Table Image and General Respect

Someone once said that a great mind is a terrible thing to waste. At poker in a limit game what you do not want to waste is your table image. Your table image is how the other players perceive you and your plays, and having the other players respect & even fear you is very important. Your table image will improve whenever you win a hand and wither when you lose. It does not matter if you show a set of aces on showdown that loses to a flush. The majority of people tend to forget that you had AA, played it great but got unlucky on the river. They will just think that you lost and that you will lose again.

Importance

Now, how come this is important? Well, it is not always very important in online poker, especially at tables where a lot of players leave and new ones enter all the time. In general though, the players who stick to playing at the same table are usually not bad, and getting respect from at least half of the table counts greatly towards you being an overall winner.

It all comes down to the amount of players you want to play against and how many you want to see a showdown with. Whenever you do make a preflop raise it should usually be on hands that can win outright, and you do not want to have more than 2 and max 3 players with you to see a flop. Having a table image as being a solid player helps you in this. People will remember that you only raise good hands, and only the bad players will call you (which is what you want).

Other situations

On the other hand, if your table image is at par with the drunk-nearly-passed out sailor who just came ashore and received 6 months of pay you can rest assure that anyone with better cards than 2-7 will call you faster than you can say bad beat. You might think that getting 7 callers when you got KK is great, but its not (unless you hit a set on flop ). Sure there is a lot of money in the pot but the chance that your KK is the winner in the end is not in your favor.

So how do you repair a shattered table image for instance when you have lost 4 hands in a row? Frankly, you can’t, and the only one thing that should keep you from leaving and sitting down at another table is if there are a large amount of bad players there with you. You can also lose table image by scolding other player for making bad plays and getting lucky. When you berate or teach other players at the table it is a no win situation.

People will get the idea that you are getting desperate when you start talking and you will probably get even more bad plays against you ( improving the chance that one of them will beat you ), or even worse, you might make the bad players realize that they are not playing too clever poker forcing them to improve their game, and do you really want that? Berating or name calling is often referred to as “tapping the aquarium”, since you might lose all the fish if the glass actually breaks.