Okay, you’ve just walked into your favorite cardroom, bought a rack of chips from the cage, and are being shepherded to a table to begin your session. Maybe this is the first time you’ve been to this room, or maybe it’s your regular game but there’s a bunch of new players you haven’t seen before. Regardless, as you sit down and look around the table, you realize there’s not one face that you recognize. (This isn’t at all unusual, of course.)
Quick: How do you identify which of these players are really good, and which ones are really bad players? I’ll give you two button-orbits to reach your conclusion.
Here’s how I do it:
First of all, the answer (as I see it) has nothing to do with any of the following :
· Size of chip stack. Especially at a no-limit table, maybe a really bad player just won a big hand on a bad beat. (I’ve done this more than once myself.) So amount of chips isn’t it.
· Age, gender, beauty, nationality, race, language, etc. – completely irrelevant.
· Talkativeness. Maybe a Matusow or Jamie Gold clone is at the table. Or maybe the mime convention is in town. It doesn’t matter.
· Cardroom regular or first-time visitor, doesn’t make any difference.
· Drunk or sober – believe it or not, I don’t think this makes much of a difference either.
Nope. Here’s how I figure it out, and it really does take me about two button orbits to determine:
Who’s playing the most hands? Who’s playing the fewest? If somebody is playing in every pot, expecting themselves to be the next Sammy Farha, then they are playing a lot of garbage. And unless they are Sammy Farha, they probably can’t get away from that garbage very easily. So, in my book, that makes them donkey candidates.
It’s the tight ones you have to watch out for. They won’t enter a pot without a decent hand. I’ve folded pocket queens preflop when one of these folks raises from early position. Seriously! And more than once. (Maybe I’m the donkey?)
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