Mailbag: Making Live Reads

Q: When playing live what sort of mental notes do you keep on people? Do you give them labels and those labels are associated to hand ranges, raising tendencies, calling tendencies, etc, etc?

I remember my first couple of live tourneys I was trying to keep track of what people were calling down with in what position. What kind of boards they were folding cbets to in what positions. But for me keeping track of all this information didn’t make the game very enjoyable and at the end of some of them I was just mentally exhausted.

Do you have any tips on maybe what you should be focusing on to begin with and what slowly to incorporate?

Thanks!

A: I should say first that I’m hardly an expert on live poker and reading tells. It is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about and working on lately, so this will be more of a learn-along-with-me or what-works-for-me approach than a definitive response. By the way, for a more definitive answer, I strongly recommend Nate Meyvis’ trip report. Nate made it to Day 6 of this year’s WSOP, and his report is chock full of insight into what to look for and what to think about at the table.

I think the most important thing is just to be open to information. I know that’s kind of nebulous but I mean that you want to be focused at the table. Personally I try to talk as little as possible and avoid listening to music or anything for at least the first few hours at a new table. When I do listen to music, it’s actually to help me focus, especially if I feel that I am getting bored or distracted or upset.

I’m not trying to come up with an exhaustive list of “this guy does X when he’s strong” or “Y always bluffs scare card rivers”, though it’s great if you do pick up something like that. I’m more just trying to get a feel for who each of my opponents is, what motivates him, and what his goals are. Some people will just straight up tell you that they want to make Day 2 or finish the day with the chips they have now or whatever. Other times you can infer it from how slowly they play or that sort of thing.

You also want to try to find out things like how long someone’s been playing and what they understand about poker. From that you can deduce things like how and how well they hand read, whether they’ll attempt certain types of bluffs, whether their tells will be “honest”, etc. In other words I don’t try to make observations about how someone will respond in every situation. Rather, I try to get a feel for who they are and how they think, the logic behind their actions, so that I have context to interpret anything they do in the moment.

The “in the moment” part is really important. If you are constantly walking around the room, talking to people, texting, checking e-mail, etc., it’s hard to be part of the gameflow. It’s also hard if you are agonizing over a bad beat or a bad play from earlier in the day or looking forward to the final table or anything like that. It’s not always easy, but make a serious effort to focus your mind what is happening here and now. You’ll pick up information without even trying if you are just mentally present at the table and doing your best to observe everything that is going on.

You don’t even have to process it intellectually, just watch what is happening, whether you have cards or not, and focus on it for a moment: “The 1 seat is raising. This is his 3rd raise this orbit. The 2 seat folds but looks annoyed. The 3 seat comments on how often the 1 seat raises and then calls. The 4 seat is talking to a friend and has to be reminded that the action is on him.” Your brain is capable of processing a lot of this info at a pre-intellectual level, and your instincts/guy will be a lot more reliable if you just allow yourself to take in everything that is happening around you, all the time.

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