Author: T

Example 2: Little piles, little blinds
When the blinds for a tournament have reached, for example, the 600-unit stage, you will often observe a player building his chips into piles of exactly 600 units to make it easier to call the first bet. Then later when the blinds go up to 800 units this player will change the piles into stacks of 800-units value. This tells you something about the player. They are likely to be the type that calls much more often than they should, that is, in poker terminology, to be a’ calling station’. You cannot chase them out of the pot no matter how high your bet. It is best not to try stealing a pot or bluffing this type of player because the percentage chance is very high that you will be called. Conversely, if you have a reasonable hand you can try a bet because they are likely to call with a lesser hand.

Example 3: Don’t hide your chips
Often at the poker table you will hear the cry ‘Don’t hide your chips.’ This refers to the practice that some players have of hiding their high denomination chips behind several piles of smaller denomination chips. The explanation for this is often that the players hiding the chips are, both figuratively and actually, protecting their chips. This type of player tends to be ‘tight’ (that is, plays only very high value hands). So, if this type of player is in a pot with you be very careful. The percentage chance is high that the player will have a good hand.

Example 4: Big jar, small jars
As opposed to the type of player described in Example 1 who like to have small piles of high denomination chips, there are others who like to have big piles of small denomination chips. If the card room supervisor wants to change their small chips ‘up’ for those of bigger denomination, they want to keep the small value chips, ‘because it looks more’. They seem to think that large piles of chips are more intimidating and, to some extent, I agree.
The French psychologist, Piaget, did a series of experiments with young children where he asked them to compare the quantities of liquids in glass jars of various sizes. In one version of the experiment, two of the glass jars were tall and each contained the same fixed quantity of liquid. There were also two smaller glass jars into which Piaget poured the contents of one of the larger jars. Piaget asked the children whether the tall jar, which remained full, contained the same quantity of liquid as the two smaller jars. His findings were that, in the early stages of development, children considered it natural for the quantity of the liquid to vary with the shape and dimensions of the containers into which it was poured. In other words, they did not have a fully developed concept of the conservation of matter or quantity.
Piaget was interested in the developing thought processes of children, so it would be rash to compare the cognitive processing of supposedly sophisticated poker players to that of small children. Still, it is possible that there may be perceptual processes which might make players perceive tall stacks as containing more chips than several smaller stacks.
A tall stack of chips in front of a player does seem to look more daunting than several small stacks, even though the total value might be the same in both cases. This is particularly so if a player has the small stacks one behind the other. There is no real empirical evidence for this observation but it often seems that players tend to be less inclined to bet into an opponent with a tall intimidating stack or stacks of chips in front of him than they would be to bet into anyone who has stacked the chips into several small piles. Although this is tentative advice, I do think there is merit in stacking your chips high.

Example 5: Macho man
I have never observed this behaviour in women players hence the title. Sometimes a man, usually an inexperienced player, will call a bet, or more often a raise, in such a way that there will be a cracking or snapping made by the chips as he bangs them into the pot. This usually happens after he pauses for thought. This behaviour is almost always a sign that he has a medium-strength hand. If it happens before the flop, in a raised Hold ‘Em pot, this behaviour could indicate a fair hand such as KD, QS or AC, 10S or even 7D, 7C. Or, if it happens after a flop of say KS, 6H, 3H, it again would indicate a fair hand, perhaps KC, 9S or KC, 8S. This behaviour seems to me to be a non-verbal statement meaning ‘I have a good hand and I am going to make a stand’ (usually the player is mistaken in thinking he has a good hand). The player is also making a statement along the lines of ‘you are not going to get away with a bluff against me’.
If in the former situation you are the one who raised with a proper raising hand, such as QS, QH, then you have a big advantage because you are better able to put your opponent on a probable hand. If a higher card than your pair comes, you are in a much better position to gauge from his reaction whether it ‘hits’ one of his hole cards or not. Equally, in the latter case, if you hold say AH, KD (when the flop was K-6-3), then you can bet with impunity.
A characteristic of this macho-type of player is often that they do not like to be check-raised. They tend to take it as an insult or perhaps even as an affront to their manhood, and they almost always call if they have a medium-strength hand. In our opinion this is one of the few situations where it is advantageous to check-raise in a pot-limit or no-limit game.

 

Previous – Part 3

Poker is a complex and multifaceted game whose central facets are sometimes called the three P’s: patience, position (with regard to your proximity to the dealer) and psychology. In this series of articles I will focus on the last of these P’s which focuses on how to read the behaviour of your opponent: the psychology of poker.

Zia Mahmood, the world-class bridge player, is quoted as saying, ‘One of the reasons I love the game of bridge is that there are no absolutely right answers to anything. Bridge is not a game that can be played mechanically, according to a series of rules. You have to use not only your brain and your memory but your imagination and your creative spark to avoid the traps that lie in even the simplest position’. The same description could just as easily be applied to the game of poker and the ability to analyse the behaviour of your fellow players is one of the subtlest and most difficult aspects of the game to master. In order to improve your game, it is important that you are able to observe closely how players behave and understand what, in percentage terms, these behaviours are likely to mean. Let’s start with a few very simple examples – how players stack and handle their chips.

 

Chips

All casino games and some home games are played using ‘chips’ instead of money. In these situations the player would exchange his money for the same value of chips. There are a number of reasons for this, of which I will just give you two. Chips are easier to handle and count than money. Players can see at a glance whether an opponent has got a few or a lot of chips in front of them, whereas with a bundle of notes it is often impossible to know how much someone has. There is also a deeper psychological reason, seldom fully articulated, why casinos prefer players to use chips rather than money. When you exchange your money for chips, you have literally and figuratively exchanged something of real value for a playing token, for something that is once removed from money. I have seen people bet considerable sums at roulette and at the poker table using chips and, although it is a moot point, I sometimes wonder whether they would be so keen to make the same bet if they had to use the same fold-up money they used to pay for their groceries. There is a well known saying heard often in casinos and card rooms, that the person who invented casinos made a lot of money, but the person who invented chips made even more money.
Later on, we will examine the importance of ‘stack’ size – the number of chips that a person has stacked in front of him. A big stack will depending on the monetary value or denomination of the chips, generally be more valuable than a short or medium stack. The size of stack you are playing and the size of the stack held by your opponents, are major factors to be considered when making a decision at the poker table.

 

Chip Handling

Some players divide their chips into separate piles, each pile having chips of the same value, others make one or two very tall piles with the bigger denomination chips at the bottom while others try to build structures resembling the Great Wall of China. Players will also differ in terms of how they put chips into the pot and what denomination of chips they use in different betting situations. Mostly these behaviours do not have any meaning that are discernibly usefull but below are a few examples of chip handling behaviours which I contend either offer an insight into a player’s personality or give an indication of the value of the hand they are holding.

Example 1: Breaking the big note!
You may recall when you were younger, back in the days when to have a £5 note (or a $20 dollar bill for our American readers) was to be wealthy. In those days, if you had a big note, you did not like to ‘break it’ because once broken it tended to be spent much more quickly. The big note was something to be kept and prized. Some players treat their chips in this way. They are always wanting to give change, e.g. give you ten 100-unit chips for your 1000-unit chip and once they get the 1000-unit chip they like to hold on to it. (In contrast there are many players who are delighted to change big chips because a pile of small value chips looks more – see Example 4.) Watch this type of player closely because often, when they have a choice of putting small or large denomination chips into a pot the choice of chips can have a meaning.
They will often put their small denomination chips into the pot when they have a marginal or perhaps a drawing hand. Sub-consciously, they may consider that they are not breaking into their pile of valuable chips, so they can do no real damage and can afford to speculate on this occasion. To continue the analogy with the ‘big note’, in this case they are only spending their small change. When this same player ignores his low denomination chips and puts in large value chips, then beware – there is a very high percentage chance that the player has a strong hand. Their subconscious reasoning may be that ‘I will be getting these chips back anyway when I win the pot therefore I don’t need to put in small value chips. Also by putting in the high value chips the pot will be easier to count and the hand will be speeded up. I will get my reward sooner.’

 

Part 2