Your First Hour At The Table

Remember that scene in "Maverick", where Mel Gibson sat down to a game of five-card draw, and promised not to win a pot for an hour? They all welcomed him to the game, anxious to take his money for the first hour, only to lose it back to him the rest of the night. The lesson, of course, was that ol' Mav was a'watchin everybody like a hawk, sizing up his opponents, noting patterns, spotting a myriad of tells, and no doubt checking out Jodie Foster's pocket pair.

How do you spend your first hour at the table? Do you spend it stacking up your chips in nice, neat columns? Maybe you're getting a feel for the room, checking out which TV gives you the best view of the game, or which waitress has your table. Maybe you're more concerned about building an image. If you're usually tight, you'll come in raising four out of the first ten hands, just to show them you've got chips to splash around.

Well, if you're smart, you'll mostly spend your first hour or so at the table like Bret Maverick, quietly observing your opponents. Unless you are playing in a very small casino, or for very large stakes, you are probably sitting down with at least five or six strangers. The more quickly you can get to know their styles - how they like to play, and what they're capable of - the more quickly you can start to make money from them.

It's not enough to just watch the other players. You have to observe with a purpose. There has to be something tangible that you are trying to understand about how your opponents approach the game, about how they go about winning money from the table. Unfortunately, in real life, unlike the movies, it probably won't be a physical tell. It will be a lot more subtle, like a playing style, or a betting pattern. There's lots of ways to go about this. Here's a summary of how I do it:

I manage to separate everybody at the table in to four types of players -- Callers, Squeezers, Bullies, and Solid Players/Mysteries. Everybody starts out in the Solid/Mystery group until they prove otherwise by their play. Some people, I can never figure out, and they may stay in the Mystery group for the whole session. But most others will find their way into one of the other groups, and those are the people from whom you're going to extract the most money.

With Callers, I simply get a hand and bet it. If I flop top pair, even with a lousy kicker, I know I'm in good shape, so I just kept betting 3/4 of the pot. The players keep calling, and although I won't win every time, I'll win 75-80% of the hands against these players, so there will be plenty of profit at the end of the night.

Against the Squeezers, I keep the pressure on, giving them a chance to fold. I fire one, two, and sometimes three bullets in an effort to get them to lay down, and usually they do. I also take advantage of scare cards. If a third heart comes out on the turn, I'm in there betting. Squeezers respond to scare cards well, and as long as your bets are consistent, you can usually get them to surrender.

Finally, against Bullies, I usually trap. I will check-call all the way down to the river, and if I figure I am still ahead, I will raise the final bet. Aggressive players will do your betting for you if you just let them. Of course, sometimes they have the hand that they are representing, so you have to be careful with that. But more often than not, you can play defense and let the donkey do the pulling.

Once I am able to categorize one of these players, especially the first two, I am happy to play pots with them. So long as I have decent cards, and/or am in position, I am happy to see a flop with less-than-stellar starting hands. But against the Solid/Mystery group, I am much more careful. My philosophy of poker is to make money from the weak players, and to avoid losing it to the strong ones. I usually only enter a pot with a strong player (or a new player that I hadn't figured out) with the Goods -- a solid, top-ten starting hand. Hopefully, I'll be in position too. And if I didn't improve on the flop, I am happy to toss it away.

Note that in recognizing the style of different players, and playing them each differently, I am varying my own play and making myself much, much harder to read. In playing four types of players four different ways, I am also a calling station (against aggression), a squeezer (against solids/mysteries), a bully (against squeezers), and solid player (against callers). So someone who was observing me at the table wouldn't be able to categorize me.

It isn't a perfect system by any stretch. You will make mistakes. Somebody that you will put in the Squeezer category will end up playing like a maniac, either because he had previously been card-dead, or because he was on tilt, or for a million other reasons. Give your opponents credit for varying their play too, although players at most low- and mid-limit tables don't change gears as often as they should. But overall, if you know who you're up against, you know how to beat them, and you can set out to do just that. But if you don't know your enemy, then you're not prepared to defeat him, and you've got no advantage in the battle.

Maverick was one of the silliest poker movies ever made, but it does offer a good lesson here. All the poker books also talk about how observation is one of the most important skills a poker player can have, yet we insist on engrossing ourselves when we are at the table with iPods, flat-screen TVs and other distractions. All those things can help us preserve our sanity while we're waiting for a hand in the seventh or eighth hour of our session, but promise yourself that for the first hour you'll pay attention to every player in the game, at least until you get them all classified. Bret Maverick would be proud of you.

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