Good poker games ("good" meaning "relatively easy to beat") are a little like the weather: Everyone talks about them, but few people do anything about them.
Most people live in places where more than one game is available: It's a pretty small town that has only one poker game, and even then, Internet poker is available to those who are willing to play it. I'll save the issue of whether you should play it for another column.
Given that so many people have access to lots of poker games and also understand how much easier it is to beat a good game than a tough game, you'd think that most players would invest a lot of time in thinking about how to get into the best available game … but many don't. Anxious to start playing, they rush to sit in the first open seat.
Getting into a game 10 minutes faster can cost you six hours of sitting in a better game, and that makes it an expensive 10 minutes. Let's figure out how you can spend that 10 minutes so the next few hours are more enjoyable and profitable.
How to find a new or better home game isn't a 10-minute process, so I'll save that one for another time, too. In this column, we're going to look only at how to find the best game in a public or Internet cardroom.
Is Your Room Big or Small?
In a public cardroom, you'll probably find yourself in one of two situations. Either your room is fairly small, in which case there will probably be only one game going at a given stake level, or it is big. In the case of a small room, you may have a threshold decision to make. Are you willing to play more than one limit or one game?
For example, are you, as someone who prefers playing $2-$4 hold'em, willing to sit in a $1-$2 or $4-$8 hold'em game, or a $1-$5 stud game? If you are – and I think you should strive for that kind of flexibility, because it does give you many more opportunities to select the best possible game for yourself at a given moment – you can move on into the section below, which addresses choices in a large cardroom.
If you're willing to play only one limit or one game, you need to visit only large cardrooms (or Internet cardrooms) in order to have flexibility.
Assuming you have access to a larger cardroom, how do you pick the best $2-$4 (or the best $15-$30) game out of several offered? You need to spend your first few minutes at the cardroom doing some scouting – preferably, as surreptitiously as possible.
Let's say that four tables are going at your preferred limit. You really need only one visual pass through those tables to make the visual half of the assessment. While assessing visually, you should look for:
• known strong players (to avoid, unless their presence is overbalanced by an abundance of known weak players);
• known weak players (to target both by table and by seating position – which may have to come later via a seat change – unless their presence is overbalanced by an abundance of strong players).
Naturally, you may not know the players well enough to make this kind of assessment, and it's unlikely that you'll be able to see enough in a few minutes to make any judgments like this. In that case, there is still one major visual clue you can check: How many chips do the players have in front of them?
Have the Winners Already Departed?
Although (as I'll explain further in a moment) this clue is more helpful in an Internet cardroom than in a brick-and-mortar room, it still can help you in a B&M room. If the majority of players at a table are short-stacked, with no large stacks visible, you are probably looking at a table from which the winners have already cashed out.
Some people think that's bad because they think there's no money to be won, but I disagree. The players who have been losing probably aren't the best players to be found in the room; if they are good, they certainly haven't been lucky, and most players don't play their best when their luck is running poorly.
While it might appear that there is no money to be won, players who have been beaten up by others are going to take one of two steps when they run out of money. They'll either buy in for more (which is very good for you) or they will depart, giving the table a new, random player (which is neutral for you).
What's an Average Buy-In?
When trying to assess how much money is on the table, figure that about four stacks of whatever denomination chips are in play (just one fewer than a full rack of five) is an average buy-in. Many players (myself included) buy in for one rack, regardless of the stake level. Another group tends to buy about three stacks, so this averages out to about four. If you look around and everyone seems to have less than this, you probably have a table that has already been "hit."
What about the reverse? What if almost everyone seems to have more, be it in the form of cash or larger-denomination chips? While it's certainly possible that the local custom is to buy in for a couple of racks, it's more likely that there are a few very good players at the table, and that these good players have either busted some other people out of the game (making their own stacks large and potentially available to redistribute some of those chips to the average-skill players at the table) or have won enough pots to have caused players to reach into their wallets and buy more chips.
Either way, the chip-heavy table probably isn't your best bet … but before you make up your mind, you should augment your visual clues with some audio clues. The best clue is the same item that Reader's Digest calls the best medicine: laughter.
If a table seems jovial, full of laughter, conversation, and happy folks, you needn't run away, fearing that they "all must be winning." While it's possible that everyone is winning, if some now-departed players contributed a lot of money to the game, it's far more likely that the game merely has a strong social element.
They Laugh in High-Stakes Games, Too
You don't have to be assessing $2-$4 games for that to be true. On plenty of occasions, I have seen the biggest game in the room be the apparent happiest. I was quite surprised the first time I saw this (at Bay 101, where a $40-$80 Omaha game seemed downright slap-happy), but I soon figured out why. There were two major fish in that game, and the more skilled players wanted, quite appropriately, to create the impression that everyone was just gambling it up and having a grand old time. This was certainly the best way for the good players to extract several grand from the fish (one of whom was a professional hockey player; I'm not sure if that made him a frozen fish stick instead of a regular fish).
If you had taken a seat in that $40-$80 game, while you certainly would have been sitting down with some of the better players in the room, as long as your own skills were up to it, it would have been well worth fading the action from the strong players.
Two major donors are certainly enough to make a game good, especially if it is a limit game. I'd be more cautious about sitting down in a pot-limit or no-limit game where I ranked myself seven of nine. That game would offer too many situations in which I'd be playing a big pot with someone better than me. In a limit game, the better players can't bust me in one hand.
We're Talking Guidelines, Not Rules
On the other hand, if a table is silent and/or sullen, you probably won't get too many people flinging chips around carelessly. Big losers can get quiet, so you shouldn't automatically reject a table because it's quiet (indeed, you shouldn't automatically draw any hard-and-fast conclusions about a game: I'm providing you with guidelines and clues here, not rules), but the choice between a jovial table and a sullen one is pretty easy on several levels, and if all of the tables seem relatively quiet, you just need to evaluate the games based on other information.
Here's one final and important point about any kind of table assessment: A game's texture can change in a hurry as players come and go. You should not only keep yourself on the "seat change" list, in case a player's departure offers you a chance to gain position on someone you want to target, but should also stay on the "table change" list, and spend some time between hands making an assessment of how the other games now look. Your good game might turn bad, and even if it doesn't, another game might turn better.
An Internet Assessment
When playing on the Internet, you can't draw as many clues from chat as you can in a B&M room, but you can gain more information from the stack sizes, because it is pretty common for players to buy in for a site's "suggested amount." You can make the same kind of assessment I described in B&M games when I suggested that four stacks of chips be considered the average, except online, the suggested buy-in is a better estimate for where people started than the four-stack guideline for a B&M game.
In the long run, of course, there's no substitute for extensive mental or written notes about the skill level of the players who tend to frequent your favorite cardroom, be it Internet or B&M. Actual experience playing with people beats the heck out of educated guesses made via chip-stack sizes or a game's joviality.
Until you acquire that experience, these guidelines should help, and even after you have it, these guidelines may help you guess a little more accurately about how a known opponent is playing on a particular night … because we all certainly have our ups and downs!
Andrew N.S. ("Andy") Glazer, "The Poker Pundit," is Card Player's tournament editor, writes a weekly gambling column for the Detroit Free Press, and is widely considered to be the world's foremost poker tournament reporter. He serves as a quality control consultant for www.TotalPoker.com, for which he also writes the free biweekly "Wednesday Nite Poker" newsletter. Andy welcomes your questions through the "Ask Andy" feature at TotalPoker.com.