Adjusting To Very Different Games

Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 12 August 2009 / Leave a Comment

Always remember that poker is a game where the person who adjusts to the style of the game quickest and best wins the money.

Some poker games are extremely predictable. Be it a table online full of grinders, a home game where everyone plays similar styles, or a table in a casino full of amateurs, sometimes games play in a very obvious style. On the face of it, this is great, as predictability in poker is usually an instant road to success; however, time and time again you see players who are unable to adjust from game to game, and end up making the wrong moves over and over again when they change environment.

An obvious example of this came when I was playing in a live cash game with a friend of mine who plays predominantly online, who kept trying to isolate people with marginal hands. This is a great strategy when playing online, simply because people play far fewer hands, but in this kind of live game is a recipe for disaster.

Online poker has a much lower number of hands played than live poker, simply because people can multi table and keep themselves interested, but live poker (particularly at the lower limits) is usually full of habitual limp callers, all desperate to see as many flops as possible due to the boredom of seeing so few hands an hour.

This is great for the skilled player, as one of the easiest groups to beat in poker are people who call too much, but they key with them is to take advantage of two key areas - their pre flop calling habit, where you try and put in very big raises with the monster hands of poker; and their post flop problems, where you try and hit big hands and win massive pots when they overplay hands like top pair. Neither of these aims is achieved by isolating light.

Instead this player was consistently building biggish pots, against multiple players, with marginal hands - not a great idea considering how often he would miss the flop and one of the multiple other players would hit. What he would have been far better off doing was putting in bigger raises with his massive hands, and calling more with his speculative hands. This would have enable him to take advantage of the two key areas of mistake these players are making, unlike his regular state of play, which wins the money online but is actually a terrible strategy in these sort of games.

Always remember that poker is a game where the person who adjusts to the style of the game quickest and best wins the money. What is a correct style in one game is often actually the worst style in another, and although habits can be hard to break if you predominantly play in one style of game, if you do not adapt you will quickly go broke.

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