When you're choosing which poker site to play at, you must consider if you wish to play at one of the more significant sites like PokerHost or a smaller poker site such as BetOnline.

Each style of poker site has their plus and minuses, but we prefer to play at the smaller poker sites. But why play at smaller sites? Read on.

Knowing Your Opponents

Do you do well at your local home game? That is probably because you see how the players play and act. At the smaller poker sites apparently, there is a lower player base. With that said, if you play higher stakes or more obscure games or tournament types, chances are you will run into the same players very often. We play a lot of head's up, and at the smaller sites we can recognize the player's name and know we have played them before. Just like our home games.

Using the software's "Notes" feature, we can add little things we notice about a particular player, such as the player "folds if you re-raise him," or if he "comes over the top he has it." At worse, we can rate the player as aggressive or tight. This can be invaluable information knowing what type of player you are playing with straight away. At the more significant sites (unless you pay $1000 tourney's or $50/$100 blinds) it's rare you will run into the same player that often - reason #1 we like smaller poker sites.

We always assume our competition is doing the same thing we are, and if we have notes on a player, we presume he has notes on us (in reality this is probably true maybe 50% of the time - players just don't use notes - especially the casual player). So if we notice we have records on a player, we assume he does on us as well.

Since this player has notes on us, we must switch up our play. He may have us labeled as "loose" and try to bully us around. Or if he has us rated as "tight" we may never get a good pot out of him. As a result, we must switch up our play from how we played him last time. But how do we know how we played him?

The notes feature can be valuable for information on yourself as well. We always play aggressive, so if we have no notes on the player, we assume we haven't played him and stick to our regular style of play. During the game, however, we will add a note to him yet so small, that way we know when he comes up again we played him aggressively.

When he plays him the second time, we will note a number 2 in the notes feature, so when he comes around again, we know we have now played him twice aggressively. The third time a number 3 and so on. At some point, when we feel he may know our aggressive play we will switch over and play tighter and trap him for some beautiful pots.

First impressions are the biggest, so when we do switch our play, we will make a note on his profile saying "us tight" so we know we played him tight the last game. Chances are he still views us as aggressive, and we will play tight again, this time noting "us tight 2", meaning its the second time we played him tight.

At some point we will go back to aggressive play starting the notation process all over again - "us aggressive 1" and so on. Get it? At some point, this poor guy is going to have no idea how to play us, and we will have our way with him, plus we have our notes on him knowing how he plays.

You can use the number notation on him as well, so you can track whether he is switching up his style of play.

By using the above system, you can beat a significant advantage over your competition. You have information and information is vital!

This system would never work at the large poker sites because you would never run into the same players enough to make it worthwhile. At some of the medium-sized sites if you play long enough it can work, but it could take months even to get a decent player notes base started.

Posted by: maxinehudsonm at 04:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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