Texas Holdem Party Guide to Table Selection
The Texas Holdem Party Guide to Table Selection
Table selection is a hugely underestimated part of poker especialy Texas Holdem . Table selection is basically choosing the right table and seat to sit down at in order to maximise your profit. Good table selection can be the difference between a break even player and a winning player. You will see good poker players continuously opening up and changing poker tables, looking for the most profitable tables and seats. Table selection sounds easy, however it is a skill, you have to know what you are looking for and in this article I will show you what exactly that is.
When playing Texas Holdem poker what table are you looking for?
When searching (table selecting) the many rooms on your online poker site the two figures you should be looking closely at are the average pot sizes and average number of players per flop.
Firstly the average pot size gives us an idea of how much money the players at the table are putting in. Here we are looking for high numbers. The higher the number the more money we can expect to win when we hold a strong hand.
The average number of players per flop shows us what sorts of players are at the table. If this figure is high, it will probably indicate the players are looser, a lower number will indicate tighter players. We of course looking at finding looser players, reason being there starting hand selection will not be as strong, something we can take advantage of when playing strong hands.
Depending on what on your own style of play depends on where you should choose to player. Tighter players may want to play will looser players and pick up the occasional big pot, looser players may want to choose tighter players and take down small pots often.
What players are we searching for in Texas holdem?
As I have just said the type of players you want to play with does depend on your own strategy. There are lots of tools available to help you search for players these days. If you use software like Poker tracker or HEM, data mining is a great option to help you find the type of players you are looking for.
One of the most widely used strategies used by today’s successful online players is the TAG style (tight aggressive). If, like me, employ this style of play then you are looking for certain type of players around you at the table. We want to find ‘fish’ to our right and ‘rocks’ to our left. Fish are bad poker players who play a large amount of hands, with bad starting hand selection, and where good players win their money from. They can generally be recognised by a Vpip (voluntary put money in pot) of between 40-100% if you use Poker tracker or HEM. We want these to be sat to our right as we will have position over them the majority of the time and therefore they will be easier to play against. Having a ‘fish’ on your left is something I would strongly recommend against, it makes them much harder to play. We target fish because like I said before their starting hand selection is poor. You will find yourself taking money of them when you hold hands like AK with top pair top kicker when then turn over A6 for example. They play hands that you will dominate.
To our left ideally we will tight players who will fold their blinds easily. This is so we raise a wide selection of hands from the button and know a lot of the time they will fold them to us, giving us easy money. A tight player can be found by searching for Vpip of between 0-15%.
When to play Texas Holdem?
Another huge factor in improving your win rate can be the time of day you play. This will influence the people that are on your site for you to play with. We obviously want to play with more players worse than us and less or none of the better players. So when are the fish most present?
Most players who play for fun will play in the evenings after work and on the weekend, increasing player traffic. If you choose to play at these times, then it’s when they will be more fish available for you to target. Also late nights tend to produce some drunken players, which will certainly not improve their play, quite the opposite in fact. So if your schedule allows I would strongly recommend playing when the traffic is highest, you will see the benefit in the long run.
Don't be afraid to move!
So you have sat at a table with a fish to your right and had some success from them. They finish playing, what should you do? A lot of people will keep just playing, hoping to win from the other players on the table. However a good poker play would asses the situation and realise that his best chance of winning money, will be to go and find another seat with bad players to his right. Once a table changes do not be afraid to find a new one, remember we want to be playing with players worse than us!
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