Zoobird Can't Read - Teach Me

[zoobird]

In Adanthar's 'Well' in MTTc, I asked some questions about getting reads on opponents. His answers were really interesting, but he chose not to share all his thoughts on the topic. I'm hoping this exchange can start some interesting discussion on the topic....



Me: You've mentioned before (and in passing in this thread) that your playing style is very read-dependent. Some questions about that:

1. At a table of ok to pretty good (but not very good) players, what specifically are you looking for?

2. Do you base reads on frequencies that a player does something, even if there's no showdown to confirm what they had? For example, I cbet the first three heads up flops I see...can you draw any assumptions from this? I open raise twice from MP the first time around after I'm moved to your table...anything to do with this knowledge?

3. Do you consider reads to be more valuable against good players, or against bad players?


Adanthar: These are good questions, but the answers are pretty specific and I don't want to give away too much. Okay...let's say we're playing on Stars. Stars has the mighty 4x raise tell, which alone is worth a ton, but basically *any* raise size on Stars that isn't a 3x slider raise is some kind of tell 80%+ of the time. Then it's just a question of whether those people call light or are giving off reverse tells, etc.

Now let's say we're playing at Bodog. Bodog doesn't really have default bet size tells, but it does have (to name two things) big stacks that limp light (but don't raise light) and a high share of bubble stallers. So, there, I try to pwn limpers fairly often and abuse the bubble like crazy - it works far better than at Stars, where people have been trained to call light on the bubble for months now.

That's how the basic, site level reads should work (and yes, they exist for every site/are extremely important for some.) To go further, you take that default profile and modify it based on the person's PA HUD stats, what you've seen him show down, how likely it is that that reraise you saw was a squeeze, and so on.

Whether a player is good or bad is nowhere near as important as the type of good or bad he actually is and what the metagame is at the moment. There are some really bad LAGs that are very hard to exploit ordinarily if they're, say, on your left in a tournament when everyone has 20 BB, and there are some normally really good, tight players that nonetheless make ridiculous bubble folds/just don't understand their implied odds in a given situation aren't what they think they are. Basically, it's not whether they're good or bad, it's whether they're accidentally playing (in)correctly at the moment and what you can do about it.