Poker Table Image: What Should Yours Be?
When it comes to developing a poker table image or table persona or table presence or whatever you want to call it, there's no hard and fast poker rules about how you want other people to view you while you're involved in a poker game.
Some guys will recommend a curveball called Crazy Assassin, other guys will recommend that you seem like the Nicest Guy In the World, many women will recommend to other women that you utilize a table persona with Significant Sex Appeal.
But the reality is that developing a poker table image is not as easy as copying someone else's successful model. In order for your table presence to be effective to its complete potential, you have to think about not only about who you want to be, but about who you currently are.
Timid Tim
If you are someone who displays traits of being timid or non-confrontational, that is good news for becoming a great poker player. People who appear weak or passive are frequently very powerful in the game of poker. Not everyone is a swashbuckler type.
If you are--or seem to most people to be--kind of on the timid side, take some time to evaluate how this appearance is helping or hindering your current poker game.
Ask yourself questions:
- When another player personally challenges me, do I fold winning hands?
- When I am 75 percent sure that I have the best hand after the flop, do I usually call or raise?
- What amount of money am I prepared to lose on any given outing?
Once you figure out how your timid persona is impacting your poker game right now, you may find that ideas for using your timid persona to better effect start occurring to you.
For example, you may sigh and look depressed when you are on a losing streak, and then bet so aggressively the next couple pots that everyone is sure you have a hand, when in reality you had nothing and just wanted to feast up on the blinds.
There are many options. The point is to look at yourself now, not just create some "alter ego" that may or may not jibe with how other people are naturally going to perceive you.
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Genuineness
It's surely strange to put the words "poker" and "genuine" in the same sentence, but that's the nature of poker: it's strange sometimes.
That's why you've got to, as necessary, include an element of genuineness in the table image you strive to create. You've got to create a persona that you yourself, if you were looking at you, would more than halfway believe.
The easiest way to achieve any level of credibility is to be credible. This means that you want to be extremely wary about adopting any table image that will be regularly contradicted by facts. For example, if you bluff frequently and get called down and broken just as often.
If you actually are at least partly who you're portraying to be, your table image is much larger and longer-lasting than if it all really is a not-that-giant façade.
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Big Bank Break Little Bank
Possibly the only essential part of any great table image is the killer instinct. If you pounce on weak players and put them out of business, or better yet go straight for the jugular of a good player who's had a run of bad hands, you are going to make an impression on the table.
If you've got a lot of chips, and they don't, and they're kind of scared of you because you have a lot of chips and they don't, it's time to drop the hammer and end their misery.
Ruthlessness of this sort if an indispensable part of every successful poker table image.
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