Playing in a live setting shouldn’t be intimidating for a good online player. If you have a lot of hands under your belt and spend a lot of time working on and thinking about your game, you are already better than half the players you‘ll meet in the Brick and Mortar realm. I’ll give you a few things to do in preparation before you get to the casino. I’ll also present key concepts you should focus on during live table play.

A few helpful things to try away from the casino

When playing online pretend that you are sitting at a live table. One thing I do occasionally is cover my cards before they get to me. In a live game I'm a proponent of not looking at your hole cards until the action is on you and this exercise will mimic what you do in live play (I'll use the AOL buddy window to do the trick). Practice trying to figure out how much the pot has in it and your pot odds without using the pot calculating feature, this will help you make speedier decisions in a live game and less readable. If you make a bluff online, pretend that someone is looking at you. Practice your calm breathing (you may look into some yoga exercises) and expressionless look.

When you sit at a table

Don‘t talk excessively. When you tell people about yourself you are giving them information. I can usually tell if someone is a decent player within ten minutes. Pay attention to everyone at the table and develop your skills to determine who can play and who can't by asking yourself certain questions:

Do they handle their chips with skill or are they clumsy chip stackers? Typically, someone who handles their chips well has been playing a while.

Do they dress flashy, conservative, or look like a bum? Flashy players typically provide more action. Someone who isn't shaved and smells bad may be on a 30-hour bender and possibly close to broke. A conservative look can quite often mean a tight player.

Do they make betting errors? The Blinds are 25-50 to start and on hand one they try to raise to 75. That really says something about them, and it doesn't say good player.

Do they comment on how other people are playing? Someone who is berating other players for playing bad starting hands is typically weak-tight, and prone to tilting.

Players can say things that pinpoint them. They will make comments about other hands and give away their playing style. Keep your eyes and ears open. Some people will tell you that they haven't won a hand since Nixon was in office. They'll tell you they are the best player in the world. They'll comment how AA is the worst hand in poker...........all this is giving you, the observant player, notes in your mental notebook.

Look at your hand when it's your turn Preflop (especially shorthanded)

I'm a proponent of not looking at your hand until the action is on you. It's amazing how many people will look at their hand and put a chip on in when the action is 3 or 4 people ahead of them and not put a chip on it when they are going to fold. Any observant player can totally take advantage of this.

A good player can get somewhat of a read on other players when they initially look at their hand. It's even more magnified when you are playing a live sit-n-go and you get shorthanded. Different people have slightly different preflop tells, but typically, someone will sit up a bit straighter when they have a hand and you may catch a very quick lighting up of the eyes. Rarely will someone look at a very good hand for a long time.

I recall playing several times heads up where my opponent would look at their big blind hand before I would act from the small blind and often times would give me information. If I was picking up weak signals, I was raising with almost anything and quite often able to pick up that Big Blind without much effort. I wasn't even looking and he didn't seem to mind giving me this unfair advantage.

Betting and Timing

When you play a hand, try to take the same amount of time to make each of your bets, and make them in a uniform fashion. If you take ten seconds to play a certain hand and splash your chips with your head down, it's different from taking 25 seconds and sliding them slowly with your head up. When you become good at reading people you can get into making false tells, but for the beginner, I would recommend just doing everything the same. Some people tap their foot a number of times to try and keep their timing uniform. I've heard Paul Phillips say that timing is one of the easiest tells to pick up on. For instance, if their are 2 spades on the flop I bet and you call quickly, more often than not you are on a flush draw. When you get to be more skilled you can use timing to throw people off, but I'd try and really work on getting your bets out in about the same amount of time and the same style. If you have a tough decision it's another story, but if you seem to always call a flush draw quick and always re-raise quickly with a big hand pre-flop, you need to change what you‘re doing.

Learning to Read other players

Pay Attention, Pay Attention, Pay Attention! When you play online you can pick up timing tells, betting patterns and use the notes you have. When playing live, you need to pay attention to how people play and use that information, as well as what their body language is giving you. Tells are not an exact science and I've been dead wrong sometimes, but there are other times I know exactly what someone has. Josh Arieh and Daniel Negreanu are able to play tons of junk because they are so good at picking up weakness in their opponents, they are totally focused on processing your betting, your behavior, your image, your comfort level and 20 other things to pry pot after pot from you, but also know when they should stand down.

An example.... I'm playing a satellite at the Taj in Atlantic City and open the pot for 3 bets with a pair of nines. The only caller I get is a flashy Sam Farha type who is on the button. I've basically figured out in five minutes of playing with him through his posturing and his table talk (he's actually said "the cards don't matter") that he's a big time action player. The flop is 47J rainbow and I bet about 3/4 of the pot and he calls. The turn is another Jack and I bet about 2/3 of the pot
and this time he beats me into the pot going all in while puffing out his chest and trying to stare me down. I think about it in my head for only 20 seconds and call thinking he's got 56 and is trying to blow me off the hand, and low and behold he does. Unfortunately, a three came on the river, but that's not the point of this: I used the information from what he has said, the hand it itself and his body language, betting and tempo and made a gut decision.

Be VERY wary of clever players

I recall a hand in last year's WPT Bellagio 25k, 50,000 starting chip event where Johnny Chan totally tricked Cliff Josephy aka JohnnyBax (who was fairly new to big time live play). Early on at the 50-100 level, Bax had KK and Chan had AA. Bax raised to 400, Chan re-raised to 1500 and Bax called. The flop was 3-5-9 rainbow, and Bax checked. Chan bet 2,000 and Bax called. The turn brought a 2. Bax checked and Chan bet 13,000 but then said he meant to only bet 5,000 because he couldn't see the chips through his sunglasses and wanted to pull 8,000 back. Chan argued and Bax called the floor to make sure and the bet stood, Bax then proceeded to go all in and Chan called immediately. Bax had some time to wonder about why Johnny Chan is one of the greatest poker players in the world. This example demonstrates that if you piece information together you will come to the right conclusions.

If Chan is some schmo, then maybe you can think of the turn bet as an honest mistake, but it's Johnny Chan, and there's no way he's ever going to make that mistake. Do you think he doesn't know you have Kings given how the hand has gone down? He’s never seen you before and doesn’t think you are thinking along those lines. There are crafty players who may do similar things. Always take a moment to think about why someone is doing something.

I did a similar trick in a sit-n-go at Binion’s a few years ago. I limped under the gun with AA and the table folded around to a novice player in the BB who was tapping the table. I knew he had made a decision on his hand and could tell that he was thinking about raising because he glanced at his chips. I told the dealer from the player tapping the table that I felt he had checked and to give us a flop, to which the player argued and I quickly backed off, he raised 4x, I quickly
and somewhat angrily moved all in and he called me immediately with AQ. Unfortunately, the board made a flush and we chopped, but if the player had put the pieces together he would have known a fold was in order. He gave me credit for fooling the you-know-what out of him.

Conclusion

Try to keep your cool at the table and always pay attention. Take your time to consider the tough decisions by going through all that you have observed and know about specific players, considering what you think they think about you. Don't give out information by talking unnecessarily and try and do things uniformly as possible. Got it? Good luck out there.

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