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 he Guardian Poker Column |
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| Victoria Coren |
| Wed 11 May 2011 |
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When it comes to thinking through your play, stop at level three – after that you can be just too clever
When I was learning to play poker, back in the days when we travelled to the game by horse and cart, I heard a lot about "good multiway hands": small drawing hands like 6 7, with which players were encouraged to call a raise if several others had called, trying to hit a big flop and get paid.
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What was once considered wily is now considered weak. These days, players are encouraged to "squeeze" (re-raise) in this situation, to punish the other limpers and win the pot straight away. You're probably best off trying a mixture of both, especially online. Some opponents will be running software that gauges your betting patterns, so you have to keep them varied.
But here's the big danger of re-raising according to the demands of fashion: if one of the other players then puts in a fourth bet, does he definitely have a huge hand? Or is he just recognising your squeeze and shovelling the pressure back on?
This is where we get into what's called "levelling". Level one thinking is simply, "Do I have a good hand?" Level two is, "What does my opponent have?" Level three is, "What does my opponent think I have?"
Beyond level three, you get into a complicated world where each player is psyching the other out; it's in that rarefied world of "He thinks that I think that he thinks that I think . . .", levelling that you see TV players getting thousands of chips in when neither has any hand at all.
My advice? Stop at level three. TV can trick you into thinking everyone's fearless and everyone's a genius. It's not the case. Most of the time, when someone bets very strongly it's because he has the best hand. You mustn't be naive in poker, but you can lose a lot of chips by being too sophisticated.
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