As a heads up player, I am often faced with the decision between sitting first and taking on whoever decides to play me or to use various methods to select opponents to sit down with. This need not be an either/or situation though, as I may choose to do either one or the other depending on the circumstances. As a professional poker player, you will need to set your own criteria to decide if and how you’re going to make these decisions.
In order to be properly informed, we need to know the typical caliber of player that sits first and second. This can differ quite a bit by poker room and buy-in, as well as time of day. So we’re going to need to know what type of player we can expect on average by just sitting in, and to do that we can just observe what kind of players are sitting down first and second. So the average caliber of the players sitting in second is our baseline, which we can determine simply by scoping out both players. This is what we need to beat when we are game selecting, or it would make more sense to just sit in and wait for the fish.
One of the potential advantages here is that winning players may tend to avoid you if you’re a winning player yourselves. If they tend to sit first more, as is often the case, then they are less likely to be hunting around for matches. The losing players, however, are less likely to be doing proper game selection and thus more likely to just sit down regardless of your stats. While this isn’t always the case, it often is, which is why determining what can be expected from sitting first is where we need to start. There may be some time considerations here though, depending on how long you have to wait on average for an opponent.
We’ve decided that we can beat the benchmark by selecting our opponents, or at least that we’re going to try to do both, meaning sitting in and at the same time looking to sit with a desirable player. If we do this though we do run the risk of getting stuck in two matches at the same time, so we need to either be comfortable with this or confine this to where the traffic is light enough that the risk is acceptable. Providing that sitting in can be expected to provide a positive ROI, and we’re looking to improve on that, we now need to consider the opportunity cost of the time involved. So efficiency is going to be a concern, and we are going to need a method that is both accurate and timely.
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