This is a progressive series about the various personages that you will come across while playing poker.

Enemy or Friend?

Don’t event think that a bookworm can be your friend because it will only spell out disaster. They might put you in a verge of craziness when they start teaching you and other players on how to play the game and telling all of you what’s right and what’s not. Their kind is really annoying. They are full of bad habits like criticizing someone when they made a bad play and laughing at their mistakes. The concerned player may wish to transfer at a friendlier table or will try to redeem himself by playing a lot better. It only means one thing, you should not worry about the ordinary skills that the bookworm may have but let your concern dwell on how they behave at the poker table.

Selectivity and Aggression

The bookworm has a compact game before flop. But their weakness would be seen at post-flop. This is due to the number of books they have read, a jumble of ideas in their head and will have concepts fighting to one another inside their minds to find them continue during post flop. Those poker players who wrote a book about poker have justified their weaknesses inside those books. So the bookworm will continue to base his game on these books and picked up all the weaknesses inside all of it. With this, you may expect that a bookworm will play a loose and too aggressive game during post flop.

The strength of a starting hand is what almost all poker players agree with and this is the only part that the bookworm absolutely understands.

The bookworm is somehow aggressive. They are particularly happy to bet but if someone take the chance to play against them they will scared to wits unless they have an excellent hand.

Predictability

Yes, the bookworms know about deceptive plays as what they learn from the book. But they are nothing near to a deceptive player. Their style can be read clearly because they often use the same one.

Poker IQ

Speaking of Poker IQ, a bookworm has a low one. Yes, they know a lot about poker by reading their books but when its time to face a challenge at the poker table they are unable to adjust. The mistake they commit is that they follow their book like its the most right thing to do and they don’t know how to decide for themselves. However, those books are written in accordance to a general situation and nothing to specific ones because the author will not be aware of the current condition the reader is in. But despite all of this, the bookworm treat their books with utmost respect and follow its guideline on every game they play.

“Hey, BOOKWORMS You’re playing poker not building a desk, you can’t just follow instructions!”

Bookworm are very narrow minded. They think that they what they know is the always the right thing to do and nothing else. They assume that everyone should follow what they think is right and whoever disagrees with them should be susceptible for them to criticize and laugh at.

What You Should Do

One thing that can help you defeat a bookworm and put them in their rightful place is to befriend them, talk to them and try to worm out their game play through them. They are boastful enough to brag about it to anyone who will listen.

If the above mentioned strategy won’t work, then the best thing that you should do while playing against a bookworm is to stay aggressive. Bet them to the hilt and let them know that their moves don’t scare you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 1:52 am and is filed under Poker Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.