Gigabet article - labels - winners, losers, good bad
We call bad players fish, bad, awful, loose, tight, nit, weak-tight, etc. It's a bad way of thinking. Most logical thinking is free of judgement.
Change your perspective. Step out of your shoes and into theirs. Don't think "they play loose," think "why do they play loose? How must they think about the game in order to play the way they do?"
Saying that a player does not think beyond his own cards is wrong. If there are four cards to a straight on board, you raise, and he doesn't have the straight, you better believe he's thinking about your hand. The difference is that we think deeper. But too many times we do the same things that we tend to use to judge bad players when we judge them in some way. We say they are "loose" but go no deeper. We label them a "nit" and leave it at that. We call them "weak-tight" and adjust our play from that simple label. We rarely think deeper. We think about what he is thinking about the hand, but we don't stop to think about what he is thinking about the game. How does he think the game is best played? How must he think about poker in order to play the way he does? "Loose" is just a label that does a poor job of describing the perspective a player has in how to play poker. There are so many other intricate details about a player's perspective that go unnoticed when applying a label to him, and it leads to mistakes or sub-optimal play against them.
We all look at reality through rose-colored lenses. Our thoughts and opinions are all biased based on our lives up to this point. Poker is not a game of cards, but a game of players - of perspectives. Sitting at a full-ring table is nine different perspectives of how to play poker. Some may be more similar than others, but they are all different from our own. We are too quick to judge a player looking through our own rose-colored lenses. If we see something differently than they see it, we think they are seeing it wrong. "THIS is how you should see it" we might think. "You should never have called that bet with such a weak hand!" This is what leads us to label people as "good" players or "bad" players, "loose" players or "tight" players. The truth is, they may not play the game as optimally as you do if you both have the same goals. But that line of thought does not help us to find the way to adjust most optimally to them. It stops us from thinking more deeply about how they see the game. We label them "loose-bad" and move on, using that information to make generalizations to adjust to them.
We could adjust far better and precisely by simply asking "Why does he play loose?", "Why does he call PSB's with all draws?", "Why did he call my raise with A3o?" Normally, we see something like this happen and happily note "loose - calls with weak hands - valuetown" etc. These notes and thoughts about a player help, but they help as much as doing shallow 2nd level thinking about a player's hand. We could derive so much more information just by taking a moment not to judge them, not to look at them through our own rose-colored glasses - our own perspective on the correct way to play - but instead see the game through their lenses, their perspective, and forget our own for a moment. We can figure out how a player must think about the game in order to play the way he does. From that we can infer how he will react to things we might do even though we haven't see it yet. We can adjust our play, our lines, our bet sizes, everything optimally from just not labeling a player and instead taking a moment to sit behind his colored lenses.
The first time I really understood this (not just read it, said "that's true", but REALLY understood it) was at a small home game that has went on every week for the last few years. I had started back playing in it for fun, having taken about a year off. In that span, I'd learned a lot of things about poker, corrected a lot of mistakes, knew the online poker lingo, knew what the labels were, knew what to do when I identified a nit/station/maniac, etc. I felt that I was a "good" player and my perspective was correct. I knew I had a plethora of mistakes and leaks to continue to fix, but I knew certain things to be correct or incorrect, and could quickly identify a "bad" player and adjust appropriately. I thought of all the other player's as 1st level thinkers. "They mostly only think about their own hands. They do little thinking about other player's hands and only shallow thinking at best." What I didn't realize was that I was doing the same thing, only about players and not hands. My thinking about them was as shallow as a lable and a handful of details. I was thinking about what hands they could have to make the plays that they made, but I was not thinking about what kind of perspective they could have to approach the game they way they played. This is a fundamental mistake.
My thinking about the game at the time was that all the players were very "loose." They saw the flop 80% of the time, called raises with very weak hands, and generally did not think about anything but their own hand. Easy game. They way I could adjust preflop with strong hands is to raise bigger and bigger as long as I was getting calls. I thought I was adjusting optimally, getting max value.
But some things always confused me a little. I was by far the tightest player in the game and everyone was aware of that. Even so, I would raise to 15x the bb and there would be commentary around the table as to what hand I had.
"He must have Aces or Kings." ...and then he'd call with Q7.
"Nah, he's got AK." ...and then he'd call with AT
"I think he as Queens." ...and then he'd call with QJs
I'd get 5 or 6 callers and tons of value! I would explain this with "they are just thinking about their own hand." Except it was completely obvious that they were thinking about my hand from the table talk.
I'd explain it with "They are calling because of implied odds, since they know I have a big hand" except they not only didn't know what implied odds were, they just didn't think that way. I would frequently get questioned about how on earth I could call one of their 15x raises with 44 if it was clear the guy had AA/KK. I just never saw or heard any evidence to support that most of the regular players thought this way.
I'd explain it as "They are just gambling and having fun." Certainly that is partly true. But occasionally I didn't get 6 callers. I'd only get 1 or 0 callers. I'd seen some of the junk they called with before, they're standards were pretty low for calling that size of a raise.
So what was it? What factor am I missing? Is it some combination of these? "They are loose players, that explains why they call. But it doesn't explain why they sometimes fold hands better than ones they had called with before." Why aren't loose players consistently doing what loose players do?
The answer came to me one night during the game. I opened to my standard 15xbb. The table talk immediately started as always. One young player sitting 2 to my left, who never failed to bring his sunglasses to the nightly game, stood up and said:
"WHY WOULD YOU EVER RAISE THAT MUCH?!?! You will never get called!!!!"
I replied, "Watch."
The older gentleman to my direct left called. Then something funny happened. The guy who had just stood up and made all that noise, the one who proclaimed that I would never get called.......called!
"WHAT!" , I said. "You just said thatI would never get called. And then YOU called! That doesn't even make sense."
The whole table started laughing, including the guy we are talking about. He then said with a big smile "I know, but now I have pot odds." He latter showed down A6 offsuit.
We had a good time from that, but I didn't forget it and later spent some time really thinking about what had happened. I realized that I had found my answer to why sometimes they all call and other times they will fold the same or better hands. Pot odds! Here I could have simply thought "They are bad players, they don't understand pot odds, pretty obvious, nothing I didn't already know," and left it at that. That would have been a costly mistake. Instead, because the funny situation that had come up, I was curious enough to actually thinking about the "why" and not just the "what". I realized that their understanding of the concept of pot odds only went as far as meaning "the pot is big." I realized that they liked to see flops and wanted reasons to call. "Pot odds" was a good excuse. I saw the pain they expressed when they would have flopped the nuts with 52o in a large pot and showed their mucked cards to the table afterwards, thinking "If only I had called." Crying pot odds and calling was a way for them to avoid this and to justify a call.
The sunglasses wearing player had given me great insight into how he thinks about the game. He allowed me to look through his perspective on the right way to play poker. Whether it was good thinking or bad thinking was not important. What was important was knowing how he thought about the game, which would allow me to make far more optimal plays against him and the rest of the players who thought in similar ways. The very first adjustment I made from then on out in that weekly game was re-adjusting my bet sizes. Rather than raise to 15x just because they were "loose" players, I also factored in who was on my left. If the loosest players in the game were on my side of the table (and there are some that would call 15x cold with 40-50% of hands), then I would raise even more than before. I knew that if at least one called, and there was a good chance of that, then it would start a cascade. If another player called, it was even more likely for the next to call. Even if I open-raised to 20xbb, the last few players would call with almost any hand they had if there were callers before them. I was opening AA to 20xbb and getting calls from J5s.
I had been stuck judging players behind my own rose-colored lenses. Having the opportunity to see what they see gave me a far better idea of how to adjust to them than any lable could have. The result is that I got far more value from my starting hands. I could make more precise adjustments to my opening raise size rather than just opening big because they were "loose" and moving up or down based on the average number of callers. The old way was an easy way to think, a convenience, a shortcut, a mental hotkey, a word to associate with a strategy. But it was lazy. It was imprecise. It was costing me money.
Now I work everyday to avoid being lazy by just using labels. It's habit that is deep-rooted. It's a habit that we should all try to avoid or at least minimize. It makes us lazy. We label based on our perspective; by what we think the correct way to play is, and then we use that lable to adjust. But we only scratch the surface of layers upon layers of a player's game and his psychology. We should stop to think away from the game about how our opponents are thinking about poker. Not just that they "go too far with TP", "slowplay too much", "bluffs often", "is aggressive", not just on what we think they are doing right or doing wrong, but how the game must look through their eyes in order to play the way that they do. If we can understand them on that level, if we can know what they must be seeing and thinking through their own perspective and not just through our own rose-colored lenses, then we can adapt and adjust on a whole new level.
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