Don’t talk too much at tournaments
I’m going to relate to you an example of how I used some of my opponents thoughts and comments in between hands against him. We are playing a $200 NL tournament at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. The tournament began with 210 players and is down to the final 33. The top 27 spots are paid.
The player to my left has made a lot of comments to the player sitting next to him, about how close we are to making the money. Along with these comments, they often discuss how many players are left at each table, and so on - basically, this player made it very clear that he wants to make it into the money.
Now onto our feature hand :
The blinds are at 1000-2000 with a 200 dollar ante. Our table was 8 handed, thus there was 4600 in the pot to begin the hand. The player to my left is 2nd to act and decides to limp in for 2000 (he has about 24k total). I have 38k in chips and am next to act with Q9s. Normally this is just not a situation in which I’d get involved, but I know that there is a very good chance that the limper will fold his hand due to his previous comments.
I decided to raise it up to 10,000, and after everyone folded, the limper thought for a while and mucked his hand, and I added a cool 6800 to my stack. Now the point of this article isn’t that my play was genius or anything like that, as if someone wakes up with AKo behind me, Ill look like an ass (although the bubble mentality is strong, and it really is possible that someone would fold a hand like this, they are always talking about how you have to fold even Aces in this situation). The point is that when you are playing poker you you should be very careful of what you say, as there are many things that can be used against you by observant opponents. Just knowing that my opponent wanted to money, caused me to make an aggressive play that I would have never made in that situation.
Another important point is that I would often would shy away from making that raise with Q9s because of fear that my opponent is sandbagging with a big hand. However it is not the mindset of players that really want to make the money, to gamble by limping with AA or KK in that spot. They would rather raise all-in and be done with it.
Be careful that when you are playing in live tournaments, that you NEVER make it seem as though coming in the money is very important to you. Do not openly obsess about how many players are remaining, as aggressive players may then decide to go out of their way to make the bubble period a nightmare for you. On the other hand, you should always pay attention to which players really care about making it into the money, and which players it means very little to.
