In no-limit hold’em, playing your opponent is just as big a factor as playing your cards, and arguably more so.  Naturally, you will be observing your opponents, how they play, how they react to certain situations, and so forth.

For instance, you see a player with a huge chip stack call under the gun, then call an all-in raise to nine times the big blind with as little as ace-seven offsuit. Traditional thinking holds that you start classifying him as a loose player, a passive player, a calling station and so forth.

The first thing that pops in my head is this: Seat No. 3's opportunity: Big preflop edges.

In essence, I've synthesized this information into a more usable form. I find personally that by doing this, I can access this precompiled information a lot faster, and this is the most important thing to know about players.

This doesn't stop until each player at the table is categorized as an opportunity, and then I can start focusing on more subtle and specific things.

No. 4: Look for opportunities to make “unpaid advertizing”

Most everyone knows what is meant by the term "advertizing": the voluntary showing of hands to "tell people" what kind of player you are.

I'm a fan of simply playing the game in what looks like the most profitable way, and letting the other players decide what kind of player I am (so I can, naturally, be the exact opposite at a strategic time). Nevertheless, from time to time, I do like to influence my image in subtle ways.

Raising preflop and showing everyone you had pocket aces is a nice way to show people you are capable of raising with aces, but most people will bear in mind with a grain of salt that they are seeing something which you are showing them for their own benefit.

Instead, if I want to convince my opponents I am tight, I do this: Find a hand where a textbook bluff would most certainly succeed, or would most certainly be attempted, and simply not take it. A good example would be where the flop comes paired low, pairs again on the turn, and nothing comes on the river. They check to me on every street, and when they check to me on the river, I announce my hand and turn it over, as natural as can be.

Yes, it probably did cost me the pot to play the hand that way. It's no more than I would have had to spend playing a bad hand aggressively for the expressed purpose of showing it down at the end, and I think it's a far more effective way to do it.

No. 5: Stay positive.

I don't mean just being able to say "yeah, I like poker" at the end of the day. I mean having your aces cracked — or running your kings into aces — and forcing yourself to release that energy in a positive way.

Joke about your bad luck. Joke about the other guy's good luck. Roll your eyes, faint and act as if you had been shot through the heart with a harpoon. I go the self-deprecating route, along the lines of "Yeah, I play that garbage, I get what I deserve; if only they were suited!"  Do whatever you need to do to get it out of your system, but get it out.

If you don't think it can be done reasonably indoors, then go outdoors, muffle your mouth with your fist and scream as loud as you can. The passers-by might wonder why you are apparently trying to swallow your own arm. No matter.

However dumb you look, however dumb you sound, and however dumb you might feel, it is clearly nowhere near as dumb as you will look, sound and feel if you go on tilt and spritz away more chips. A crisis of bad luck shall last exactly one hand — the hand it made you lose.  Once it starts influencing your play on further hands, then it's gone from bad luck to bad play on your part.

It's not easy, and it's a goal I still fail to meet on a regular basis.  But I recognize it as something that I must improve if I want success in poker.

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