Stop Over Thinking
It’s been said many times that poker professionals often have a harder time fi guring out amateurs than they do other professionals. One of the toughest obstacles to overcome on a daily basis when playing poker professionally is constantly reminding yourself that not everyone out there plays and thinks like you do. It’s very important to not draw conclusions on an opponent’s possible hand range based on how *YOU* would play the hand, and instead focus on how *THEY* might play the hand. The difference is subtle, but very important!
As an example, I was talking through a situation with a friend of mine last week and in this particular hand his opponent has raised in early position and he had called in late position with A-K. The fl op had come A-6-2 with two diamonds. The early position raiser checked to him, he bet, and his opponent called. The turn was an off-suit 9. His opponent checked again and he bet and his opponent quickly called. The river was the Qd and his opponent suddenly came out fi ring with a full pot sized bet.
My friend told me there was no way he could possibly have a fl ush, because he certainly would have bet a fl ush draw on the fl op. I quickly pointed out that this was a huge fl aw in his thinking versus an unknown player (this sort of thought process can often make sense if you know the player well though). Just because we would never play a fl ush draw so passively after taking the lead prefl op does not mean our opponents would not. Many players are scared to play their draws aggressively until they make them. My friend called thinking the line looked very gbluff-likeh and the opponent tabled Kd Jd for the nut fl ush.
The important lesson here is that when playing against a relatively unknown player we can’t make broad assumptions about their holdings based on how we would play hands. We must keep an open mind and consider that players will often play in a way that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us. This doesn’t mean throwing all hand analysis out the window, but it does mean you must be a bit more generic in your analysis and give weight to hands that are more probable than others, but not completely rule something out. You can obviously make basic assumptions, like thinking your opponent probably didn’t call with 7-2 off-suit from early position, but more specifi c assumptions, like your opponent cannot have a fl ush draw because he didn’t bet it after taking the lead, can lead to bad decisions.
I’ve been playing a lot of Pot Limit Omaha lately and another good example of this came up there. I was at a deep stacked $3/$6 table where both players had around $1,200 in front of them. An early position player raised and a middle position player reraised him. The middle position player was a tight player who didn’t reraise too often so it was fairly obvious he had AA- x-x. The early position player called and the fl op was 2-2-6. The early position player check raised the middle position player and the middle position player proceeded to get the rest of his chips in the middle while the early position player had 2-4-5-6 for the fl opped second nuts. Afterwards, the reraiser made a comment about how he never thought the other player could call a reraise with either a 2 or 6-6 in his hand. While it’s true that most players would not call a reraise with a 2 or 6-6 in their hand, making this broad generalization caused him to lose a 400 big blind pot with two pair because he assumed the other player would play similar to his own style.
Both of these examples show how big pots can be lost by making assumptions about players based on information we know about ourselves and not based on what we know about our opponents. It is very important that we can act on our reads on our opponents at the tables, but it is equally important that we do not act on generalizations based on our own play that are not confi rmed by things we’ve actually seen our opponents doing at the tables. I have myself even fallen victim many times to making a hero play because I thought to myself “there is no way he could have THAT hand.” There are many different ways to play poker, and while you may feel your way is the best way, other players have different motivations for what they do at the table. Until you understand how a certain opponent plays, be sure to keep an open mind!
