History and playing changes

Poker Strategy / Marcus Bateman / 11 May 2010 / Leave a Comment

Good players will do totally different things against different player types - even with the same hand, on the same board, with the same stack size.

One of the key things that separates good players from mediocre ones is their ability to radically change how they would play a hand in an identical situation - against different players - depending on history.

Good players will do totally different things against different player types - even with the same hand, on the same board, with the same stack size; and understanding why and when to make these changes is crucial to working your way up the stakes.

Poker is a game where information is king, and nowhere is information more important than in your previous hand experience with a player. Human beings are creatures of habit on the whole, and the best insights you can reach about a player will nearly always come from their previous play.

Just think of two extreme player types in poker. Although very tight players do bluff occasionally, on the whole these players tend to just stick to their time honoured tradition of just sticking to hitting big hands and trying to get paid. Compare how you would play a hand like top pair with a mid kicker against a historically tight player like the one above, with how you would play such a hand against a maniac gambler who has a long history of constantly over playing all manner of junk. Some people play poker simply to gamble, and you can frequently encounter players who will have long histories of overly loose, spewy play. In this spot, totally different approaches need to be implemented in thinking how to play your marginal hands - even if all other factors are equal.

Although these are obviously the two key extremes in poker, being able to form a solid picture of a player's general habits and then implement that knowledge into how you play hands is arguably the most key aspect to mid stakes poker and above. Many people fail to understand just how important it is to try and absorb every detail possible at the table, and nowhere is this more true than in hand histories.

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