How do you generally do at poker and how much attention do you pay?

obviously someone who is not paying attention to what is happening at all most would usually say that would not be a profitible player. Not definitvely true as there are players who play little to no attention to others and just have a solid strategy often mostly GTO.

however whenever I go on long stretches of losing or breaking even I find myself questioning have players adapted to me am I been out played have players learned my tendancies. I have found these questions been asked of myself whether its micros or $50 plus games. I dont play cash games maybe I should I just assume online cash games are the toughest games out there and in most tournements, spin and goes, mtts if i make a mistake which we all do it wont cost me a week/months profit cash games that can hence why i prefer to avoid cash games.

I mean one lesson I learned a long time ago is that your playing poker against humans doesnt matter how bad they may apparently be they can still potentially spot something you are doing too much/too little and exploit it. Most of the time if weak players they exploit it badly and lose bad anyway.

I usually play a lot of tables as mtts sit and goes, spin and goes etc often have small profit per table but can make decent amount if your a winning a player and play lots of tables. doing this it is hard to pay attention to individual players so i do sometimes wonder when things are not going my way if the pool has adapted to me or etc.

last session I had a lot of very bad luck but then when you play a lot of tables your going to get a lot of bad luck and good luck and bad luck tends to stand out. I have a strict rule I stick to never look at the bank roll during the session. I practice tight bank roll management so unless cataclysmic bad session not going to suffer brutal bank roll hit. during last session I was noticing the players that try ridic bluffs, including one player who i caught basically trying to follow me into every single pot and bluff me on all boards that looked like they didnt hit my range. a fun hand where I have pocket Kings and the flop comes TT7 he bets out heavy kinda makes sense from his perspective how many tens can I have? and am I really likely to put it in with 7? etc well obviously based on my reads of him before im not folding turn is 2 he bets big again i call river is T well he moves all in. Now no one in the world who has made the observations i made on the guy is folding here and you might be expecting me to say he had the T for quads and a bad beat rant but nope he had J5!. this player then tried to go after me on every table winning lots of small pots and losing lots of big pots and celebrating every time i lost a hand openly in chat whether against him or someone else whether i was all in and stacked or lost 2 blinds. So clearly he was paying very close attention to me and really not adapting well to me.

I sharkscoped the guy I dont believe its right to share names or etc so i wont but lets just say his graph was pretty damm ugly, the sort of graph that makes you feel a bit guilty that maybe your making money of people that have a serious gamblign problem.

anyway clearly im paying some attention because im getting reads but theres a lot of stuff i miss and i wonder whether thats a weakness. anyway I could have sworn i was going to see something horrific but after the session I checked my balance and it was almost exactly my expected win rate according to my stats so mamybe i was standard luck just sure as hell did not seem that way.

what i am wondering for my own sanity is how much attention and adaption do players seriously make? like obviously if my opponents were Doug Polk Daniel NG and Jungleman they would notice eveyr flaw and tendacy in my play and rip me a new one. However clearly players playing $1 through to $50 games are not in that category.

So I guess im asking what stakes do people play how do you do and how much attention are you paying to your opponents?

In my case, it all depends on my mood. But in general, I always try to play focused because for me poker is to some extent a source of additional income.

In my case, it all depends on my mood. But in general, I always try to play focused because for me poker is to some extent a source of additional income. I prefer tournaments with a buy-in of $1.

I think most players massively overestimate how much attention the average opponent is paying. At the low and mid stakes, most people are focused on their own cards and a basic game plan, especially if they're multi-tabling. They'll notice obvious leaks, but they usually aren't building detailed profiles of every regular.

Good regs will adapt to repeated patterns over time, but that's very different from everyone in the player pool "figuring you out." More often than not, a breakeven or losing stretch is just variance making you question everything.

The player you described with J5 is actually a good example. He was paying a lot of attention to you, but he wasn't adapting well- he was just forcing bluffs because he wanted to beat you. That's not the same as making profitable adjustments.

Personally, I try to pay attention to players who are involved in pots with me or who clearly have recurring tendencies. Beyond that, if I'm multi-tabling i rely more on solid fundamentals than trying to exploit every individual. You simply don't have the bandwidth to track everyone across multiple tables.

As a tight and aggressive player I am often the most aggressive player at my table. A lot of people hate this, so they convince themselves that I am overbluffing and I often take suckouts on the run out because of this. I will say, "you called with that??" and they tell me, "you bluff a lot!" as if they think that they've outsmarted me.

The thing is that they think that me opening J8s strong from the BT is a wild bluff, yet they will limp-call with far worse from UtG. : P They can't tell an opening from a bluff. It's not like I would jam J8s for 40bb as a steal attempt. Now THAT would be a bluff. Yet some of these players WOULD jam A5s or 44 for 40bb and then think that I overbluff, hah!

Now, If I open 97s, get called twice, whiff the flop hard and it checks to me, there is a very good chance that I bluff this for about 60% pot, and usually nobody is calling, so am I overbluffing or not? Haha! ; )

Semprini said:

As a tight and aggressive player I am often the most aggressive player at my table. A lot of people hate this, so they convince themselves that I am overbluffing and I often take suckouts on the run out because of this. I will say, "you called with that??" and they tell me, "you bluff a lot!" as if they think that they've outsmarted me.

The thing is that they think that me opening J8s strong from the BT is a wild bluff, yet they will limp-call with far worse from UtG. : P They can't tell an opening from a bluff. It's not like I would jam J8s for 40bb as a steal attempt. Now THAT would be a bluff. Yet some of these players WOULD jam A5s or 44 for 40bb and then think that I overbluff, hah!

Now, If I open 97s, get called twice, whiff the flop hard and it checks to me, there is a very good chance that I bluff this for about 60% pot, and usually nobody is calling, so am I overbluffing or not? Haha! ; )

Click to expand...

Umm... Yes? hahaha

I'm curious there seems to be a lot of reference to 'they' here in your post. For context purposes who are we referring to when we say 'they'? Is this the chat box online? The local casino tournament? wsop Circuit event or a tourney in Las Vegas? Or maybe a game around the kitchen table with friends?

I'm thinking if it's not too far to drive, maybe I can be part of the 'they' you're talking about (haha ha ha hahaha)

Poker Orifice said:

For context purposes who are we referring to when we say 'they'?

Click to expand...

The chat box.

In a ring game its typically not that important to try to adjust very specifically to individual players, and you also cant really do that, as long as other players are still left to act. Moreover all the sites, where I play, either allow the use of external HUDs or have their own build in HUD. So when I am multitabling, I can leave it to the HUD to pick up on, if someone are totally out of line like 3-betting every other time, they get a chance to so do, and then adjust based on this information.

When you play heads-up or shorthanded with someone at the end of a tournament, it becomes way more important to pick up on, what they are doing and adjust to changing dynamics. For instance in a recent 8-man SnG on ACR Poker, we were down to 3, and the player on my right repeatedly min-raised his SB, then bet small on flop and turn but big on the river. After folding a few times I stuck my foot down, and as expected he was bluffing with total air.

I have good days and bad days like everyone else. I try to stay focused on every hand because even one small mistake can be costly. The more attention I pay, the better my results usually are.