Hands that Define Players Ability:
There are a couple of starting hands in poker that will easily enable you to gauge your opponents poker ability, their poker knowledge, and more importantly how well they think you play. One of the starting hands I am referring to is King Jack off suit. A lot of poker players tremendously overvalue and overplay King Jack off suit. Many good players don’t even play King Jack off suit under the gun, but let’s leave that discussion for another topic.
Here is an example from a 30-60 limit hold’em session I played recently at the Bellagio in
Las Vegas . Nobody had entered the pot and the action was on me, I had a reasonable holding of KQ off suit in middle position and raised the pot. A fairly young kid who I had previously played with on a couple of occasions called the raise from the button and the big blind called. The flop comes garbage, 9-3-2 rainbow (all different suits), I make a feeler bet on the flop, the button calls, and the blind folds. Off peels a King on the turn giving me top pair, I bet, button calls. The river comes a Jack. I bet for value with top pair good kicker and get raised L. I’ve seen this kid bluff raise on previous occasions so I pay off the raise and he shows me king jack off for two pair on the river, a 3 outer, he could only win if one of the 3 jacks remaining in the deck came. A fairly bad beat but not the moral of this article so let’s move on to the point of this poker tip.
What do we know about this player after seeing this hand play out?
- The first thing we know is that he doesn’t understand hand values properly. King Jack off suit just isn’t a playable hand if a decent player raises. (If a bad player raises you can make an argument for playing the hand or possibly raising with kj off on the button). With KJ off suit, way to often you are going to end up in a dominated situation where the opponent has either Ace jack, AK, Or KQ and you are going to need to get lucky to win the pot.
- Another possibility is that he thinks I play bad which is great information for the future to exploit; if he thinks I play bad I will check raise him more often and play certain hands in a trickier manner to confuse him more. In this particular circumstance I don’t believe this player thinks I play bad, because we have played several hours previously, and he has tended to avoid most confrontations in pots with me.
- If he understands that KJ off suit isn’t a playable hand when the pot has been raised, he may be on Tilt. Players on Tilt from previous hands tend to compound their mistakes and lose even more. This is the perfect game to play in, players on tilt making bad decisions based on emotions are great targets. I usually try to punish them even more and get them really on tilt.
Evaluation of this particular player: Based on prior play, I would say this player was effected by a combination of factors #1 and #3, probably about 70% Tilt (about 10 minutes prior he had aces cracked in a big pot and was visibly upset) and 30% lack of knowledge.
As a poker player I couldn’t have asked for a better situation. I put the majority of the money into the pot with the best hand. “Getting the Money in the pot with the best of it” is all you can ask for when you play poker.
Poker is a never ending game of adjustments and decisions, when you see players make bad decisions and play hands they shouldn’t you should constantly be evaluating their play and make adjustments to your own play and betting patterns to exploit their weaknesses.
Jason | |
