Metagame Considerations in Live MTTs

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For those of you who might have been playing a good amount of live poker over the recent summer months – either at the WSOP, elsewhere in Vegas, or at any of the numerous poker festivals going on worldwide – you’ll most likely have experienced an interesting ‘attunement’ process as your live poker routine develops.

This process relates to how you interpret your opponents’ actions at the tables, and how dynamics between individual players accumulate over time. This element is a much more significant part of live poker than it is online, since live poker involves looking your opponents in the eye. Getting attuned to the metagame of live poker is a pivotal part of maximizing your EV, and thus it’s crucial to spend time focusing on how to shift dynamics in your favour. Let’s take a look at some techniques for doing just that.

Sizing up your opponents

One of the most important habits to develop when sitting down at a live table is to develop an accurate perception of your opponents on a personal level, and to understand how they’re going to perceive you. Take a look at the players around you – how old are they? What are they wearing? How comfortable do they seem? All these questions have answers, and those answers should affect the way you play.

The stereotype about older players is definitely accurate in many cases – they’re often tighter and more conservative. The stereotype about younger players can be about 50/50 – just because a player got into poker over the course of the last 5-10 years doesn’t mean they’re good. A player wearing sunglasses is likely taking the game very seriously, and as a result is likely to be somewhat uncomfortable at the table, perhaps unwilling to take big gambles at risk of busting out.

A player spending the whole time on their phone is not paying close attention, and if they suddenly start piling chips into a pot then there’s a good chance their range will be a lot stronger than average. A player ordering drinks the whole time is likely to splash around too much and make bad calls on the river. All of these reads are things you can pick up within 10-30 minutes of sitting down, and they should all greatly influence how you approach specific opponents.

‘History’ – when it matters, and when it doesn’t

The personal reads you have on your opponents after sitting down at the table will be mirrored in the way they perceive you. They may not all be spending a lot of time thinking about how you’re actually playing, but they’ll certainly have at least a subconscious perception of you in the back of their minds. They’ll respond to you in a way that is grounded in their understanding of you as a person.

What this means is that as ‘history’ between players develops – i.e. the longer you spend at any one given table – the more these players start to shift how they perceive you, and play differently as a result. But different players will adapt differently. There are players who will actively seek out an aggressive dynamic with you – these players will often be somewhat easier to identify. They’ll often be loud, brash and combative. The players who seem to shrink away from any significant dynamic are generally more productive sources of profit, since they’ll allow you to pick good spots without much resistance.

The problem with ‘history’ though, is that in general, only the players who are good enough to pay close attention to your ranges will actually be making significant adaptations to their own play as a result of their perception of you. For example, a player who’s seen you bluff a lot but isn’t a particularly aggressive preflop player isn’t actually that much more likely to be 3-betting you light just because of ‘history’ – their preflop ranges may well be very static, and only their bluff-catching ranges in postflop spots may change. Be mindful of the difference between a player who is adapting both their preflop and their postflop games, and a player who is really only going to make significant adaptations in specific bluff-catching situations.

Conversation and speech play

Conversation is a valuable tool in your arsenal. Players who sit silently at the table, saying nothing to their opponents miss out on information that could provide them with valuable opportunities for exploitation. Finding out that the guy to your left owns his own business and is likely worth seven figures, compared to being a guy who’s taking his first shot at a $1,000 tournament, could be invaluable in understanding the way each of the two players might approach a tournament situation.

With that said, be careful not to place too much credence in what your opponents say about the hands they play. On many occasions players will be surprisingly honest about the hands they hold, but it’s also fairly common for players to randomly lie about their hands with no specific intention or desired image they want to convey. In addition, players might say things to you about their intentions for future hands – all of this should be taken with a pinch of salt. Usually, they’re not going to do what they say they will.

Here’s an example from one of the WSOP events I played this summer, the Giant $365 event. I’m down to around 18bb in the big blind and a fairly active, thirty-something Canadian recreational player opens in the cutoff. I shove over his raise with Ad2d, and he tanks for around a minute with what he claims is Jack-high. “You re-raise me every single time I open, it’s crazy”, the player says, not realizing that it’s only the second time I’ve 3-bet him in the three hours we’ve been playing together.

Villain asks me to “crack a smile” – I remain stoic and say nothing. Villain eventually folds, and tells me that if I had smiled, he would have called. I look at my cards, show the deuce of diamonds, and smile at him. He says he knows I didn’t have pocket deuces because I had to check my cards before showing – a fair point. He pointedly states, “next time you do that, I’m calling you, doesn’t matter what I have”.

A short time later, I’m down to 22bb in the small blind, and the same player opens again in the hijack, to around the same sizing of roughly 2.7bb. I fairly quickly shove with JsTs, the only play I can make in that spot, an extremely profitable one. Despite having said he was calling me no matter what he had, villain tanks for a full 90 seconds, before eventually calling with AcQd.

The lesson here is that villain was, in this situation, all talk. Of course he did end up calling, but having told me he was calling me no matter what, he obviously did at least consider folding a hand that should have been a snap-call in that situation. Villain had no intention of following through on his threat to call me with his entire range – he was posturing. If I had decided to do something different with my JsTs as a result of a perception that villain truly was folding 0% of the time, I would most likely have ended up turning down an extremely profitable spot. If an opponent tells you what they’re going to do next time you raise their big blind or something similar, don’t treat it as a guarantee.

Remember to relax and enjoy it

Finally, don’t tense up at the table so much that you forget to enjoy the experience of playing live. Poker is fun, and when we forget that, we often put ourselves in a mental space that prevents us from playing at our peak. We become stressed and end up making decisions designed to try to control the game in impossible ways – focusing on ‘minimizing variance’ and other unreasonable goals.

Relax, have some fun at the table, and your interactions with your opponents outside of the hands you actually play will give you clues you can use in the moment of making a decision. The dynamics that build up as a result of these interactions can be used to shift momentum in your favour. Mastering the live tables is a skill, and just like anything else, if you’re better at it than your opponents, you win in the long run.