Studying and profiling your opponents

Your money at the poker table will come off the mistakes your opponents make. Your main objective is to avoid making mistakes yourself and to exploit your opponents’ mistakes time and time again. In order to be able to do that though, you need understand where your opponents are likely to err, and for that you need to get to know them. The best way to sum up your knowledge of an opponent’s habits, mistakes and strengths is to create a profile of him/her.
Poker is a game of partial information, yet because of the fact that every single gesture people display, every single act they undertake gives away a wealth of information on various aspects of their existence, some people are better at reading their opponents at the green felt than others. You need to learn to pick up the information generated by people’s actions and then you need to learn to interpret the information.

Live poker offers plenty of opportunities for information gathering. Online poker is less generous in this respect but you’ll be able to pick up certain tells there too.
In a live poker room, you’ll start your profiling well before your opponent even sits down. It is kind of like a detective-job, so it is actually rather exciting and entertaining.
The way a player buys his chips and handles his cash can tell loads about what sort of poker player he is. Keep an eye on him when he buys in. Does he have a few bills only or does he have a pocket-load of $100 bills? Occasional players who do not have an actual poker bankroll will carry less cash and they will have $20 bills mixed up with the others too. Pro players who have a serious bankroll usually only carry $100 bills on account of the fact that the amount of money they need to have handy is simply not practical to be kept in smaller bills.
How is the money actually handled? If a player tends to be shy about the way he/she handles his/her money (under the table, attempting to hide it from the other players’ view as much as possible) it is likely that he/she will play a tight game. If the player is displaying the contents of his wallet or pocket in plain sight, he may well be an impulse-driven, more aggressive type. Watch your opponent when he buys in. How does he handle his money then? Does he find it visibly difficult to let go of the bills? If so, he’ll probably find it difficult to let go of his bills in the game too, and won’t commit often.

Watch the amount your opponent buys in for. Buying in for the minimum amount means that he/she is almost certainly under bankrolled and looking for a quick bankroll-boost via a double-up. This also means he/she will be playing on scared money, which offers you certain advantages over him/her. If the player in question buys in for the maximum possible amount, it doesn’t just mean he is adequately bankrolled, it also means he’s there on serious business and maximizes his edges this way.
You reckon the amount of information you can get from a player just by watching him/her handle the money is impressive? Well, we’re just warming up on the reads here. Once the chips come into the picture, things get even more interesting. Watch how your opponent takes the chips out of the rack. A seasoned player can get the chips leaving them in stacks. A rookie will just dump all the chips and stack them up after.

The height of a person’s chip stack can also tell you a few tales about his poker room experience. Rookies do not feel comfortable with more than 20 chips stacked in a column, while pros have absolutely no problems with that. A person who stacks his chips by the 10s is almost certainly a beginner.
Look at how your opponent arranges his stacks. If he’s methodical and careful about it, you’re probably dealing with a conservative and tight poker player. If he doesn’t even bother to stack his chips, you’re likely to be facing a maniac.