“If you can’t spot the sucker within 30 minutes of being at the table then you’re the sucker.”

I’m sure we’ve all heard this cliché before. It’s true that if you are a competent player, you will usually spot several mistakes made by your opponents at the table quite quickly. If you don’t spot any you should probably find a better game. Providing you are observant (or cheat by using Poker Tracker and a heads-up display) within half an hour you should have a good idea who the weak players at the table are.

This is all well and good, but in reality you can do far better than this. It is possible to spot weak players on the internet not only because they play badly, but also because they tend to share certain habits and mannerisms. This article will take a look at some of these other ways to spot the sucker. Things that you can spot long before you have had a good chance to study their play, maybe before they’ve even played a hand!

The days of smoke-filled rooms, whiskey, cheeseburgers, and late nights are gone. I think the new-school poker players — the ones who are dominating the games today — are players who look very different. They’re younger, leaner, and more focused on improving their physical and mental health — and they’re crushing the games.
— Daniel Negreanu

For the newly released poker book Peak Performance Poker: Revolutionizing the Way You View the Game, author Travis Steffen interviewed a lot of top pros, and the preceding quote from Daniel Negreanu basically sums up in a couple of sentences what the book is all about. As someone who has always struggled with my weight and energy levels, I was quite excited when Travis approached me about the concept for this book. This was exactly the type of poker book that I had been wanting to read, and now I was in a position to have my company publish it.

Peak Performance Poker is about preparing your mind and your body to play the best poker that you can possibly play, and to play that way at all times.

Am I delusional?  You decide.
I recently bluffed off 125 big blinds and felt like I played the hand pretty well. But, of course, I know that we poker players sometimes like to justify our actions despite evidence to the contrary, so I posted the hand to receive feedback from the forum members at my site, www.InternetTexasHoldem.com. I was basically seeking the answer to a very simple but important question: Am I delusional? What do you think?

Marginal Hands
This is the fourth column in a series that highlights some of the hands discussed in the new book Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time, Volume II, by Eric “Rizen” Lynch, Jon “PearlJammer” Turner, and Jon “Apestyles” Van Fleet. In this book, each author chose one tournament, and discussed the key hands from once he made the money all the way down to heads-up play. In this column, I’ve chosen one hand from each author in which he three-bet preflop with a marginal hand.

Examples of when not to do so
This is the third column in a series that highlights some of the hands discussed in the new book Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time, Volume II, by Eric “Rizen” Lynch, Jon “PearlJammer” Turner, and Jon “Apestyles” Van Fleet. In this book, each author chose one tournament, and discussed the key hands from once he made the money all the way down to heads-up play. In this column, I’ve chosen a couple of hands from Apestyles, in which he illustrates examples of when he decided not to continuation-bet.

Evaluating some close decisions
This is the second column in a series that highlights some of the hands discussed in the new book Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time, Volume II, by Eric “Rizen” Lynch, Jon “PearlJammer” Turner, and Jon “Apestyles” Van Fleet. In this book, each author chose one tournament, and discussed the key hands from once he made the money all the way down to heads-up play. In this column, I’ve chosen a couple of hands from PearlJammer, in which he evaluates some close decisions on the button.

The situation dictates how they are played
Volume II of the Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time series by Eric “Rizen” Lynch, Jon “PearlJammer” Turner, and Jon “Apestyles” Van Fleet was recently released. In this book, each author chose one tournament, and discussed the key hands from once he made the money all the way down to heads-up play. For this column, I decided to choose some hands from Lynch’s analysis that look at different situations for playing small or medium pocket pairs.

Note that all of the hands are roughly the same, small or medium pocket pairs, but the situation changes the action significantly. In one hand, Rizen folds 7-7, and in the next, he discusses the possibility of four-betting with 6-6!

Is the future here?
In the last few months, I’ve had a couple of live poker experiences that have gotten me excited about live poker again. There is nothing like the live experience of being able to interact with your opponents and look into their eyes during critical decisions. The social interaction simply makes poker more fun. However, online poker spoils you. When you are dealt 60 hands an hour and can play multiple tables at once online, live poker can seem excruciatingly slow at times.

Ever since I started playing online poker, I have not found much enjoyment in playing live cash games. They are just so slow! Poker is a game of patience, and it isn’t fun waiting hours for the right time to exploit your opponents. On the other hand, I still love the excitement of live tournaments compared to online tournaments. There is nothing like the experience of playing for big money in a live setting. Online final tables lack that same excitement, and you lose the ability to see how your opponents are handling the pressure.

Important factors to consider
“You could be the 10th-best player in the world, but if you’re playing against the nine best, you’re the dog.”

I’m not sure who said that, but game selection has always been an important topic discussed by many top players and authors. The goal in poker is to maximize your earn rate, and a big part of that is selecting the right game to play in. Sometimes, dropping down a limit can be more profitable if the games are very tough at the limit you normally play, and sometimes, even jumping up a limit is advisable if the game is very, very soft.

But there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about game selection when it comes to multitable tournaments. The main reason, of course, is that you don’t know who your first nine opponents are going to be, since seating is random and then changes throughout a tournament. But there are many important factors (other than your own ability) that ultimately determine your profitability in any given tournament:

A lucky day!
The $100K Holiday freeroll tournament at Full Tilt Poker ended up being a nice Christmas gift. The buy-in was 2,000 FTP points, and there was a cap set of 10,000 players.

A total of 1,800 places were paid: 1,800th - $10; 91st - $100; 10th - $600; ninth - $1,000. More than one-third of the payout went to the final-table players. The top three finishers received $10,000, $7,500, and $5,000, respectively.

This kind of tournament is usually much different than the normal major tournaments I play on Sundays. Given that it was a freeroll, you would expect there to be a lot of weak players looking for a big score. In reality, I found the play early on to be a lot better than expected. However, once we made the money, you could see that many of the players were playing simply for the next pay jump, even if it was "only" $40.