Profiling Opponents in Sit and Go Tournaments
If you are serious about making money in sit and go tournaments then you also need to be serious about profiling your opponents. Opportunities are going to present themselves in every game where a decision may very well be mostly reliant on what you know about your opponent. So if you have no inclination on that opponent whatsoever, you are decreasing the probability of you making the correct decision. Often times they are big decisions.
You may be one of those rare select individuals who can get a sense of your opponents character, even if it's through bandwidth, and know what to do instinctively. I am not one of those people, and it's likely you are not either. So don't fool yourself into thinking that you are going to instinctively know what to do in game critical hands each and every time. That is nonsense, and is the domain of fools.
If you have never profile opponents and kind of puzzle as to how to go to go about it while there is a lot of information online and in books about profiling opponents, but some of the most standard and widely accepted profiles are those that were described in Dr. Alan Schoonmaker's book called The Psychology of Poker. In using a graph and scale method Schoonmaker was able to define profiles by using passive and aggressive, compared with tight and loose measurements to define extreme player profiles. These profiles are otherwise known as tight passive, tight aggressive, loose aggressive, and loose passive, each of these which made up for corners of the profile grid.
It has been argued that tight aggressive is the best way to play most kinds of poker in most situations. But other strategies cannot be discounted and players have adopted characteristics from the other profile quadrants and have also proven successful when playing like a calling station or a maniac or a rock. All of these profiles you will run into at every confrontation. Most players however are not so extreme as to be clearly identified in one of the quadrants.
This is where some other indicators come in handy and may really tell the real story in terms of how extreme your opponent really is. VPIP represents how many times your opponent has voluntarily put money into a pot. This is based on a percentage of total hands played a higher this is the looser your opponent is to be considered. PFR shows how many times of total hands played that your opponent has raised before the flop, the higher this is the more aggressive your opponent should be considered. AF indicates how likely your opponent is to bet after the flop compared to how many times he bets before the flop. This shows your opponents willingness to play the flop aggressively with you. WSD and WSD% are clear indicators of your opponents propensity to stay in a hand and his ability to know how good his hand is what all the cards are turned up in the community.
I would like to reiterate here that tournament indicator shows all of these vital statistics instantly, and will help you make decisions with a simple glance at your opponent’s statistics. These statistics combined with the Schoonmaker profile grid can really be useful in attaching an online profile to your opponent. In sit and go tournaments, because of the limited time you are playing with your opponents, you need to get a handle on this information as soon as you can.
To help you do this, I highly encourage you to download the sit and go profile report at the top of this page if you haven't done so already. It is an extensive analysis of the types of players you are going to find in sit and go tournaments and will also show how to identify, categorize, and strategize against them. It is a free e-book so just sign-up to get it and make this one of your first priorities in profiling.
