I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. - Oscar Wilde
You've been at the cardroom a while; how many hours has it been? Hard to remember. You know it must be sometime in the early morning because the football game has been over for a long time. Still you continue to stare up at the TV screen, though ESPN2 is now running what appears to be some sort of jazzercise competition for persons of indeterminate gender. Everyone at your table seems inanimate, lifeless -- smacked into a silent stupor by the sheer repetitive monotony of a poker game where no one's betting. Every once in a while maybe some guy will raise and the big blind will call. But a pre-flop three-bet is unthinkable at your table this particular night.
At the table behind you, where they're playing for identical stakes, you hear the sound of laughter--someone has apparently just said something funny as he rakes in a giant pot, sounds like he's offered to buy everyone at the table a drink. The waitress starts taking orders. "They're sure gambling over there," says an old man in a John Deere hat sitting to your right. You nod dully.
"On you." That's the dealer speaking, and you look down and see you have a hand. It's a J-9 of clubs. You're three seats behind the button, and no one is in the pot yet. Call, fold, or raise? Each option seems equally dreary.
What's wrong with this picture? Well, you've probably been gambling too much and too long, for one thing. You've also made a key error, and it has nothing to do with whether you ought or ought not to be speculating on that suited J-9. You're playing at the wrong table. You must get up, right now, and figure out where you ought to be playing, if indeed you ought to keep playing at all.
To Move or Not to Move
You should move if the table is dead, but that's not the only reason to seek another table. If you're taking way too many beats, bad or otherwise, consider a change. I've found that winning tends to breed winning just as losing begets losing. And when you've taken a few tough beats (and can't help showing your frustration) your fellow players begin to smell blood in the water, and the number of moves you can make may diminish sharply. Also, you might have misread your table, and they may simply be that much better than you are without your being aware of it.
Sometimes you might want to move if someone (often a person who knows you) is sitting to your left and trying to isolate you by three-betting all your raises. Unless you decide it's time to go to war against this person, you might consider switching tables. You might also consider just switching seats.
But if you're a regular player in the place you play, try not to switch tables just because someone needles you. You will only encourage them to do that in the future in order to to put you on tilt. You've either got to take them aside at some point and try to make them see you're really a nice guy or gal and they should love you just like Momma does or you've got to be a prick and call the floor and make them stop.
A table where a particularly acrimonious exchange has just taken place also isn't good. Some bitter old rock lets loose with, "You cold-call my raise with 7-5 off? Okay, keep playing like that," against some guy who barely knows the rank of hands and then replies to the rock, "I tell you what, sir: I play my hand the way I want and you play yours." Rock: "Keep playing like that and you won't be playing long." And on and on until the floor is called and it's just a downer for everybody. After a confrontation like that, there's always an adrenaline hangover, and then people just don't want to get their chips in quite as much and as often as they did before. When an idiotic tight-ass starts bitching at some hapless imbecile for playing "poorly" it makes people tighten up so as to avoid criticism from the self-appointed Guardian of Correct Play.
But never switch tables because "The cards are just not coming for me here." It's been said before, but never enough: when it comes to the distribution of chips, it's the ass, not the seat.
Finding Greener Pastures
In general, you're looking for a warm, happy, relaxed atmosphere, where everyone is talking and joking and drinking, a table where people will even congratulate each other when they get beaten. (I have not only played at a table where this has happened, I have high-fived people who gave me bad beats. Being a good sport will pay dividends in poker and, somewhat less importantly, in life.) Playing at such a table, you will find the action is looser and the pots will be bigger. Also, you want to see big stacks in front of people. A game where everyone has bought in short or is stuck is not necessarily a game you want to be in. True, you can often outmaneuver people who are close to the cloth. But you'll find, for example, your bluffs are less likely to work, because they're down to their last big bet so why not call? Also there's less to win, because people are either too broke or too tight with their money.
When you've decided it's time to get up, walk over to the floorman and ask for a table change. Why do you walk away? Well, for one thing, you need to get some blood flowing to a place that isn't your aforementioned nether regions. For another, you don't want the people you are playing with to know that you are essentially disparaging their table. That's only going to depress the action. Also, it's a tell--people see you know enough to know when to move.
Get your name on the change list and just hunker down and wait for it. If you don't think you can get a new table, go home. In some clubs, they have a must-move feeder table situation, where you can't maneuver back and forth between tables. In that case, just pick up your chips, grab a cup of coffee, and start focusing full-time on the jazzercise until they allow you to get into the must-move game. Or better yet, if you have the discipline, become a railbird and watch the game you're going to move into until they call your name.
Having the power to select your table, by the way, is greatly aided by being able to play multiple games and multiple stakes. Limit hold 'em game not to your liking? Try the pot-limit Omaha. This way you increase your chances of being able to select a weaker table. Of all the sorts of 'edge' plays that are available to you, I think this one is the single most important.
A caveat: I don't change tables promiscuously. I switch when I think something is seriously wrong with the table I'm at. For my style of play, I'd rather sit in the same place all night if I can, because then I can pick up the table's vibe, so to speak. I get a sense of everyone's story for the evening. So I know, for example, that the woman in seat 4 is a gym teacher, that certain cretinous players at the table have been insinuating that she's a lesbian, that she's lost several big hands in a row and is now into her second rack. I need to have all that information so I can get a sense of where her head is when she throws in her chips. Or I note that the 25-year old Chinese guy in the expensive clothes (who everyone says is a drug dealer) hasn't lost a pot in an hour, has a huge stack of chips, and has shown down some utterly trashy hands. If I'm new to the table, I'm lacking this information, and I might lay down a hand I should have called with or vice versa.
Welcome to Shangri-La
So you're now at the table where people are actually having fun and your edge is greater. But there is a fresh danger in moving to the table where people are gambling -- it's a little like going directly from a funeral to a wedding. You've got to be able to and want to make the adjustment; your hand valuations will have to change and you must be prepared for the fact that the stakes you have been playing for have effectively gone up due to the extra action. (And if by chance you're just a grinder, then the Happy People Table will only upset you with their boisterous laughter and fiendishly incorrect play. You should remain in your garden with the other rocks.)
If your new crowd is aggressive, you're going to need to see just how crazy people are getting and loosen up enough so that you're playing more hands than you normally would, but not so much that you're too much of a dog versus, say, five or six opponents pre-flop. Of course, you have to know when to stop muscling your table, and you have to have the temperament for creating action to even begin this process.
In the end, you should be at a table where you're comfortable and where you feel you have the best of it. Playing poker is all about finding ways to win that your opponents can't or won't. Table selection is only part of that, but sometimes it can be the most important single decision you'll make in a night.
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