Making Quick Reads in Tournaments

Modern poker tournaments attract hundreds, if not thousands, of players, many of whom will likely be unknown to you. Not only will you nothing about their playing style, but you will not even know their general level of poker competence: what they know, what they don’t know, which concepts they do and do not understand, the mistakes they will make, and the moves of which they are capable. To make matters worse, you will likely continue to meet new opponents as players are eliminated and tables break. Sizing these new faces (or screennames) up quickly and making educated guesses about their play is essential to good decision-making against a continuously changing field of opponents.

This article will suggest several strategies for formulating preliminary profiles of new opponents and adapting your play accordingly. It is important to emphasize from the outset that these will be tentative and preliminary, though educated, guesses. You should continue to observe your opponents actively and be very open to revising, qualifying, or even reversing your first impressions as you gather new information. If used correctly, though, these tips can help you to make surprisingly accurate assessments based on relatively little information.

Short Stack Folds
You can learn a lot about a tournament player by observing how he plays when his stack is short. Unlike much of poker, short stack play is relatively solved. There exist charts that detail exactly when to go all in and when to fold based on the size of the pot, your position, and your stack. In short, it is very possible to play a short stack to near-perfection, and many experienced tournament players do exactly that. Thus, significant deviation from correct short stack play is a sure sign of a less-than-stellar tournament player.

Of course, without seeing an opponent’s cards, you can’t know for certain that he is deviating from the correct short stack strategy. You can nevertheless get a good idea based on very little observation. Suppose that a new player has just joined your table, and you note that he has only 2000 chips in his stack. Blinds are 100/200 with a 25 ante, so with ten players at the table, this player has an M of less than 4. The action folds around to him in the small blind, and he folds as well.

This player could have profitably moved all in with almost any two cards, and in fact with absolutely anything if the big blind were a tight enough player. There is an outside chance that he had one of the worst possible hands, something like 62 offsuit. The far more likely explanation, though, is that this opponent is not playing his short stack as aggressively as he should.

How should you adapt to this? You will need a better hand than usual to call one of his all ins. Perhaps you are familiar with a calling strategy mathematically derived to combat the optimal all in strategy mentioned above. Needing better than 43% equity, you might call with as little as J2o, which has 44% equity against a random hand, if you are in the big blind against a very good tournament player and have the chips absorb the loss.

Having already seen this particular player open fold from the small blind, though, you can take advantage of his tightness by folding the weakest hands, like J2o, with which you would call against a better player. Over time, you can continue observing your opponent and further adapting your play. If he open-folds in a few more spots where an all in with nearly anything would be profitable, then you can fold stronger and stronger hands to him when he does move in. Conversely, if you see him move all in the next five times that the action folds to him, you can treat the first instance as an anomaly and loosen back up your calling range. None of this is exact information, but poker is not a game of exact information. Even without seeing any cards, you can learn quite a bit about a player if you know what to look for.

 

Short Stack Shoves
You can also glean a good deal of information from seemingly trivial cards that you do get to see. Suppose that the player in the above example moved in, got called, and showed down Ace-King offsuit. This may not seem significant. After all, virtually any player, even those who don’t know what an M is, would move all in with AK and an M of 4.

The thing to understand is that AK is a much smaller part of the range of a good short stack player than it is for an overly tight short stack player. Suppose that a strong player would move in with any two cards, but a weak player would only move in with the top 33% of his hands in this spot. Before the hand, you thought there was a 50% chance that this opponent was strong and a 50% chance that he was weak.

Both players will move all in 100% of the time that they have AK offsuit. However, because the strong player is moving in three times as often as the weak player, he will have AK three times less often when he does move in. Thus, when you actually see the AK, there is now a 75% chance that this is a weak player and only a 25% chance that he is strong. In other words, the fact that this previously unknown player showed up with AK the first time that you saw him move all in makes it more likely that he is a weak player, as a weak player will have AK when he moves all in far more often than a strong player will.

 

Edit: This is wrong. 

Pre-flop Raise Sizing
There are many reasons to raise the pot pre-flop: to build a pot, to improve your position, to steal blinds and antes, to isolate a weak player, etc. Over the course of a tournament, some of these objectives, such as building a pot, become less important, while others, such as stealing blinds, become more important.

Better tournament players will understand these factors and vary the size of their pre-flop raises accordingly. Thus, in the early going, a strong player may always raise to three or three and a half times the big blind, but later he may be begin raising to two and a half times or less. This is because stacks are shallower and he believes a smaller raise can accomplish his now-primary objective of blind stealing with less risk than a larger raise, which is no longer needed to build a pot.

A player who makes needlessly large pre-flop raises in the later stages of a tournament is a player who does not fully understand why he is raising or how to do it effectively. For example, some online poker sites have a “Bet Pot” button that automatically sets a player’s raise to the size of the pot. Once antes have been introduced in a tournament, using this button will almost always result in raise sizes that carry far more risk than reward for the raiser. It is safe to conclude that any player using the “Bet Pot” button is not particularly knowledgeable about tournament poker. Conversely, any player who makes an unconventionally-sized raise is at least trying to think a bit more deeply about the game.

It is also reasonably safe to conclude that a player making large raises is raising fewer hands than a player making small raises. Since a smaller raise risks fewer chips, players can include more bluffs and marginal hands in their raising ranges. A pot-sized raise risks a much larger portion of a players’ stack and thus can generally not be made profitably with as many weak hands.

All of this information is available to you from the first time you see a new opponent raise. You don’t need to see his cards, and you don’t even need to see how often he is raising. Just from looking at the size of his first raise, you can conclude quite a bit with a good deal of confidence.

Cold Calls
Blinds are 100/200 with no ante. You open the pot in early position with a raise to 600, and the player to your immediate left, with 2400 chips in his stack, calls your raise. One of two things is almost certainly true of this player: either he has a huge hand, probably AA, or he is a very poor tournament player (or quite possibly both).

A simple principle, which David Sklansky calls the Gap Concept, states that it takes a better hand to call than to raise. This is because by raising, you can win the pot by showing down the best hand or by causing your opponent to fold. Given the stack sizes involved in the example above, the caller is forfeiting the opportunity to fold out his opponent’s hand. Either he has a hand so huge that he doesn’t want a fold, or he does not understand a very basic tournament principle.

If this player ends up folding or showing down anything less than a huge pair, you will know that he is loose and weak. Calling off 25% of a stack only to fold the flop is just not something that good tournament players do.

Conversely, if you see a relatively knowledgeable tournament player make a call like this, you can deduce that he likes to get trappy with his big hands, even in spots where it’s transparent what he is doing. When this player does re-raise all in against you, you can call a little more liberally since you have reason to believe he would have just flat called with AA.

For example, suppose you open with 55 and this player moves all in. Based on the pot odds, you need 40% equity to call. If you put him on a range of {88+, ATs+, KTs+, QJs+, AJo+}, your 55 has only 39% equity, so you must fold. However, if you can exclude AA from his range, you now have 41% equity, making a call correct.

Conclusion
Examples like these demonstrate the importance of paying attention to the details of every hand, even those that do not involve you and that appear relatively standard. Even relatively standard hands can reveal a lot of information about an unknown opponent if you know what to look for. In a poker tournament, where you are faced with many close decisions against unknown opponents, such information can be very valuable indeed.

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