Table Selection Advice - What Do You Look For?

[getmyrunon]

I've been grinding my way through 25NL and now I'm safely rolled for 50, but I want to improve the other aspects of my game before I make the jump up.

What do you guys look for when selecting a table aside from known fish. Either specific #s of players seeing flop, pot sizes, stack sizes, etc. If you sit down in the game, do you watch a few orbits before you post the blinds / what are you watching for?

I realize this might not apply as much at 25NL as the game is so fishy it's beatable without it, but I'd like to know what to look out for, because I don't really know much about it.

thanks

[deaders]

On Prima I dont have a huge selection, my first criteria is to sort the tables by seeing flop % and open up the highest 4-5. If a table has more than 2 real shortstacks I wont even sit, unless there is a known superfish sitting with a decent stack (at least close to a full buyin). If there are already more than 2 known good TAGs I wont sit, unless of course once again there are a few big fish. Basically I just look to sit at a table with lots of money on it and some players I know to be donkeys, if I cant find one Ill just use the pf% but leave after a while if its not a good game.

[ajmargarine]

For Party 100NL 6-max I look for tables with 0 or 1 shortstack. That's about it. I open up tables (avoiding the waitlist annoyance) that have the largest pot size. I sit and play as soon as the big blind hits me, unless I am still getting all my tables set up. If I don't like how a table is running after a few orbits, I leave and find another. I don't even use a buddy list hardly never, but I got goot fish radar and seem to find them no matter where I sit.

[ticks]

The money moves clockwise in poker,
so I like to have a few big stacks on my right.
Apart from that I look for tables with few shortstacks,
and high average potsize.

[DeadMoney_J]

I like tables with deepstacks and Hi Avg. pots. I also will run a few sites at the same time in order to have better selection when multitabling.

[JackAll]

1. Atleast 3 of the 5 other players need to be loose (>35% vpip - the higher they are the more turned on i get!).

2. Deep stacks. I wish I could sort on median stack size. I want atleast 3 of the 5 other players with stacks atleast 80BB. The higher the better.

3. Avg pot size. This changes a lot based on if there was one or two huge hands recently, so mainly avoiding very small avg pot size rather than looking for very high.

Exceptions:

1. I don't mind sometimes having 3 tight players if they are all right after me and will fold to my pf rz or rrz almost every time, so I can steal a lot of pots on the flop in late position with marginal hands.



In general I sit and play a few hands before GameTtime gets the stats up, so I play a little cautiously for those first few hands. After the stats are up if it's a crap table I look for a new one pretty quickly. I spend a fair bit of time looking for good tables when I start a session of poker. It's a pain in the arse, but pays off very well.


This is purely to win more money. If you want to get good at 'poker' then I would suggest playing most any opponents and learn to read each one and exploit their individual games.

[younghov17]

aj whats ur party name

[Skuzzy]

Table selection used to be my biggest edge. Before the party split and now the new party software i would open the max number of tables at 5 sites. I would have poker tracker running to collect the observed hand histories, and I would use PAHUD to list all the tables. I would also watch each table for obvious advantages such as a lucky fish who is sitting on a 300BB+ stack and has a couple of players wound up playing back at hime with garbage.

Now I just sit down and play at tables with money. for a full table of 6 max 100NL, i usually want to see at least $500 on the table. I will play until I feel the game is too tight with a preflop raise usually winning the pot, or too aggressive where almost every pot israised pre flop by someone other than me [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Unless I'm playing a single table, which isn't often, I like middle of the road type games. Extremes of tightness, looseness, aggression and passivity all require me to think too much and therefore require a greater level of attention.