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Putting Players on Tilt
Putting Players on Tilt - In a Super Turbo you never want to motivate your opponents to focus on trying to beat you. If you do something to make your opponent dislike you, his natural reaction will be to want to hurt you back. The last thing he wants to do now is lose to you, so he will be focusing more than ever. He might have been watching TV, surfing the web and playing poker at the same time. But now the TV is turned off and the browser is minimized. His mission is to beat you. So avoid doing things that offend or embarrass your opponents such as slow rolling, berating them in chat, telling them they got lucky when they outdrew you, playing unnecessarily tricky, showing bluffs and deliberately putting players on tilt. Example 1: It's 4-handed and you are a massive chipleader with 1500 versus stacks of 610, 400 and 90. Blinds are 40/80. The player with 400 folds. The player with 610 open limps on the button hoping to team up with you against the tiny stack that is in the small blind. But the tiny stack folds, leaving himself only 50 chips. You and your huge stack are sitting in the big blind with 63-offsuit. Since the small blind folded, this becomes a no-brainer shove for you, because the button can't call and risk bubbling when there's a player with only 40 chips left (unless he limped with a monster like AA or KK). So you shove and the button reluctantly folds. Then you do a stupid thing. You show him the 63o - bad move! Your push was very correct, but showing the bluff was a terrible idea, because you have now created an enemy. Here's another situation to consider. If you get heads-up with someone on the flop (usually after they've open limped and you're in the big blind) and you flop a good hand, but you can't decide whether to bet out or go for a check-raise, just bet out. People feel offended when they get check-raised. They feel embarassed or tricked. It motivates them to play tricky against you the next time they get a chance. You would rather them play straight-forwardly against you. So don't check-raise just for the purpose of causing others pain. If check-raising is clearly the better play, then certainly do it. But if it's close, you might be better off just betting. Example 2: A loose passive player open limps from the button, the small blind folds and you have J5 offsuit in the big blind and you started the hand with only 5BBs. You check and the flop comes J96 giving you top pair. The pot is 2.5BBs and you have only 4BBs left in your stack, so you're committed. You could check and hope that he bets with something like K7, A3 or 44, so you can check-raise all-in as a big favorite. But the risk is that this loose passive player might check behind with a hand you don't want to give a free card to such as KQ, QT or 87. Or if he checks behind with K7, A3 or 44 then even a turn card that misses him might kill your action. Therefore it might be a good idea to bet out about 1.5BBs. He's never folding a pair or a draw anyway, and you might avoid giving a free card to someone who was never going to put in money in the pot unless he hit something (maybe something that beat's you). So don't do anything to try to put someone on tilt. If you put a player on tilt in a Super Turbo the only ones to benefit are the other players at the table. Both you and the tilter will be hurt by it. He'll be hurt because he's now on tilt and you'll be hurt because he'll play more tricky and aggressive against you and generally keep an eye on you. Example 3: Here's one last example of how to avoid causing unnecessary pain or embarassment of others. You have AA in the small blind and everyone folds to you. The big blind started the hand with only 1.3 BBs, so he's practically all-in just by posting his blind. You should simply and promptly raise to put him all-in. Don't get tricky and just call and let him raise his last 0.3 BBs only to get called by AA. Make the inevitable process of him getting all-in against your AA as quick, painless and unmemorable as possible. Don't wake a sleeping giant. Here are some other ways to NOT draw attention to yourself.
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