I make a decent amount of money playing poker. I’m better than most, but I tend to play above my bankroll which means I’m less likely to make the line-balancing bluffs needed to profit from good, thinking players. So what do I do?
I target the bad ones.
I didn’t realize what I was doing until a friend of mine asked to sweat one of my cash sessions. After we finished he said, “So you really only play against one person at the table.”
I thought about it for a minute and realize that he was right. When I sit down at the poker table I target one or two players and tend to avoid the rest of them. My targets become my bitches. I isolate them with all kinds of crap and pound them ’til all their chips are mine then I rub the virtual chips on my titties and fall asleep on a bed of money.
My point is that you don’t have to be the best poker player to make money. You don’t even have to be that good. All you have to do is find the bad players and know how to exploit them. Here’s how you can make a shit-ton of money playing poker even if you’re not the next Durrrr:
Data mine
Data mining straddles the fence of morality. Some people say that it’s cheating since you have information derived from hands that you didn’t play. Others say that it’s a tool available to anyone so no one truly has an edge. I tend to side with the latter camp.
PokerTableRatings.com makes a ridiculous amount of information available to everyone. Recently AnskyPoker.com, one of my favorite blogs, posted this information that showed the best times to play poker on different sites at different limits using Average Pot Size. Gugel also analyzed how hard it is to move up in limits using the average number of hands played at each limit. You’ll have to sign up for his forum to get the full reports, but it’s free and well worth the 30 seconds it takes to sign up.
It’s great to know when the fish are swimming, but it’s even better to tag individual fish that you can stalk over and over again. There are a couple ways you can do this.
The first thing you can do is go through your Hold’em Manager or PokerTracker database and find all the big losers at your limit. If you don’t have a large database, you can buy hand histories from PokerTableRatings.com or just use their “Biggest Losers” tool to find the people hemorrhaging money at your stakes.
Once you have your fish list, sign up for a free PokerTableRatings.com account and go to the “My PTR” tab. There you’ll find a place where you can enter your fish into your buddy list and get email alerts when they’re online. I have a Blackberry so I know instantly when one of my fish is online.
The other way you can find bad players is to get a program like IdleMiner and let it run for about a half hour before you sit down (Careful with this. Some sites have banned IdleMiner.). Find a table with one or two really bad players and sit down – preferably with position on your mark.
Identify Your Opponent’s Weaknesses
This is where Hold’em Manager or Poker Tracker really comes in handy. If your opponent has a VPIP of 53 and a PFR of 4, you should isolate their limps but respect their raises. If your opponent has a VPIP of 53 and a PFR of 32, their raise should mean shit to you and you can 3bet them wide – especially if they have a high “Call 3bet” stat and a high “Fold to Cbet” stat.
Tend to isolate with hands that are ahead of your opponent’s range or hands that can flop well. For example, ATo isn’t usually a hand you’d 3bet, but it figures to be ahead of someone who’s raising 32% of their hands. Likewise, mid suited connectors and suited single-gappers can flop big.
I prefer raising to calling since it tends to isolate the bad player and gives you a shot at him heads-up. For that reason I tend to isolate limpers more often than raisers since there’s less risk involved.
Watch Out For the Sharks
Be aware that you’re not the only person preying on your mark. There will probably be one or two good players trying to take a shot at him too and they might get annoyed with you hogging all the action. If you want to keep feeding, you’ll have to adjust to the good players too. Here’s how I do it:
1. I don’t isolate with every hand. I only use premium hands or quality speculative ones. No trash unless I’m on the button and the blinds are passive or I have a good squeeze opportunity.
2. Cultivate a tight/aggressive image. If you seem loose, the TAGs will stop respecting your isolation plays.
3. Watch out for obvious plays. I was playing on Cake once and was hammering a really bad player who called raises in the small blind and check/folded a lot. I raised from the cutoff, he called in the small blind and a strong TAG 3bet from the big blind. This is a textbook squeeze spot so I put in a 4bet and took the pot down. Decent players will make plays on you, but they’ll be obvious. Exploit them.
4. Throw some scraps to the sharks. You don’t have to be involved in every pot your mark plays. Lay down your weaker hands if there’s another shark that’s keen on a kill. By avoiding other sharks, you’ll reduce your variance. If you’re confident in your skills and are rolled for the stakes you play, you can fight the sharks. Otherwise, avoid them.
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Poker is a predatory game. A there’s a definite food chain that develops. Seek out the weak players and avoid the strong ones.
This tip is one of the most obvious and overlooked tips in poker. If you want to make an obscene amount of money in poker, all you have to do is play worse players.
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