Skills in my opponents which I fear/ respect.

[Ansky]

A long while ago, Strassa made this post about what he fears in HSNL opponents. All of those things are true, and while they have some application to tournament poker, the lack of deepstacked play leads to a different skill set which is important. Basically the following is a breakdown of what I think is important in being a great tournament player, and what are some of the things which supposedly good tournament players do which makes them bad.

Skills I fear/or lack there of:

1) Ability to 4bet shove light pf in proper spots-- Every good tournament player 3bets light sometimes, be it shoving on a resteal or reraising a normal amount if it's slightly deeper. A lot of good tournament players aren't that good though because they never have the balls to 4bet.

2) Knows how to properly manage his continuation bets. Too many ppl c-bet blind basically, probably because of HOH. Then there are those who don't cbet enough. I have seen so many people play hands where it is so blatently obvious they are getting check raised on a board of a certain texture, and yet they cbet and fold to the inevitable check raise anyways.

3) Playing with a plan. Whenever I see a player (this is so often the case w/ p5s all stars) who does something like raises the sb when the bb has 14bbs, then tanks when the BB shoves, I automatically lose respect for them. You simply cannot raise in such a spot and have no mind for what to do if you get shoved on, because it is such an integral part of the original decision to raise.

Note, I am not saying it is NEVER correct to raise/fold in such a spot, but to raise and not have a clue is awful.

4) Respek for shania- Too often I think tournament players ignore shania because they assume their opponents aren't observant, or their arent enough regulars that it will matter. I have notes on quite a few high stakes mtt regulars betting patterns that they still seem to follow. That said, sometimes multi tablers will ignore that a fish at the table will call a psb with bottom pair at the same freq that they will call a half pot bet, and they still make their standard bet and lose value. So having a sense of when to apply shania and when to ignore her is pretty important.

5) Seeing through the lines-- I think a lot of times there are great spots for bluffs, especially against good players in 3 way pots, which people ignore. This also comes directly from the strassa school of pokah, but the ability to bluff when people think you CAN'T be bluffing is huge.

6) Knows what his opponents expect of him. Doing things like reraising utg raisers w/ AK (nothing personal HEK) or w/ QQ when your perceived reraising range will be extremely tight is a very obvious, yet also very common leak amongst tourney regs I think. This is just a particular example, though there are obviously more.

Whatever else you have lets hear it.

Also, this is in no particular order, just some thoughts I had offhand.

[THAY3R]

I like this post.

[THAY3R]

I dislike it when Shaun implies to me that this famous live pro is really good when in actuality he's nitty/awful.

[shaundeeb]

lol I am not going to bash a famous live pro with 15 other live pros who know him and are right next to us. I try to imply things not my fault you misapply it and get owned ITM.

[WarDekar]

At least tell us who you're referring to and what you said

[djk123]

nice post.

yea i suck with #6. working on that.

[Superfluous Man]

pretty awesome post, you should probably delete it before more people see it and improve.

[THAY3R]

Funny enough, the only players I fear live are the good internet players, everyone else pretty much sucks.

And also like Ansky mentioned, anyone who is capable of 4 bet bluffing my 3 bet steal makes me crap my pants.

[8Adam8]

I fear players who actually understand position and how to exploit it.

[EverettKings]

A lot of this stuff is pretty basic, but are easy ways to identify people who might give me trouble in an otherwise sea of fish at an event like the wsop.


1) Looking up at the blinds/stacks before looking at their cards. This means that they're identifying situations where it might be profitable to raise with any two cards.

2) Raising big after a bunch of limpers (especially from the blinds).

3) Carefully watching all of the players at the table from preflop on (i.e. doing more than just staring people down when you get HU facing a big river bet).

4) Being under 25. I mean, where'd they get their money?

5) Continuation of Ansky's #5: finding believable bluff spots. I.e. identifying situations where people can't possibly expect you to mess around with crap, yet playing crap for just that reason. For example, if I just won a big pot in early position and am still stacking chips, people expect me to fold and 'chill out' for a hand or two, at least with total crap. But often I'll come out firing again right away: how can I not have it there? Pretty much reverse Mike Caro stuff.