Profiles
What Is A Player Profile?
Player profiles are a method used to define the type of player your opponents may be.
In a poker game we are trying to give as little information about how we play to our opponent as we can, while trying to gather as much information about them as possible. Being able to quickly and accurately profile a poker player can help with getting the right reads and give you an edge at the poker table.
What are the Types of Poker Player
During a hand of poker we will face many decisions, how people react to these decisions will define their profile. The range of hands they play, how willing are they to play bad hands? Will they bet with them or wait to see what everyone else does? These decisions can be classified as tight or loose and passive or aggressive.
- Tight/Aggressive
- Tight/Passive
- Loose/Aggressive
- Loose/Passive
By observing players we can see how their decision put them in different profiles. Look to see what hands they show down, lots of low value cards and unsuited cards would mean they have poor hand selection, playing a lot of hands and lots of pots these are the signs of a loose player.
How Aggressive is Aggressive?
Now you can see if they are Tight or Loose, Passive or Aggressive we need to define what that means.
Start to compare them to players you know. Think of the loosest guy you have ever seen play and give him a score, doesn’t matter how much, say 90/100 in looseness. Now the tightest guy you’ve ever known and score him too, say 10/100 in looseness, now look at your opponent and judge, is he as tight as that guy? or as loose? so he has a score, say 30/100 so he’s pretty tight, but not too tight.
Then we pick aggressive and passive people a give him a score based on that, let’s say he was one of the most aggressive people you’ve ever seen with a score of 90/100. So we would end up with profile of the guy quite easily, we know how tight he is, 30 and we know how aggressive he is, 90 so we can profile him as being tight/aggressive.
What does all this mean?
Once you have players profiled you can use this profile to make your reads. Using the example of our opponent who is tight/aggressive. we know he will have a decent hand because he raised pre-flop and he is quite tight and only plays when he has quite good cards, so if the flop is high cards we can be pretty sure he will bet because he is very aggressive. Lets say we flopped the nuts, he will act after us, so should we bet, or check? In this situation we can check knowing he will bet for us. This is a sound decision based upon his profile.
How to Exploit a Player.
By using player profiles to help make poker decisions we can change the way we play according to our opponents. Use the profile and figure out what they want you to do and do the opposite. If a Loose/Aggressive player raises you all in on the river, you can be safe calling him with weaker hands, he wants you to be scared of his bet, so don’t be. If it’s a Tight/Passive player doing though, beware! Raising is against his usual behaviour so he must have a very strong hand.
