Targeting Players
One phrase you often hear people say is “don’t play cards, play poker." To people who don't play poker seriously, this doesn't always make sense. To many people it’s one and the same. One of the main differences is fi guring out people’s playing tendencies and then targeting the players who are most likely to give you chips. Often this means targeting the weakest players, but not always. Sometimes it means targeting someone who may be a good player but has a very awkward chip stack at this blind level, or maybe someone who has a small leak in their game that you’re in good position to exploit.
One of the things I really try to fi gure out the fi rst few orbits of a poker tournament is where my chips are going to come from. Believe it or not I usually know fairly quickly and it’s usually fairly accurate. For instance in one World Series of Poker event I just played, there was a gentleman in Seat 1 (I was in Seat 4) who was limping a lot of pots from middle position. He would then play very straightforward post-fl op (check and fold if he missed, bet if he hit any piece of it). I quickly identifi ed him as the source of my chips. I would consciously play many more pots when he was in the pot with a much wider range of hands and would sometimes even raise to isolate him. He played in such a way that if he checked I could almost always win the pot right there, and if he bet I could hit some sort of concealed hand and could get him to build a big pot with me.
The plan was working well and I got my initial starting stack of 5000 up to 6500 mostly through him, and luckily for me everyone else at the table kept giving him more chips, which I hoped would end up in my stack! I did eventually get him to play a 15k pot with me when I had A-A to his 6-6, but he hit a 6 after we got all the money in. Even though things didn’t work exactly according to plan results-wise, I put myself in great position to have three times the starting stack three levels into a WSOP tournament by targeting one player who had a particular weakness that I identifi ed and was poised to exploit. Sometimes you’re not so fortunate when these types of players are to your left where it’s hard to know whether or not they’ll enter the pot before you have to act.
Here’s another example from the $5,000 No Limit tournament I played last week. There was a gentleman with 14,000 chips at 200/400 blinds who was opening way too many pots. I had 40,000 chips and was able to use him as a source to build my stack as he was to my right and often opening to 1,100. If I raised to 3,200 it put him in a really bad spot unless he had a top hand as that was nearly 25% of his stack. I knew that if he kept opening light as he was I could pick some spots and re-raise him and he’d have to fold. As long as I wasn’t super obvious about it I could use him as a source for some chips by re-stealing over his raise once every two orbits or so. That alone would keep me ahead of the blinds, and added to my real hands and normal steals I would chip up nicely. Also, if he started to catch on I could pick up a real hand at an opportune time and have him play back at me with the worst of it.
Sure enough, it worked according to plan. The fi rst three or four times he thought a while and folded and I was winning pots with 7-6 offsuit and K-5 suited that I wouldn’t have otherwise played. Then on the fi fth time I had A-K off-suit and he decided enough was enough and shoved over my raise with K-T off-suit. The fl op came king high and I knocked him out, adding his 12,000 chips to my stack.
The key to “playing poker” as opposed to “playing cards” is identifying the weaknesses that exist at your table that you can take advantage of and then exploiting them (of course, sometimes there are weaknesses that you can recognize but can’t exploit due to position, stack size, etc). It can be as simple as a guy who plays too many hands to as complex as knowing your opponent will never bet both the fl op and the turn as a bluff but will almost always continuation bet the fl op, allowing you to call in position then fl oat a lot of fl ops in order to bet the turn and win signifi cant pots. You may also hit a real hand on occasion and win a real big pot off that way as well! Some weaknesses are very subtle while others are more complex, but identifying and then exploiting them is one of the key differences between a poker player and a card player.
