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Assessing Your Opponents
By Chips_Middle | October 1, 2008
I’ve noticed recently that I have an awful habit of registering whether my opponents are good or bad without gathering any truly useful information. I watch some guy call when he shouldn’t or bet when he shouldn’t and do so repeatedly and all I register is “idiot”. This isn’t a good idea.
I mean, it’s not a bad thing as far as it goes to know that your opponent isn’t much use. It might help you with table selection I suppose. The problem is that in assessing my opponent as an idiot I have committed several errors myself.
Firstly, I have excluded the possibility that he is doing something that I don’t understand or that there is a reason for his play that isn’t immediately apparent to me.Â
Secondly, I run the risk of generalising from one stupid play to categorise my opponent as stupid. He may be tired and generally very good but made a mistake. He may have been watching TV or otherwise not paying attention and he may even have done it intentionally. He may be on tilt and I might face him again in future sessions in an entirely different mood.
Thirdly, playing against a table of “idiots” and losing is actually more annoying than playing against people you have some respect for and losing. So, if I am having a bad day and categorising my opponents as idiots I run the risk of fueling tilt in myself. After all, if they are all idiots then I am entitled to win, am I not? In fact, often if I am in the state of mind where I am inclined to judge my opponents as idiots it is because tilt has already begun.
See, I shouldn’t really be assessing my opponents from a point of view of judging them against me. In doing so I am just seeking to massage my own ego. The most important reason why I shouldn’t do this is that I miss out on registering genuinely important information.
When I see my opponent make a play, instead of registering “What an idiot” I should register “Got stack in on turn with weak hand and no outs facing a raise and re-raise”. It does me very little good to realise that my opponent is an idiot (even if I am right). Knowing what kind of mistakes he makes, that’s another matter entirely because this is information we use to extract the maximum.
I should remove the emotion from the situation and register the information and see if I can use it to help form a picture of my opponent’s play. When I have a hand and am deciding how best to play it, it does me no good to know that my opponent is an idiot but knowing that he calls too much is gold.
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