[Harv72b]

Let me first of all say that this is an outstanding post, and that I think every person who reads it owes you much thanks for your effort. It's impossible to stress just how important table & seat selection are for a winning poker player, especially when you're talking about online play (where it's so much easier to change tables/seats & to be selective about which you initially take).

I do have a couple of nits to pick, tho, purely in the interest of adding whatever I can to the overall thread. I don't think that anything you said in the OP (and I did read every word) was wrong, nor do I think that it would hinder anyone in the least if they just printed it out, kept it on the desktop next to their monitor, and used it as a checklist when starting their sessions. Seriously.

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the point here is that good table/seat selection will not make you a winner if you suck at poker. If you suck at poker you should focus on getting better.

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I agree 110% with the second sentence, and that should be (and probably is) the primary focus for anyone reading this forum. However, I don't completely agree with your first statement...if you suck at poker, but are great at table/seat selection, then you probably can be a winning player. The example I like to give goes something like this:

Stephen Hawking decides to take a few days off from solving the mysteries of the universe(s) and instead comes up with the perfect poker rating system. Every single poker player in the world is ranked, and darn it all, you wound up ranked 9th worst in the entire world. While you should absolutely be focused very intently on improving your game (and therefore ranking), if you somehow managed to sit at a table populated by the 8 players ranked worse than you, well guess what...you have a positive expectancy. Similarly, if you were ranked 9th best in the world, but for some bizarre reason chose to sit in at a table with the 8 players better than you, well hey--you're going to have a negative expectancy (although at that point you'd likely be more interested in learning from your play against the very best). Table selection is indeed that crucial to how well you do.

So why bother improving your game if you can just sit around & wait for perfect tables to come along? Obviously because you don't make money by sitting around and waiting...the better you get at the game, the more tables you can sit at & enjoy a +EV and the greater your edge becomes in those games.

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- IF waitlists are long, be prepared to start new tables and let the fish come to you (this works even if you sit out and don’t sit in until its like 6+ handed)

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This point deserves a thread of its own. Many of the best tables that I've ever held a seat at were short-handed or non-existent when I first sat down there. In addition to the excellent point that you made about many TAGs not knowing how to play short-handed, you just have to understand the fish's mentality; a donor doesn't want to log on, scan the tables, find a good one, and then waitlist himself for 15-20 minutes until a seat opens up. He wants to gamble, and he wants to gamble now. So he's just going to go to whatever stakes he's decided he wants to play that night, pick the first table he sees that already has an empty seat, and plunk himself down there to start gambling it up. He's especially going to like it if the game is already going but there are seats open, because then he doesn't even have to wait for anyone else to show up & post a blind. Empty seats are fish magnets.

This, incidentally, is why I think it's a great idea for anyone playing .25/.50 or higher to at least get a feel for the 6max games. You can't fully exploit the fish (or the other TAGs) in a short-handed game if you don't understand how to play there, either. At stakes lower than those you're probably not going to have a lot of trouble finding good full ring games.

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Table Burnham – before stat import
Okay, so at first glance this table appears to both suck and blow…..but lets take a closer look. When I opened this table, the stats you see were from a previous datamine and yet the lobby (See second image) was showing VPIP of 33% and average pot > 6BB…..hmmm…heres a clue..…there are 5 tight players and 4 unknowns.

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There's a much better clue to be seen immediately on that table--the Button just showed down 97o in a 10 BB pot, at least two BBs of which went in on the river with a straight showing on the board. He couldn't have posted preflop because he's the button. It couldn't have been a mass limpfest to him because the pot would be larger--looking at his hand compared to the board, there should've been fireworks at some point in the hand prior to the river (he flopped a pair + gutshot & then turned his straight, after all). Just from looking at that one hand I would consider him a loose (and probably bad) player, at least until proven otherwise. And just having 1 bad player is enough to get me on a waitlist.

About table stats: I still have them displayed on my PAHUD, but in all honesty it's just because I haven't gotten around to removing them from the setup. As you pointed out elsewhere in your post, they can often be misleading if not downright worthless towards your table rating. It's far better to look at the individual players at the table & try to get good position on the donors...I've sat at some insanely profitable tables before which probably had overall numbers in the 22/8 range. They were so juicy because they were comprised of mostly tight, ABC nits with 1 or 2 loose/horrible players in between; if you get position on the donor(s), then not only will you be able to outplay them all night long, but the nits will let you isolate on them for almost as long. Which brings me to another caution, but one which you shouldn't run into very often on microstakes tables: having position on one or two loose players can be offset, at least partially, if you have a very good & very aggressive player on your left. Because he won't allow you to just isolate on the donors free of charge, and will often counterisolate on you with some less than premium hands (to put things politely). The end result is that it can wind up being close to the same as having a LAG on your left...which is never a particularly fun (or profitable) scenario.

Oh, yeah...use buddy lists. If your poker site of choice doesn't offer one itself, dig around on the software forum & see if there's a free buddy list program out there which will work with it. Many a session of mine has been saved simply because I found one good buddy sitting at a single table.

One more time, thanks for taking the time to write this post out, and don't think for a second that I'm trying to counter any of your points, or to take anything away from the credit you deserve. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]