Poker Lesson #10: Sizing Up a Table

Poker Lesson #10: Sizing Up a Table
by Oliver Butterick

When I sit down to a game, the first 15 minutes or so are a very busy time for me, as they should be for you. As a pro, you need to always play with an edge, and the quicker you can gather information on your opponents, the sooner you will be able to take advantage of their tendencies. Here is a list of five things I generally look for when I first sit down at a table.

1. What is the chip position of the other players? Usually it is better to buy-in for a small amount in unlimited buy-in cash games, as you can always add to your stack once you get a feel for the table. However, you can’t take anything off the table until you leave. If it is a limited buy-in table and there are a lot of big stacks on your table, you have to decide if you are ready to play in this game. More than likely, you will have to play very patiently and wait for the nuts, as there is likely to be a lot of action at the table. If you would rather be in a game that allows you to play some of your drawing hands, ask the floor person if you can request a table-change.

In limited buy-in games, players with unusually big stacks tend to be loose-aggressive, and you should play very tightly against them. Whether or not you play aggressively depends on whether the player makes loose calls, which is something you can’t determine until you’ve seen them play a bit.

2. Look for clues to determine who plays a lot of hands and who doesn’t. Let’s say that you are in a No-Limit game with $2-$5 blinds and you see that the most of the chips on the table are $5 chips. One or two players will usually have a lot more $1 chips than the rest of the players at the table. This usually means that they have won a lot of pots in the past hour, and therefore have played a lot of hands. You can make this deduction because there are always a few $1 chips in each pot, which is the leftover money from the rake. Usually, players don’t buy a bunch of $1 chips. Consequently, if you are a tight player (and you should be), then you could buy 10-20 $1 chips when you buy-in, hoping to deceive astute players when they come to your table.

3. As discussed in Mike Caro’s Book of Tells, look at how each player has arranged their chips. This is usually directly correlated to the way that they play. Carefully organized chips usually are in front of a careful and conservative player. Messily unorganized chips are usually in front of a loose-aggressive player.

Two examples come to mind: If there is someone who has arranged all of their chips in a neat way with all of the stripes on the sides aligned in some way, chances are they are bored because they have been waiting hours for an ultra-premium hand. When this player is in the hand, beware. They are likely to have a strong holding.

On the other end of the spectrum, I am reminded of someone I used to play against in LA. He would stack his chips without sorting out the denominations. He would have $25, $5, and $1 chips all mixed together so that it was difficult to tell how much he had. This might also be someone that you want to avoid if you can help it. Often this particular player is adept at playing his opponents. He is not afraid to try to bet you off a hand when he senses weakness and varies his play greatly. He is aggressive and difficult to read. If you try to slow-play big starting hands, be prepared to face a big bet on the flop, not having much clue whether or not you have the best hand.

4. As tempting as it may be, avoid posting into the game before you’ve watched a few hands. I frequently break this rule, but as the saying goes: “Do as I say, not as I do.” During these first few hands, you need to assess the previous three items, which should take about 15 seconds and should give you some initial assumptions about the other players. You will then spend the first 15 minutes at the table testing these assumptions.

First, you want to classify players according to how tight or loose they are based on how often they play the hand. Tight players almost never play every hand in one orbit of the button and loose players rarely only play their blinds. Are the players that you expected to play every hand actually playing a lot of hands? Are the players that you assumed to be tight folding most of the time? If not, in either case, you may want to revise your assumptions. Perhaps the player with a neat stack and without any $1 chips recently went all-in on a bluff and lost, and just bought more chips. Perhaps the player with the disorganized stack and a lot of $1 chips is the tight player that won that same pot, and just hasn’t had time to stack his chips the way he normally has them.

One way to test when players are behaving the opposite of what you expect is to gauge the reaction of the other players. If there is a player that you expected to be tight who plays three hands in a row and wins all of them, you might reconsider your initial assessment. However, if it is because he seems to be getting a lot of respect when he bets, he might still be tight. Tight players usually win smaller pots than loose players do, so if he wins three SMALL pots in a row, it might not mean that he is a loose player. Also, if it really is a tight player, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone at the table made a comment about it, like, “Wow, you finally caught some cards,” or, “Well, somebody woke up!” or even, “I can’t believe that you got pocket Aces three times in a row!” In this case, you can feel certain that it is probably still a tight player who just happened to get a few good hands in a row.

5. Now that you have sat down and watched a few hands before posting, you will continually need to assess your assumptions. This might seem like a continuation of the last item, but it's not. Remember that very few people play the same way every hand. Tight players can get frustrated and play loosely, and loose players can tighten up as well. Some players will play loosely when they first sit down, advertising that they are maniacs, only to tighten up and collect the action that they get on subsequent hands. The best players will continually mix up their play so that you are always guessing, and second-guessing yourself. If you put a player into one category and never question that assessment again, you will often end up losing your whole stack when that person changes gears. But if you always try to reclassify how your opponents are playing at any given moment, you not only will stay out of trouble, but you just might be able to catch a tight player who has just gone on tilt.

Oliver can be reached at oliver@babblog.com.