My latest article, “Making Quick Reads in Poker Tournaments“, is now appearing in the April issue of 2+2 Magazine. Here’s an excerpt that previews the article’s content:
“This article will suggest several strategies for formulating preliminary profiles of new opponents and adapting your play accordingly. It is important to emphasize from the outset that these will be tentative and preliminary, though educated, guesses. You should continue to observe your opponents actively and be very open to revising, qualifying, or even reversing your first impressions as you gather new information. If used correctly, though, these tips can help you to make surprisingly accurate assessments based on relatively little information.”
Please let me know if you find it helpful, if you have any suggestions, or if I’ve made any blatant errors (that last one’s for you, brue!).
lol! Sorry, not trying to be nit-picky – I comment because I think your articles and posts are worth reading carefully, and reading carefully often leads to finding points of discussion.
Nice article – I think one of the next big breakthroughs in poker stats analysis will be analyzing the correlations between different traits, and thereby allowing you to infer much more from small pieces of information. For instance, correlation between cbet% early in the tournament when deep-stacked and steal% from the CO when 10 bbs deep late in the tourney. The same analysis would be useful in cash games, but perhaps a little bit less so because 1) it’s easier to get a bunch of hands, so making the most out of a little information is relatively less useful, and 2) there are fewer situations in cash games, since the structure never changes, so you have less “variables” to estimate, so fewer hands gets you more direct information about the current situation you face compared to a tourney.
-bruechips
I meant to say too – classifying players into “types” is a kind of version of this, but fairly inefficient in comparison to what I’m suggesting. I think that executing this project correctly would result in at least some surprises that would go against traditional conceptions of player types.