Pokeroom.com – Timing
Category: Poker
www.pokeroom.com – There are many different things which lead to successful results in poker, but timing is one thing that has to be high on the list. If there was some way you could play poker with perfectly timed raises and folds for an entire night, you would almost certainly win every time. The problem is, it is sometimes very difficult to know when the right time to make a move is.
We cannot just simply, randomly guess when to push all in or fold, although sometimes it appears inexperienced plyers are doing just that. The key with knowing when to make a certain type of play is ultimately understanding when your opponents have weak or strong hands. This requires you to read situations with clarity and accuracy and that, is the skill of poker. Having said this, it is not just a case of making the right decision at precisely the right time, because if you are bluffing, remember your opponents do not need to have a strong hand to reraise you all in and force you out, they simply need to read your hand as well as you have read theirs.
With this in mind, try and be careful how quickly or slowly you make your decisions. If someone has raised you a lot of chips and you sit thinking for a very long time before calling, you show a great deal of uncertainty by doing so. You can of course use this to your advantage when you know you have an opponent beaten, and that’s something I like to call ‘theatric thinking’. You know you have your opponent well beaten, but you want to make it look as if you are close to folding in order to induce another raise on the next betting round. So try and remember when you play, that in several senses, timing can be very important to both your overall outcome, and that of a given hand you find yourself involved in.