Profiling errors

Whenever you sit down at the virtual felt or at the poker table at your local casino you will almost always begin to figure out which players are tight, which of your opponents are loose, who plays aggressively and who is passive. This is called profiling and everyone does it but because each individual is completely different it is quite difficult to profile accurately and mistakes are often made.

Although those using betfair promo note that there are dozens of mistakes you can make whilst profiling an opponent there are three that are the most common. One is the so called primary effect and entails you giving too much weight and significance to the first set of observations you make. For example, you may see a new player at your table playing almost every hand and assume he is loose-aggressive but he may be on a rush of cards or may be creating this image for himself so that he can tighten up and get paid off with his big hands. This is a common problem because a good poker player often changes gears to throw their opponents off the scent.

Those looking ahead to Betfair Poker Live London note that another common mistake is the so-called Halo Effect, though this is more weighted towards profiling players in a live environment. It is human nature to assign positive attributes to people we deem to be good-looking and negative ones to those who are not so fortunate in the beauty department! Do not fall for this, especially in this day and age where many fresh-faced internet poker prodigies may only be 18-years old but are highly aggressive, in the poker sense of the word, and may have played hundreds of thousands of hands so will be quite experienced.

Finally, humans are guilty of stereotyping which does not bode well when trying to profile opponents. Most people would expect the flat-cap wearing 75 year old man to play loose-passive where you would often be correct to assume the young man clad in poker room clothing was a solid player. However, you will often be wrong.

When profiling opponents make sure you do so with a clear head, without the influences of anything else other than what you have seen and allow your profiles to be fluid and change to extra things you observe, rather than being rigid and set in stone.