>>
TIMMY. Short for timid Timmy, this player is weak, passive, and unlikely to make any sudden moves for fear of startling himself. Timmies don’t play to win, they play not to lose. Therefore, you find them liberally inhabiting the middle stages of tournaments, but rarely making the final table. Aggressively attack uncontested flops against a Timmy. He won’t play back unless he has a real hand.
>>
SPEEDER. A speeder is a dangerous player. He plays fast in every sense of the word, and part of his motivation for playing fast is to get you to play fast, too. If he’s better able than you to analyze and act on the fly, he can make money on the margin, so he attempts to increase the pace of play not just through swift choices but through promiscuous raises and reraises. Take your time against a speeder. Pause to consider your decisions. This will not only ensure that you’re thinking things through but also frustrate him by breaking his rhythm.
>>
WALLY. A Wally (short for cally Wally) is a weak-loose player. Wallies call too much, fold and raise too little, and chase all sorts of draws without regard to, or indeed knowledge of, pot odds. They’ll routinely call preflop raises with inferior values but, paradoxically, only raise preflop with premium hands. Like their kosher cousins, they’re more interested in trapping than bluffing. On the one hand, you can bet for value forever against a Wally because he’ll never bluff-raise into you. On the other hand, you can’t bluff a Wally because his calls-with-bottom-pair will wear you out.
>>
FRISKY. A frisky player is fearless, creative, difficult to gauge, and difficult to put on a hand. He’ll raise with anything or nothing, and can trap, bluff, and drag. He can play strong hands strongly or weakly; he can play weak hands weakly or strongly. Frisky players play a lot of hands and play them well, but they can be beaten through trapping because their own friskiness will often get them out ahead of their hands.
>>
FEELIE. Feelie describes a broad class of players who are more interested in feeling good at the table than in playing proper poker. Recognize them by the pride with which they show you their successful bluffs and good laydowns. Feelies have ego problems. They need constant external validation, and this need will make them reveal far too much about their play. Do everything in your power to reinforce their sense of smug superiority. Make them feel good enough and they’ll stick around to lose all their money to you.
>>
ANGERBOT. Angerbots are a variation on the feelie theme. They want to feel good about their play, and they get there largely by telling you how bad yours is. While it’s remotely possible that their enraged chatbox rants are all an act, it’s much more likely that they’re emotionally out of control. We should not be surprised at this, for the online community is full of players—young men especially—who haven’t yet learned to tamp their Vesuvian tempers.
>>
BOOKBOT. A bookbot tries to play correctly according to the starting hand requirements and strategies he’s absorbed from his studies. He has technical precision, but lacks “feel.” He’ll play predictably and miss opportunities that other, more creative, players would seize. He won’t hurt himself too badly in any game—but he probably won’t hurt you either.
>>
There are, of course, melds or hybrids of these handles. You can have a kosher-Timmy or a frisky-speeder or a bookbot-angerbot (who will play correctly until he loses his cool). It really doesn’t matter what definition you give to a player, and it doesn’t pay to become too obsessed with fitting players into types. After all, if you try to squish everything into a pigeonhole, all you end up with is a bunch of squished pigeons. But the effort to assign handles to your foes pays dividends no matter what words you use, and even no matter how accurate you are, because it gets you into the habit of actively thinking about how your opponents think and of correlating the patterns of their play to types or patterns you have encountered before. So the next time you play, make an effort to analyze your foes and assign some handles of your own. If nothing else, it will give you a sense of confidence, the confidence that comes from knowing you’ve got them named.
4
CONTEXT DENSITY
Even as we’re busy trying to break our enemies’ codes, those devious scoundrels are hard at work cracking ours. In realworld poker play, defense against this would involve switching gears from time to time, throwing a little misdirection into the mix. Given the pace of play online, though, the fact that our foes are trying to profile us actually creates an opportunity to use against them the information they gather. To do this, we need to understand and exploit a little something called context density.
To weigh context density is to gauge the amount of information available within a given space of time. The more information that’s available, the higher the context density is said to be. In television, for example, a show on public TV has higher context density than a commercial broadcast, where program content is interspersed with, and diluted by, commercials. Likewise, a medical periodical like the New England Journal of Medicine has higher context density than, say, Men’s Health magazine, for the latter’s hard data is watered down by ads for Lucozade and Trojan-ENZ. In the poker realm, if you were trying to gather information on how a certain foe defends his big blinds, and you went after this data in a ten handed game, you’d have 10 percent context density, because he takes his big blind one hand out of ten. In a six handed game, you’d be able to get meaningful stuff on this subject one-sixth, or 17 percent, of the time. Heads up, your context density on just this one subject rises to 50 percent, because your foe has to take the big blind every other hand. That’s some thick context density. Thus we say…
PATTERNS ARE EASIER TO SEE WHEN CONTEXT IS DENSE.
But the number of players at the table is not the only factor in determining context density. Basically, anything that’s not directly related to the strategic considerations of poker thins poker’s context density. In realworld cardrooms and casinos, we find that context is broad but it’s not dense. There’s lots of information floating around out there—betting tendencies, body language, facial expressions, measurable attentiveness, and how people defend their blinds—but it’s spread out over time and diluted by such information-poor irrelevancies as shuffling, dealing, pushing pots, rack fills, arguments, brawls, and CPR for heart attack victims. Online, hands don’t just happen faster, they happen in an environment of very high context density, where the information stream is rich, deep, swift, and almost purely relevant. In this environment, we can reach conclusions about our opponents and make adjustments very quickly, while the relevant information is still fresh in our minds. We don’t have to wait hours for certain exploitable situations to recur. Online, they may recur in mere moments.
It is this ability to make snap adjustments that gives us a powerful weapon to use against certain foes.
Imagine that you’re playing in a full ring game against, among others, a frisky Joe who raises from middle position. You hold a bad ace and don’t feel like getting involved in a reckless adventure, so you fold. But you notice that the guy winds up showing down 8♠-7♠, and you go to school on that, formulating the hypothesis that this foe likes to mix up his play by raising with middle suited connectors. In another lap or two, you see the same middle-position, middle-card raise, and you consider your hypothesis confirmed. Now you’re on the lookout. Next time he makes that mid-lap raise, you can go to war with a wide range of hands, because you know that with a variety of overcard flops—whether you hit them or not—you can scare him off the pot with a bet.
Naturally, this trick works both ways. If you’re the one making the mid-orbit, middle-card raises, your more focused opponents will quickly get hip to your tricks. This is not necessarily a bad thing, not so long as we understand that…
THIRD