A lot of the articles here at the BetUS poker school focus on the logical and mathematical aspects of poker rather than the psychological ones. The reason is that the mind game aspect of online poker is a lot harder to teach; it’s all about specific scenarios and individual players. That stuff is hard to generalize into advice that everyone can profit from.
Of course, poker’s all about mind games. The more you can get into an opponent’s head and figure out what he’s got, what he wants to do, the bigger your bankroll is going to get. One really good way of model of these mind games is the concept of “levels of thinking.”
The first level (or the “zeroth” level according to Sklansky, the guy who pioneered a lot of this thinking) is just knowing your own hand. That’s the level that everyone thinks on, even the horrible players. The second level is what your opponent thinks you have (or what you think your opponent has. Almost all players think on this level too, at least some of the time. This is the basic hand reading level where you look at what your opponent has done in this hand and in previous hands and try to put him on a range of holdings.
The third level is where you get to the more expert plays and players. On this level, you’re thinking about what your opponent thinks you have. Sounds confusing. Let’s say you’re playing No Limit Hold’em and you’ve got a monster. You decide to overbet the pot (make a larger than average bet) because that’s what you’ll often do when you’re bluffing. This is third level thinking; you’re assuming he’s going to think you’re bluffing, so you take advantage of that.
That fourth level is even more expert and more confusing. It’s your opponent thinking about what you’re thinking about what your opponent thinks about your hand! Take that last example about the value overbet if your opponent suspects your trap and folds to the overbet because he realizes that you “know” he’ll think you’re bluffing, he’s now working on the fourth level.
You can keep on going to higher and higher levels, but there’s usually little point beyond the fourth, maybe the fifth against someone you play with all the time. It’s too complicated and you have to make really precise assumptions about what your opponent’s thinking.
It’s important to be aware of “levels” and use this type of thinking in your own game all the time. However, you can never think more than one level above your opponent. For instance, if your opponent only thinks on the first level, what his own hand is, you can never use the third level. He’s not thinking about what you have, so it would make no sense for you to think about what he thinks you have.
