Putting players in boxes

Starting out playing live, especially if your first forays into playing cards for money have been with virtual people, or their six-letter online nicknames, brings a whole new bundle of information along with the complex packages that are real opponents. You aren’t just faced with someone’s blinking avatar which must act within sixty seconds, but a real person whose hands, face, speech, attitude and betting habits all help with one of the most vital skills in poker – the read, begun with characterisation.

The quicker you can decide what type of player you’re facing, the quicker you can get on to reading the player in a more precise fashion and the easier your decisions when playing against him become. A side benefit of starting to put players in boxes is a growing self-awareness – a sensitivity to how other people might be categorizing you, and an ability to exploit this, which comes in very handy indeed.

Once a beginner player gets past the initial stage of evaluating his own hand, position, and betting options, they start to notice other people’s. It is very obvious when someone “just plays their hand” i.e. makes decisions solely on the strength or weakness of their holding (which in hold’em is just two little cards) and nothing else. Their preflop raise with AK may be stolen on a raggy flop. They call with a draw and bet big having hit it. They bet into dry side pots when a player is all in as they’ve hit bottom pair. Then, like a door opening, the realisation hits that everybody else has a hand too, and may be trying to figure out their hand. Suddenly it all gets a bit more complicated.

So within a few minutes of sitting down at a new table, it is a good idea to start separating the new opponents into categories. Everyone’s heard the coverall terms ‘rock’ and ‘maniac,’ and the descriptive one ‘passive’ and ‘aggressive,’ ‘loose’ and ‘tight.’ By applying them to players, you can start to form little boxes, and as the game progresses, the sides can be firmed up, as it were, giving a little nutshell description of the types you’re up against.

The difference between loose and tight players is fairly obvious. A tight player will restrict himself to better starting hands, for example in hold’em big pairs or AK, usually coming in with the expected preflop raise, and folding everything else. A loose player will play many more hands, and their starting hand criteria are a lot more flexible. Sometimes they don’t seem to have any at all. Simply counting the number of hands a player plays preflop will start to give you some idea of where to start putting him in his box. Folds a lot and raises with big pairs, but shows discrimination after the flop? Tight. Raises or calls preflop a lot and likes to see a hand develop all the way to the river? Loose.

A loose player may be either passive (exemplified by the calling station, who will play many hands, just calling all the way with winning hands, losing hands and overly optimistic draws) or aggressive, where the raising initiative is taken with all kinds of starting hands. A very loose-aggressive player is a maniac – an any-two-will-do raising machine. This is the most obvious type of player to categorise, as they’ll usually stand out from the rest of the table in the number of hands they play, and the extremely high frequency of their raises.

Once you’ve identified the kind of loose player you’re up against, you can vary your play accordingly. A loose-passive person is the perfect target for playing drawing hands against as they tend not to make it too expensive for you to see the cards which can make your hand, and will probably call you once again after you hit. The maniac looks more problematic, but since you know they’ll be raising with any cards, you can call with less stringent preflop criteria and let them continue betting into you when you hit your hand. A serial bluffer with no restraint will hand over money trying to ‘push you off’ a good made hand, and a little trapping goes a long way.

The tight-passive player on the other hand, may, after the flop and on later streets, be overly wary of the potential for his hand to be outdrawn and play weakly, calling or even folding when the betting takes off. This is the right sort of person to bluff against if, say, a scare card comes, or if you reckon that they are liable to be playing AK or AQ and have missed the flop. The tight-aggressive player deserves a little more caution, as they’ll not only be selective about the hands they play, but will play them strongly post-flop, making it more expensive to outdraw them and more difficult to push them around.

It’s rare that you’ll find yourself completely surrounded by one or another of these types, but it should be pretty apparent if everyone apart from you at your table is a maniac or a rock (an ultra-conservative player). Play must always be adjusted according to how you view your opponents – ‘playing the player’ is not so much about looking for tells as adapting strategy to fit their betting habits.