Getting Inside Villain's Head: PATL Charting 1

Pick up a modern poker book or watch pretty much any training video, and you're likely to read/hear all manner of different categories that so-called experts use to typecast villains. Rocks, sheriffs, crazies, maniacs, nits, whales, foxes, fish, zombies, farmers, donkeys.... you name it, some expert somewhere probably suggests using it. Phil Hellmuth, for instance, in his popular Play Poker Like the Pros book goes into a long-winded discussion of how you should label your opponents with (bizarre) animal terms like Lions, Jackals, Elephants, Mice, and Eagles. He also talks about "Aunt Ednas", "Megalomaniacs", and "Missouri Show-Me State" type players you'll find yourself battling on the felt. Other experts spend an inordinate amount of time dissecting the subtle differences between fish vs. donkeys vs. newbies. And so on...

Uh, right. How do all these confusing names actually help us with categorizing players, especially in the heat of battle... and just as importantly, help us play against them?

Aunt Edna's aside, I personally believe a simpler approach is required. Keep it Simple, Stupid (KISS) is a mantra I try to live and work by, and this definitely goes for player typecasting, too.

For me, a good way to typecast players is actually via a logical/sequential three step process: 1) Initial Stereotyping (if playing live, that is; this step is not really applicable online); 2) PATL categorization; and 3) figuring out the villain's Level of Thought. These three things, especially the latter two, will take you a loooong way toward reading villain's hand range and line. I've already touched on the first and third steps (here and here, respectively) in previous posts. Today, I want to talk a bit about the middle (and perhaps most important) one: PATL charting.

PATL (pronounced like the word "paddle") charting is an abbreviation that stands for Passive-Aggressive/Tight-Loose. The poker author Charley Swain popularized this notion in his ground-breaking book Advanced Degree in Hold'em. For those familiar with HUD programs like PokerTracker and Hold'em Manager, the PA and TL numbers are the first two default stats that get displayed on top of an opponent  on the screen (albeit in the reverse order; i.e., Tight-Loose first (VPIP), followed by Passive-Aggressive stat second (PFR)).

PATL is a measure of a) how loose a villain plays; and, b) how aggressively.

We can combine these two graphs into one, and then divide the result up into four standard quadrants (i.e., player classifications):

Think of PATL charting as the first major refinement to the initial stereotyping step. The seventy year old cranky codger, for example, is probably pretty loose, playing most Aces and Broadways, suited connectors, unsuited connectors, and pretty much anything shiny and bright. He's also likely to play fairly passively with most of those cards, preferring to see cheap flops and hoping to hit. As we observe his play for the first couple of laps we will probably confirm these general tendencies, so fairly quickly we can assume he's playing greater than 25% of hands and raising significantly less than half of those. As we gather more data on the codger, we can refine and improve upon these numbers, but they slowly but surely will coalesce onto one specific area of the chart.

Similarly, the middle-aged conservative insurance salesman playing poker for the first time in a casino is probably going to be timid entering pots; he'll likely play far less than 25% of hands dealt to him, and also rarely raise with them. We'll call him a Tight-Passive player.

The experienced Asian dragon lady is also probably fairly tight, but she's more solid and probably has an aggressive streak to her; lets assume her initial VPIP is somewhere around 20%, but she's raising significantly more than half of those. We'll call her a Tight-Aggressive (TAg).

And the PokerStars kid is probably looser than the average player, and probably also isn't afraid of the raise button; call him 25% and 70% on the TL and PA scales. We'll label him a Loose-Aggressive, or LAg, player.

There are some special cases worth mentioning-- namely, the maniac, the nit, and the calling station:

The Maniac is essentially a loose-aggressive player on steroids; these players are fairly rare nowadays; i.e., most players understand that this is a losing style of play, and unless the player is drunk or insane, you won't see many of these at your poker table. Similarly, the Nit is a special type of Tight-Passive; these players can sit there for hours, folding hand after hand and not playing anything, waiting for Aces and Kings to show up. And the Calling Station is just a Loose-Passive on steroids (or would that be Xanax?); these players just want to see flops and turns and rivers; they rarely if ever raise, instead being perfectly content to call down with bottom pairs and hopeless long-shot draws.

All that said, the majority of live players we find seated at low stakes NL tables usually fall into the bottom two quadrants (tight-passive and loose-passive). Both of these are commonly referred to as "fish."  Online, we see fewer and fewer passive players; most of the players still playing online (i.e., in the USA after Black Friday) have gotten pretty good, learning to adapt to a tight-aggressive (TAg) or loose-aggressive (LAg) style of play.

In the next installment on this topic, I'll discuss how a PATL chart can be used to put a player on an actual hand range... which is the ultimate goal of this process, right? I'll also start to bring in the refining factor of position, and how this does or doesn't affect range. Stay tuned.

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In other news, I hope everyone had a safe and merry Christmas. Mine was low-key and high-calorie-- just the way I like it! Also got a new Kindle, which I've already loaded up with a handful of poker books and good fiction. Woot!

All-in for now...
-Bug

Player Types - Part 1

Poker is a game of incomplete information. We have limited facts upon which to base our reads. People are actively and constantly trying to deceive us. We don’t always know why someone is betting, checking, or calling. Are they bluffing, or do they have the goods? Do they want us to bet, or are they afraid if we do? Everyone wants you to believe the opposite of what they’re actually doing. In other words, poker may be a game of incomplete information, but this is just another way of saying that it is ultimately a game of deception.

To cut through all this duplicity and start putting players on hand ranges, we have to start by sorting our opponents into different categories. The problem, however, is that there are all manner and variety of players that we encounter at the tables. There are reckless cowboys, timid calling stations, clueless amateurs, and skilled young professionals. Ages range from the very young to the very old. Skill levels also vary, as do the amount of table time a player has under their belt. Some players are aggressive, while others are passive. Some play straightforward ABC poker, while others think FPS and bluffing should be part of every hand. Some players fold nearly every hand that they are dealt, while others almost never fold before the flop.

It seems that there are as many different types and tendencies of players as there are people. Yet if we could somehow sort all these different players into a few basic categories, we’d have a leg up on the process of putting these players on hands. Professionals do this initial “sorting” based on a number of factors, but chief among these are the actions they observe their opponents make at the table. A good pro can figure out what category a player fits into in just a couple laps of the table. They then continuously refine and adjust these initial reads from that point onward. In other words, they pigeonhole their opponents, which allows them to start to understand the types of hands these opponents are likely to play in various situations. As the game progresses, the professional is able to make more and more accurate reads based on this information.

So if we want to learn how to do this "sorting" of players, how do we get started? What are the basic categories of players we'll face? In my humble opinion, there are seven basic subsets into which we can slot our opponents. And these seven categories are based primarily on two actions* that are very easy for us to observe and take note of at the tables: 1) how many hands they play; and 2) how aggressive they are with these hands.

These two numbers are of course "Voluntarily Puts Money Into the Pot" (VPIP) and "PreFlop Raise Percentage" (PFR). In the next blog post (here) I'll tell you what the seven categories are, and I'll explain how these two numbers factor in. Then we can start assigning hand ranges to each player type, and then start formulating ways to counter and attack them.

Understanding who we're playing against--and what their strengths, weaknesses, traits, and tendencies are--is one of the first steps in learning how to beat them.

All-in for now...
-Bug
*There are obviously other important factors we’ll add to these two as we learn how to make reads (e.g., tricky vs. straightforward, positionally-aware vs. not, playing with "scared money" vs. not, etc.) but we’ll start with these two very basic factors at first: VPIP and PFR.