Know Your Enemy
In the game of poker, it really pays to know your opponents. If you assume that every poker player plays well, then you’re going to end up making some pretty bad reads. When I looked back on the poker hands that he’d won, I could only think of one or two hands where he actually played solidly and won. More often, he started with cards that were mediocre at best and drew out the best hand. I had assumed that this guy was a solid poker player based on his possession of the largest stack and pretty much ignored what I’d seen throughout the game. Since I categorized him as a smart player, I thought that he’d be a tight-aggressive player, instead of the loose-aggressive player that he turned out to be. That assumption led to a really bad read which ended up knocking me out of the game. So, learn from my mistakes-don’t judge a player on the size of his chip stack, because you may end up getting burned on a bad read. Judge a player on how he plays, not how much money he has. Don’t make the erroneous assumption that all of your opponents play just like you do. Some of them are better, and some are worse. Figure out which is which before you go all in.
