Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 28 January 2009 / Leave a comment

Although the basics of being a good poker player are simply tying to work out your opponents possible range of hands, comparing it to your own, and acting accordingly; sometimes your opponents possible holding is not the only consideration you should be thinking about when you consider your possible options.

When thinking about if you should call in a certain spot it is important to try and calculate what kind of player you are up against and factor this into your equation.

A classic example of this is when dealing with players who are good when they are winning, yet are awful if they take a bad beat and start to tilt.

Here your considerations should be skewed towards trying to tilt this player. Imagine you have a holding like king queen suited and are facing an all in raise from such a player after a mistimed re-raise. Although you are most likely very behind their probable range of hands, you will probably have some chance of winning the pot if you call (around 25% against hands like ace king and ace queen, and you might even be lucky enough to be racing against a hand like jacks or tens). If you can suck out and win this pot then you may have a great chance to win a few more buy ins against a player like this as they tilt and start throwing money away - and this sort of effect makes the actual odds calculation of that specific hand much more complex than just the exact odds of the situation.

Poker is a game where history and future predictions are just as important as any particular hand. When thinking about if you should call in a certain spot it is important to try and calculate what kind of player you are up against and factor this into your equation. Against good players who can stay calm in the face of everything that the game has to throw at them, such plays are largely pointless as you will just be throwing money away; however, against players who seem to go crazy after a few bad beats it is often worth your while going out of your way to try and put a beat on them as soon as possible.

Here is where the incredible mix of mathematics and psychology that make poker such a great game are easy to observe. There are clear situations in poker where making a play that is clearly mathematically wrong is actually right - and learning these situations and when to make such plays is critical to long term success at the higher limits.

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