Correctly utilising table image and game flow is vital in high-stakes cash games
Once you reach a certain level in internet cash games you will find that many players will have mastered the basic fundamentals of no-limit hold’em. By the $5/$10 level most regular players will have sound pre-flop opening ranges, understand the mechanics of three and four-betting and be competent post-flop. And if you want to cross the threshold of $25/$50, you must start to consider other factors that separate good players from great players. Most important among these are image and game flow.
What we are talking about here is anything from general tendencies in a player’s game to how two players have been playing against each other in the immediate past or in specific hands. Of course these factors are also important in lower stakes games, where knowing that a player is a maniac or that someone may be on tilt will help you, but as you move up in stakes they become far more significant.
Intelligent players will not only be scrutinising your play and history with them, but will also be estimating how you are perceiving them and how all of this affects your hand ranges in specific situations. For this reason you need to be thinking about a variety of things when key situations come up, in addition to the simple mechanics of the game.
Firstly, you need to consider your own image, that of the relevant opponents and any history you have with those players. You also need to consider how these factors might affect your opponents’ decisions based on what has happened in the short, medium and long term.
For example, in high-stakes games you will need to be much more precise and aware of what has happened over the last 20, 50 or 100 hands, as these periods tend to influence game flow most significantly.
Poker players regularly change gears, go in and out of tilt and remember history with opponents over different time periods. This is true at all levels of the game. But in games of high-standard play these factors are vital, as understanding the psychology behind each player’s actions is most likely to determine the long-term winners and losers.
KEY POINT
Against intelligent opponents you need to be aware not just of your general image, but of how the action in the previous 50 or 100 hands has affected the flow of the game
FEEL THE FORCE
An elite player will often be one who is able to develop an excellent feel for when an opponent is likely to be three-betting light or bluffing more than usual. Whereas a merely good player, who understands from a technical perspective that he should be four-betting light or calling down lighter some of the time, will have a much lower success rate in making such plays.
The obvious question therefore is how one goes from being a good to a great player? While training sites and poker forums can certainly teach you the theory and mechanics of a game like no-limit hold’em, the most important factor is still probably having played millions of hands and been in similar situations before. This is good news, however, as most players will be capable of developing these skills over time and there are ways to fast-track your progress. For example, whereas most low and mid-stakes players tend to play many games at once and use software like PokerTracker, at higher limits most players tend to play less tables and rely on their own observations when making decisions.
This is the case for a variety of reasons. Firstly, there is a smaller pool of regular players at higher stakes and most regulars will tend to know each other’s games fairly well. However, the information that high-stakes players are able to gather themselves is usually more valuable than raw statistics. What has happened in the immediate past or during that session is going to be more relevant when making a marginal decision.
AUTO PILOT
Similarly, stats software is only as good as the person interpreting it and there are limitations in terms of what data can be gathered. For example, a loose-aggressive high-stakes player is likely to be fairly tight under the gun and extremely loose on the button, but general VPIP/PFR stats may disguise this fact.
Players looking to move up and improve their skills in judging image and game flow should therefore occasionally practise playing less tables and focusing more on making their own reads. By forcing yourself to play this way you can ensure you do not get into the habit of ‘auto-piloting’. Playing in an automatic style will make you vulnerable to more observant players at all stakes.
And, importantly, once you move up in stakes you should try to make this more of a regular habit, as other excellent players will be doing the same. By making yourself focus on your own interpretation of game flow, rather than a set of statistics, you will gain the opportunity to stop and think about what has happened recently in game flow terms.
Approaching a game in this way will allow you time to think about how your opponents are likely to play in a specific situation. And this is where the true mental challenge of high-stakes poker begins, with a battle of levels of thinking. At this point, winning the levelling battle of ‘I think that he thinks that I think…’ becomes most important, and is where truly elite players will prove themselves.