raise (rather than reraising like he was trapping with AA or K-K) you might be able to peg him on a range as exact as 2-2 to 7-7. This doesn’t really hold true for players in late position who might play more marginal hands, and once one player limps other players are likely to call behind him with all sorts of weak hands.
The same logic about being the first to enter the pot applies to minimum raises – and other raises less than three times the big blind – versus large raises – four times the big blind, for example – and for similar reasons. Most tournament players like to put in a big raise with the “medium to strong” hands like A-K, A-Q, A-J, Q-Q, J-J, 10-10, or 9-9. They do the smaller raises with weaker hands because they don’t want to invest a lot of money with a weak hand that they are more likely to have to fold late and they make a larger raise with A-K, for example, because they don’t want a multi-way pot and they do want to charge their opponents to “draw out” on them. I rarely see a big raise with A-A or K-K; I suspect because the fear of getting no action overcomes the fear of getting outdrawn (which is really the fear of having to fold, a nonexistent one for many players with A-A).
A last category of pre-flop open (first in) raise sizes is the gigantic raise. Most solid average players don’t open the pot for five times the big blind or greater unless they are shortstacked and are going all in. A player who does make a gigantic opening raise could either be erratic enough to have a wide range or be predictable enough to have a very strong hand. But one thing you can be sure of is after putting in so many chips he is going to be reluctant to fold. It’s rare for stacks to be above fifty times the big blind in the middle or late stages of an online tournament, so a gigantic raiser is usually going to be getting good pot odds if you move in on him and even better pot odds on a reraise less than all in. Most raisers are aware of this and hence want to go with the hand no matter what.
You can put a relatively unknown player on a hand post-flop with much greater accuracy if you recognize that when he raises to 400 in first position at the 100-200 blind level it’s very unlikely that he has A-K; and when he raises to 800 in the same situation it’s even more unlikely that he has J-10 suited. If he raises to 600, though, there is often little that you can conclude. A growing number of players are making small raises with all their hands, but the large raise tell is still very reliable
Open raising isn’t the only situation in which tournament players can be extremely communicative. Like raise size, three-bet (reraise) size can also directly correlate with hand strength. A tournament player who three-bets about 3.5 to 4 times the opening raise is usually betting for value. In fact, he probably has a restricted version of the range that he’d open raise for 3.5 to 4 times the big blind. Often his range just has A-K, Q-Q, and J-J instead of A-K, A-Q, A-J, Q-Q, J-J, 10-10, or 9- 9. Versus a late position raiser, it might include A-Q, 10-10, and 9-9. The reason is that these hands are much stronger than what your opponent puts the original raiser on, but they don’t play particularly well after the flop in three-bet pots. Most players would rather win the pot pre-flop than have to play a threebet pot with A-K, because they know they won’t make a pair very often. This is even truer when the three-bettor is out of position.
It’s harder to assign a precise hand range to a player who makes a small – three times the initial raise or less – three-bet. The days when everyone just flat called raises and gave up the flop are over, especially in cyberspace. The average tournament player is aware that people are trying to steal his blind and he is capable of making a move to defend it.
Rather than attempt to qualify which hands a small three-bettor might have, we can eliminate which hands he cannot have, namely the “medium to strong” range that he would have made a large three-bet with. If we do eliminate those hands (this is somewhat of a stretch here but we’re looking for a tentative range against an unknown, not a set-in-stone, range) then we’re left with a situation where the three-bettor has the nuts or a bluff. He’s either trapping with A-A or K-K (or sometimes Q-Q) or he’s three-betting with a suited connector or even garbage in an attempt to pick up the pot. He’s making the small threebets as a bluff because they require a lower chance of success to be profitable (a 3.5 times reraise is often risking over two times the pot).
Very well, but Mr. Galfond tells us there are far more combinations of the bluff hands than the twelve combinations of A-A and K-K. Aaron refers to Phil Galfond’s article “G-Bucks” which appears in the April 2007 issue of Bluff Magazine and is available online at www.bluffmagazine.com. Does no one ever have anything? What you actually have to weigh is all the many combinations of bluff raises versus the relatively small chance that your opponent is both capable of bluff three-betting and thinks this particular hand is an appropriate spot. Whether he thinks it’s an appropriate spot depends on the original raiser’s image, which you might not know either. Even if you can’t tell whether a player has it or not, the bluff/nuts dichotomy is still a useful read. It will come up again when we’re examining post-flop bet sizes. If you’re considering moving in on a player, it can be helpful to realize that 2-2, 8-7 suited, and A-J are all worth about the same: They’re absolutely crushed when you get called.
It’s almost effortless to always bet the same amount and it’s certainly not difficult to deceive people with varying bet sizes contrary to the ones I just described. Fortunately, tournament players don’t seem to be adapting quickly. Even as they do adapt, new players are constantly flocking to the game equipped only with “0th level,” thinking that they should make a big raise with A-K. Analyzing these opponents might not be as glamorous as getting a read on a tricky, aggressive professional, but it’s just as important for acquir
To be continued once the remainder of the article is found…..
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