Establishing your table presence
Table presence describes the impression you give the other people at the table. Your attitude and demeanor can project huge amounts of information such as excitement, disappointment, confidence, anger, irritation, and so on. In addition to these outward emotional cues, your table presence is also based on how you play and win. Does your style cause the other players to consider you a conservative and tight player or a loose canon? Do the other players respect your bets as indicators of a powerful hand? Or, do people regard you as someone who will call anything?
Another factor contributing to your table presence is your physical appearance, and by that I mean your clothing, hair, accessories, and so forth. Do you dress casually in jeans and a T-shirt? Do you dress up in designer clothes? Is your hair long or short? Do you yak on your cell phone all the time? Do you wear an expensive watch? I’m not advocating that you look or dress any particular way, but you should consider how it influences other people’s opinions about you. If you play poker in your work clothes but your hands strike like Thor’s hammer, then you will be establishing a respected table presence. People will think this guy works for a living and is ready to take my money too. Players who do not know you may not know what to expect. Both of these situations can be positive for you when exploited correctly.
Absolutely half the battle in poker is the willingness of your opponents to put their chips in the pot. The trick is to get them to put money out there when they have the losing hands. Another trick is to scare them out of your pots so as to prevent them from filling up into a hand that can beat yours. You and all your opponents will be fighting internal battles between protecting your money and trying to take money from others. Effectively navigating this field of greed, pride, excitement, and desire is never easy, but being aware of the nuances and seeking to exploit them are crucial to improving your game.
Personally, I tend to play really tight conservative poker. Over a decade of using poker to help pay the bills has stamped the recklessness out of me (but one does always need to be on guard against the reemergence of foolishness). With opponents familiar with my game, they are fairly gun shy when I start betting a hand. One of my colleagues refers to me as the “jaws of death” – a moniker I try to live up to. When I bet, players familiar with me start looking for reasons to fold because my table presence has been established as that of a winner. I’m not going to be out there exploring jungles without a map.
In order to get a table presence such as this, you need to very consistently win pots and show your opponents premium hands when they call you all the way to the showdown. When you accomplish this, then you will have the opportunity to bluff effectively. Constantly show them the nuts (the best cards in any particular hand) so that when you have to bluff you have a decent chance. Bluffing must always be done judiciously and rarely.
Building yourself a table presence that makes your opponents squirm and studying the actions and presences of your opponents are the difficult human elements of poker. Anyone can look at the numbers and learn the odds of poker and know which hand has a better chance than other hands, but judging the human factors is extremely difficult and presents a constant challenge to poker players, whether novice or advanced. You have to get a sense of when things just are not right for you. You need to know when your decent looking hand is going to lose, so you can fold instead of clinging hopefully to it and donating your money to other people. For example, if you get in a pot with someone who hardly ever bets and he or she goes all in, which is a common move in no-limit, then all of the sudden your pocket pair of kings ceases to excite you. When that happens, just fold. You should always be willing to fold, even when your cards are good. You might regret it a little but not nearly as much as if you had bet it to the hilt and gotten your bankroll turned into confetti for someone else’s party.
Consider the following points as you work to establish your table presence:
1. Decide on a strategy. Know ahead of time which hands you are willing to bet in order to see the flop. Are you going to strictly stick with super-premium hands? Do you want to include suited connectors or premium hands when you have a good position? Establish a strategy for yourself ahead of time.
2. Be consistent. Decide what you are going to do and do it. Consistency comes with time. You will likely have to devote some playing sessions to experimenting and learning about the strategies that personally suit you, but your goal is to refine your strategy into something you can consistently follow. You might be thinking that consistency will make it easy for the other players to predict your behavior. To some extent this is true, but if they can predict that you will win, then they will give up more pots to you instead of battling it out to the river. Also consider that by being consistent, you can now employ the tactic of doing something unexpected. When your opponents have you stereotyped, then you will occasionally be able to take advantage of their preconceptions or prejudices about you. People have a tendency to categorize each other, which is a useful skill, but if you overly rely on it, then you will be ill prepared for dealing with the unexpected. So, be consistent but give yourself some wiggle room when you need to get out of a jam or snatch up an opportunity.
3. As you study your opponents also keep note of their reactions to you. How are they regarding you? What are their comments? Do they call you? Do they raise you? Do they fold? All of these actions supply important feedback for you. Your opponents are the mirror in which you will see your table presence reflected. Use this information to judge how well you are establishing a presence and whether or not it is meeting your goals.
Table presence is an advanced concept. You will likely work on it for the entirety of your playing career. It will always require constant fine tuning and adaptation to new game environments. For example, if you regularly play at the same cardroom, as I do, most of the other players will be well aware of your presence at the table and what it means for them. However, when you go to a new cardroom or casino and play poker, you will have to focus on establishing your table presence. If you want to prove your expertise as a player, then make sure to show your opponents the nuts when you get in a hand to the end so they will see that you are knowledgeable about your game and not a fish to be reeled in, released and caught again.
Continue: Money management for no-limit poker
