At the beginning of a lot of internet forum threads where the poster discusses a hand will precede the hand details with observations of others’ history at the table, primarily those involved in the particular hand. I do wince a bit when the person uses their own image to explain a move. People will explain their aggression with their tight table image or a slowplay because they’ve raised a lot of hands recently.

What’s disturbing is that most of the time when I see this rationale, I seldom see evidence to support the poster’s view of their own image from the rest of the table. While pegging others on patterns, it’s easy to think that people are accurately doing the same to you, not to mention if you are accurately judging yourself as loose or tight.

The word “image” has many meanings and the meaning that works in the context of the poker table is a popular conception. I’m not picking at semantics when I say that a conception is not always true. I’m saying that your style, approach, and skill are not always your image.

Let’s say you can sit at a table for an hour. Fold every hand except two blinds where you folded on the flop and the time you caught Kings under the gun. In your Kings hand, you raised 4 BB’s to open, went heads-up with the small blind. You two saw a ragged flop in which the SB checked and you bet 3/4 of the pot and he folded. You mucked face down. What is your image using this evidence that I’ve presented?

Answer: You don’t know.

All you know is that you’ve folded some marginal hands to raises. The rest of the table doesn’t know what you folded. They don’t know that you had Kings the one time that you played. Hell, many at the table might not have even noticed that you’ve only played one hand out of the blinds. They might see you as a loosey-goosey because of your age, clothing, or any other reason one can think up.

I’ve seen many people who are very solid players catch an amazing run of cards and play aggressively to maximize their winnings. They’re not normally aggressive, but they’re getting the cards right now and the time is right. Every individual at the table will have different thoughts of the guy for many different reasons. Some may be right. Most will be wrong if all they know of the man is this run.

So how do you know how your opponents perceive you? There are many ways and narcissistic assumptions are not one of them.

How people interact with you verbally and within the game will tell you a lot about the people you’re playing. Hey, there’s a thought. You don’t know how people perceive you unless you begin to know the people whose perceptions you’re attempting to figure out.

Different people exert respect and disdain differently. Use your instincts and your innate judge of character. At the same time, leave love and hate at the door or for the blog that you’re typing while you play. Sycophants and antagonists are roaming the table to get people to vomit the true selves they’re trying to hide or don’t even know. These people are the best at digging into others’ subconscious because flattery and insults trigger emotions and the emotions triggered effect judgement. We’re not just talking about impaired judgement in the card game, but impaired judgement with regards to how they react to the banter and card gameplay of others at the table.

I refer to these people as PD’s (Pavlov’s Dogs). If you don’t know of Ivan Pavlov, where the hell have you been? Just kidding, look it up and you’ll understand. Pavlov received a lot of glory and fame for his discovery. The people like the dogs discover something, but the dogs discover after the damage is done and dogs are better than emotional people at evaluating cause and effect. PD’s don’t notice the effect of their emotional outbursts as the loss of money until they’ve already lost their money. Guess who has it. The sycophants and the antagonists.