But remember that implied odds apply to limit Texas Holdem poker as well so even here, one has to be a bit careful when identifying a potential “fish”. For the novice, “implied odds” are the estimated number of bets/pot size that will be in the pot at the end of the hand.

Failure to extract the maximum amount of money from the hands that you win is a sure sign of weak play. We all sometimes miss bets and raises but the “fish” are guilty of glaring errors. You no doubt have heard of the term “value betting”. This basically means betting on the end with mediocre hands that you are still quite sure is the best hand and you are also sure that your opponent has a hand that is not only inferior to yours, but that they will also call with it. Weak players are terribly guilty of this and I must see this type of error literally dozens upon dozens of times a day.

There is a lot more that can be discussed here but this is a very involved topic and not something that could be covered in one single series. The definition of a “fish” is very vague as it implies a poker player that is weak. However this is a very grey area as any player who was experienced and technically proficient may be a “fish” in a game full of world class players. But yet a big winner in a small poker game could well be classed as the “shark” in the game.

So in a strange way, a shark can be a fish and a fish can be a shark. What it all depends on of course is where you stand in the particular food chain and how that correlates to the games that you are playing in. If in a certain line up of ten players, you were technically the tenth best player then you would be the fish. If in a different line up of players, you were the best player then you would be the shark.

Poker is a strange game in so many ways. Skill and good play isn’t always rewarded and this tends to tilt many players and this is quite possibly the toughest part of poker. But to know where you fit in with regards the poker food chain is not only a very important piece of information, it may also keep you safe form loss. It isn’t just about technical knowledge either. Knowing poker theory is good but it only counts for a small percentage of the overall game of a skilled player. I don’t believe that poker skill can be found through reading or watching coaching videos, it can only be arrived at by a process of doing it repeatedly.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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One must remember with these things that nothing is ever set in stone and most players can and will adapt and change. Once you sit down in any poker game, the playing patterns of your opponents will reveal many things to you. For instance, any player who is calling a high percentage of the time especially in a game like limit Texas Hold’em poker unlike Omaha is a definite fish. There is simply no way that any player can be a long term winner in any poker variation who has a high calling percentage unless it is someone like a very skilled no-limit player who is constantly limping in because they feel that they can dominate the opposition. Many of the hands that players call with are long term money losers. This is very difficult to spot from the play of a very small number of hands, especially when a player is getting lucky with junk.

It takes poker simulation software that can run the same hand in the same situation literally hundreds of thousands of times to see the patterns emerge. Another classic “tell” of a weak player is the failure to take aggressive action of any kind unless the “fish” has a very strong hand or the nuts. Many players who are either inexperienced or weak shy away from raising because it makes them feel uncomfortable. This lack of aggression costs them dear because not only are they losing bets in the pots that they win, they are also losing entire pots by allowing hands that would have folded to stay in and draw out on them.

A player who does not raise at the appropriate times in poker is akin to the blackjack player who fails to take advantage of positive situations by not doubling and splitting. When you have the best of it, you want more money on the table, it is as simple as that. Failure to do this is losing poker and once you have spotted players doing this, make sure you remember them for these people are a major part of your earn rate.

Another example of “fishy” play although a bit more subtle is when players draw to hands without receiving the necessary pot odds. This is especially the case in structured betting games like limit hold’em. Be careful though not to apply this concept to big bet poker because implied odds are far more important in those particular disciplines. In a game like limit hold’em for instance, if you observe a player who is calling bets and raises with totally inadequate hands, then this is a definite fish.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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You may or may not see the same faces whenever or wherever you play poker. Obviously on the internet, there are large volumes of players and many will be unknown to you. It is vitally important to be able to classify your opponents very quickly wherever you happen to play. Nearly all of what I will be talking about here will not apply to internet poker sites simply because you cannot see your opponents.

Whenever you sit down in any poker game be it private or casino, you will or at least should be watching your opponents. Weak inexperienced players tend to stand out. You do not need an advanced qualification in psychology to be able to spot a new player. Any player who looks in awe, wonder or perhaps excitement at a poker table as they approach it may be playing poker for the first time. They could be playing live poker for the first time in this era of internet poker or they could simply be playing in a casino for the first time. They might even be in awe of a certain location (i.e Vegas) and be feeling very nervous or excited.

However, this look can be misleading and is certainly not proof of low skill level. This is simply because many internet players have good technical skills at certain forms of poker that may be superior to many of their live opponents. Therefore you will have to accumulate more data either based on the quality of their play or other factors that will be discussed shortly.

Another sign of lack of experience in either live poker or poker in general is poor chip handling. Fumbling and dropping chips is a sure sign that a player is not used to handling them. Although once again you have to be careful with this because skilled internet players would not have this ability if they didn’t have much live game experience.

Anyone who is ignorant of the rules of the game is likely to be a “fish” although beware of the actor who is trying to throw a smoke screen by pretending that they don’t know. Anyone who is unaware of poker etiquette is likely to be playing poker for the first time or at least is inexperienced. Notice here that I said “unaware”, this is because there are many players out there who simply do not care about poker etiquette. If you do not know poker rules and procedures and do not know what I am talking about when I talk about etiquette, better look out for those gills because I am referring to you. Look out for part three coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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It is however, very true and is an indication that in most poker games, the skill level of the participating individuals can vary immensely. The truth is that many players simply do not even realise that they fall into this category. Because the poker playing population in general is predominantly male, there is the inevitable ego factor involved. Poker prowess is considered a macho thing by many of us males. Many people think that poker skill is something that one is born with, to a certain extent this is true. There are indeed many skills that a top player needs in order to succeed that simply cannot be taught. However, that does not mean that tuition and guidance can be overlooked when you learn poker.

Because many players do not realise that they need to be educated at poker, they do not attempt to seek it out. Poker is abound with famous quotes and another famous one is “you can be the tenth best player in the world, but if you persist in sitting at a game with the other nine players in the world who are better than you then you are going to be a losing player”. This last quote highlights something very important whenever we are on the subject of “fish”. A “fish” or “live one” does not have to be a weak or unskilled player. It is entirely relative to the game that a player is in. No top pro would knowingly sit down in a game with nine other players of superior ability, so the famous quote above is somewhat academic. No top player would ever allow himself to be a “fish”.

Someone could actually have very poor poker skills and be somewhat of a “shark” in their game simply because the other players were worse than them. The conclusion to this is that a lack of grounding in poker theory and knowledge does not necessarily make someone a fish, the flip side to this is that any player can suddenly become one even if they have a long history of winning. It is not necessarily how much poker wisdom you have but how much you have in relation to your opponents that is the important issue here. Look out for part two coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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When playing online poker we have the benefit of clever poker software to help us see these trends, but I am purist who believes the true poker player does not use such pieces of software that could become a crutch. I prefer to spot things myself as this indicates true progress in my poker game. The use of software is not nearly as satisfying.

Much of this two part feature will help the live poker player as well as the online poker player. Remember that bwin.com, my favourite poker site, offers you the opportunity to win satellite poker tournaments to gain seats to many large poker tournaments that offer huge prize money for those players good enough to excel in them. Much of what we discuss can also be used in online poker, particularly the classifying of opponents betting patterns.

Tight or Loose, Passive or Aggressive?

The first classification you should make is the overall style your opponents use. A poker player who plays tight plays few hands, usually in position and you can guess that the hands he does choose to play are probably the high pairs like AA, KK, QQ, JJ, and TT down to 66. The other hands that are likely holdings are AK, AQ, AJ, KQ, KJ and QJ. Really tight players may not play anything lower than 88 or KQ. Loose players will visibly play a lot more hands and be constantly involved in pots. This suggests their range is significantly wider than the tight player and a very loose player could literally have any two cards. Whilst this makes them vulnerable to stronger hole cards, they can catch concealed monsters so these players are by no means weak if they know what they are doing.

Passive or aggressive play links in with their overall tight or loose style. A tight player must put their chips into the pot aggressively to make up for the blinds they lose and the multiple hands they fold due to their tightness. Aggressive players raise and bet three quarters to a full pot most of the time so it is expensive in terms of chips to contest a pot against them. This forces opponents to make a decision early on how they wish to proceed in the hand. Think of Tom “durrrr” Dwan in cash games, he builds the pot and makes his opponents uneasy about playing against him because they know a bit pot is coming.

If you spot a player that is playing tightly but then passively when they enter a pot this suggests they are “scared money” and not willing to gamble enough to accumulate chips. An aggressive style against this player should pay dividends. Watch the hands revealed at showdown because sometimes a tight player is not passive, but playing trappy and slow playing strong hands. This is also a beatable style because when they are betting strongly it is with either a marginal hand or a bluff. I used to unwittingly use this style and wonder why I did not get action on the hands I checked in rather than bet. It was because the opponents knew I was strong, because otherwise I would be betting!

We have much more to discuss in this article. Please click on Part 2 for the next section of this feature.

By Malcolm Clarke

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After broadly classifying your opponent’s style you need to drill further into discovering how they play. You need a good memory because in a tournament you will meet many players if you do well and cash games can see a high turnover of players. You need to learn how every opponent plays strong hands like two pair or better, how they play dangerous boards and to what extent their perception of hand values change, how they play draws, how they exercise pot control and whether they can make a value bet on the river and whether they overbet pots as bluffs or value raises. Aren’t you pleased poker is such an easy game?

The way to analyse these things is by closely following the action and before you make a bet against these players always ask yourself the following questions.

• Is my opponent good enough to understand exactly what he is doing?
• What does he think about how I am playing?
• What was the outcome of a hand played in a similar way to this in the past? Is he/she repeating for the same outcome? If not, does that suggest a bluff?
• From what I calculate their style to be, is there an opportunity for me to win the pot outright?

Stop for a moment. All of these questions cloud the key concept of poker that you must be aware of throughout each and every hand you play, your own hand strength. It would be very easy for me (and I have done this many times) to work out a player could be on a bluff or is playing passively and who should think I am tight, and then make an ill-timed bluff with such a weak hand it was not worth it. Sometimes you know the opponent is bluffing but you must nevertheless live to fight another day.

Therefore, there is one last point to remember when considering the above questions and that is,

• Does my own hand strength allow me to engage in this situation or is it simply too weak?

Creative plays are fine and it is always good to read your opponents and understand what sort of hand you are going to engage in, but do not be afraid to impose your own style on the hand. ABC Poker is a powerful style in its own right. Sometimes it is best not to get too engrossed in the technical poker concepts we have discussed and bet because you want to build a pot because you think you are ahead! Many amateur players bet because they have a good hand not realising more complex ideas that support their decision. My poker game has shown much improvement recently when I went back to basics and stopped paralysing my mind with analysis.

There is a balance between using the ideas above and your fundamental understanding of poker to decide what to do in a hand. I completely believe that being able to rationalise your thinking using the ideas listed above and in Part 1 will become very helpful for those inevitable tough decisions we all face in our poker games. That is when extra knowledge is helpful and in today’s modern online and live poker environment there is really no excuse for not learning and studying as much about poker as you can.

Hopefully the discussion here has helped you as much as it has helped me to write it! Good luck on the poker tables.

By Malcolm Clarke

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You start to lose faith in the poker strategies that had been doing well initially and suddenly you are following your own methods. Because you have no real confidence in using these strategies and that they are still untested in your own mind then this makes matters worse.

This is what it all boils down to at the end of the day…confidence! Lack of confidence is a killer in poker because it can cause you to alter what you were doing. It can cause you to change successful methods for losing methods and when this happens then the end is not far away. This is precisely what I mean when I say that limit hold’em will mess with your head. In no other form of poker will you be forced at some stage to endure terrible bad runs and beat after beat even at the higher levels.

It is a common fact that top no limit players will experience a far greater percentage of winning sessions than top limit players. I see it all the time on forums, players experience what they see as a bad run and then come onto the forum looking for advice. They perhaps are losing after a few sessions of no limit or maybe after playing 20 SNG’s and are now looking for what to play next. They try Pot Limit Omaha or heads up play, in short, anything that will lead to success.

In a way I feel sorry for them because many of them will never ever get to where they are trying to be and that is to be winning poker players. But I suppose it is a good thing for the winners that we have such people otherwise without winners there would be no game as who would play a game that they couldn’t win at? But the thing is that with poker, everybody starts off by thinking that they can be successful at it.

There are no proven tests of a player’s ability other than winning and losing and most of the losing players hear about the winning players and want to be like them so they persevere. They buy more books, read more magazines, join coaching websites and all the rest of it. In their mind, not cracking poker is an indication of a lack of intelligence and if some eighteen year kid can do it who they have read about in some magazine then so can they! Look out for part three coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

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Well let me tell you right here and now that anyone who thinks along these lines is massively wrong. Limit hold’em is a game that requires you to see flops and this is where the most skill is in any form of poker. Many players who start out playing no limit hold’em cannot play good post flop poker because they simply do not get enough practice. But let me tell you another more subtle and equally dangerous problem with limit hold’em. This is a problem that few people talk about and is rarely discussed in any book.

This is how limit hold’em plays with your mind. Some of you will no doubt have read numerous books advising you of how many big bets you need as a potential bankroll. Most books start the bidding at 300 and go all the way up to 500 and even 1000 depending on your skill level and type of opposition. Why do you think the books tell you this? Simple, because you will need them that’s why!

Maybe not straight away, maybe not tomorrow, next week or even next month but if you play long enough then you will need them. The problem many novices face is that they read this stuff and then still have no experience of going through a bad run and even worse, they don’t really understand what a bad run actually is.

They have a bad day online and lose 40 big bets and some think that their entire world is caving in. But it is one thing to theoretically read about a bad run in some book but it is something else to play through one. When that horrible run of 50 big bets that you thought must be due for turning around suddenly turns into 100 and then 150 then if you have never experienced this type of run before, it will seriously mess with your mind believe me. Well I have news for you, take that 150 big bet loss that you thought was the run from hell and then double it and see how you feel then?

That’s right, most full time or semi- professional players have endured swings of 300 big bets at some stage. These runs are bad enough for experienced players to handle but for novices or for someone who has never experienced one, it will be perhaps the biggest and toughest test that you will ever go through in your poker life.

Well let me tell you something else, most players never live to see the other side of that storm. They mentally self destruct along the way and the exact point in which that happens depends on how tough and resilient the player is and how soon they encountered the run. You start off with a few beats and you start to frown. Then you get beat by a two outer on the river followed by some player rivering a gutshot draw that he never should have played and now you are slightly upset.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

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But there is one very large problem with big pairs, weak players overplay them in games like full-ring and end up getting all in when their hand is dominated by a bigger pair. This nightmare situation is easier to walk into with queens as you have both kings and aces as potential threats. In fact QQ is only a slight favourite against hands like AKs and AK. In full-ring poker games then these possibilities arise more frequently than what you imagine and when you get stacked while holding KK against AA or QQ against KK then it has the capacity to tilt some people.

Tilt is bad enough at the best of times but it can be absolutely fatal when you are multi-tabling. I was playing in a deep stacked NLHE game yesterday at NL50 road testing “The Vulture” system when the following hand came up. A player limped under the gun and I raised from middle position to $2.25 with K-K. The small blind three bet to $9 and the original limper shoved all in for their remaining $47. What was I to make of this? Some players would say that folding kings here is impossible and especially at this level.

While it is true that NL50 is not a level full of great poker players, they are all too aware of hand values. A limp re-raise is a powerful play at the best of times but a limp four bet all-in shove is another matter entirely. If I was new to this level then I would certainly have called with the kings but I folded them. But the small blind called and showed QQ while the UTG player had the obvious AA. Many players will be critical here of my play and calling may have been correct but in this environment based on what I had observed over many thousands of hands then calling felt wrong.

But having hands like 7-6s can prove immensely profitable in their own right and you never have a problem folding hands like these post flop if you don’t connect. But hands like KK and QQ can be really problematical if you constantly go for your entire stack in deep stacked no limit full-ring and you will come to realise this as you learn poker. In four bet pre-flop situations then you will be against AA far more than QQ when you hold KK. I have got stacked several times with KK against AA in these situations in very quick succession and it is not a pleasant experience and it really puts you to the test when you are multi-tabling.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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But in cash games where you have a relatively deep stack of say 100 big blinds and so does your opponent then things are a little different. Let us say that an early position player raises and a middle position player calls and you elect to call on the button with a hand like A-K. The flop comes A-Q-9 and the UTG player leads out with a strong bet of near the pot and the other limper folds.

Raising here would be very risky and probably a bad play all round for several reasons. Firstly a raise reopens the betting and allows your opponent to three bet or move all in. If you are raising with the best hand then your opponent will fold all weaker hands but if you are doing so with the worst hand then you could likely get pot committed here and end up losing your stack.

Having top pair top kicker makes it too soon to fold at this stage but a raise is overplaying the hand. In other forms of poker like limit for example then reopening the betting in this way with the worst hand is not as bad from a theoretical standpoint and you will come to understand this as you learn poker. If you have outs then the raise still has plenty of equity so it isn’t that much of an error. But a raise in no limit play is a substantial commitment.

It can be this way with far stronger hands than top pair top kicker. Let us say that you have 5-5 on a board of J-10-5 rainbow. Your opponent bets the flop and you raise and they call and the turn card comes and is the Ad and they lead out for another bet again. Here I think that it is a mistake to raise with bottom set and you may already be drawing to only one out if your opponent has a bigger set. Raising here reopens the betting and allows your opponent to not only get away from a weaker hand but to also pot commit you to the hand.

Some may say that you are committed to losing your stack on this board but in very deep situations then I think that this hand is one that can be got away from against decent players. The lesson here is that you need to be very careful about reopening the betting except when you hold the very nuts or close to it.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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