Know your Opponent's Poker Play - Learn from Opponents' Play

Know your opponents’ play and make sure to learn from it. By studying your opponents’ play you can emerge the winner even when you are losing games.

Different Player Styles

If you are playing a lot of poker online you probably know just how different a table of the same kind of poker can feel. The players that sit down to play determine what type of game it will be. If you play in a smaller poker room with a simple schedule you will start to recognize the nick names and remember the player styles but this is not something you can count on when you want to learn from your opponents’ play.

The best thing to do is to understand different kind of player styles and make your decisions according to this. Nick names can change and people do work on their skills. A player that used to be the biggest fish can go through a poker school and come back with a new approach. Look for the speed of your opponents’ play. Are they making their decisions fast or are they slowing down? Beginner players could very well be playing fast since they are not aware of the true values of their hands.

Common Mistakes

Impulsive play is often mistaken for aggressive play when it is really a sign of a new player that is making fast and uninformed decisions. Many casino players enjoy playing poker every now and then and you will most likely find them fumbling in a poker room that is next door to a casino. Learn to spot these opponents and understand that their poker play is the result of ignorance. You will most likely be able to make them fold by raising steady even with a lower hand.

If you are one of the fish and you know that the opponent’s will learn from your moves to take advantage of you, you should consider how to cover this up. Stick to the lower stakes but also take the chance to play for free every now and then. Free games are great for learning how to read your opponents and how to give them the impression that you want. Just because you are trying to learn the relationship between bets and player style it doesn’t mean that you can only do so in real money games.

Know the Poker Tells

It takes a lot of experience to know your opponents’ play. Once you start understanding the meaning of poker tells you will be able to know more about a specific player without having met him before. In online poker you can’t rely on facial expressions. All of the information comes through the moves. It is very common to use pot odds and therefore it is crucial not only to learn about them but also to see how your opponents are using them. If someone is bluffing a lot you need to call them and not be fooled into raising the pot and then fold so that they get a maximum prize sum. Make sure to take notes in every game and if you see that a certain player always acts the same you could ask a more experienced players what the poker tells of his games are.