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With online casinos making gaming so accessible, it seems inevitable that people who may have previously stayed away from casinos are starting to get their foot in the door at some of the better known poker rooms. These less experienced players who are easy to beat are known in the poker world as ‘fish’, although to be fair, even players with loads of experience may remain poor poker players and still get labelled fish. So if you’re an old timer at the poker table, and quite fancy yourself the next Doyle Brunson or Phil Hellmuth, then you’re going to want to know ways of spotting the fishiest player at the table in order to make the most money. Here are some of the more obvious ways to spot a fish online;
- Always Calling Sometimes, when people aren’t very confident at something, they find it easy to just follow someone else’s lead. And it’s the same in poker. If you find a player who is calling every bet regardless of their stating hand then they are probably a weak player.
- Show Offs Some people just can’t help showing their hand. They show every bluff they make, every hand they rake, and really they just don’t need to. A good poker player will know to give away as little information as possible about his hands and his style of play. If someone is giving this information away, they probably don’t know much about poker.
- Aces Everybody loves to get an ace. But new poker players in particular seem to be dazzled by them. If you happen o see someone call a three-way all in with an A-6 suited early on in a sit and go, then you might as well start praying he gets lucky and wins all the chips – just so you can go win them back off him easily later on!
- Chatterboxes A lot of online poker rooms have a chat facility, and whilst some decent players do enjoy using the chat box in order to create a false impression about their play, it’s also a good means of spotting fish. The chat box is a simple way to gather information on another player simply by the way they type and their reactions to certain hands. Poker is a game of concentration, so a player might find it pretty hard managing to type at the same time as using the mouse, watching the screen, and also making some tough tactical decisions about their game.
- Hand Rank Checkers An experienced poker player will know his hand rankings inside out. A newer player however, may need to keep referring to a hand ranking chart. If you spot this, then you’ve probably spotted your fish.
- A Critic There is a pretty wonderful phrase that goes ‘don’t tap on the aquarium’. In other words, don’t scare off the fish. An experienced poker player will know this. A less experienced poker player may go around shooting his mouth off critiquing other fish and trying to make himself seem like an expert in the process. If you spot a player doing this, chances are he’s a fish himself. Either that, or incredibly stupid. In both cases, probably someone you can win a lot of money from.
- Trackers There are a variety of poker stat trackers available to you. These programs will track millions of poker players stats so you can find out just how fishy your opponents are. This is a sneaky but very efficient method of finding out who’s got lucky and whose been plain silly with their game play.
