When you sit down in any poker game then you absolutely need to have some idea as to where your profits are coming from. Let us say that you want to play in an online NL100 full ring game and you do not know your opponents. You see nine opponents and their stack sizes are as follows. Two players have stacks of $21 and $24 and three players have stacks of $56, $76 and $77 while four players have stacks of $109, $141, $158 and $213. You have a look during the early stages of the game and the two short stack players are also short stacking on other tables as well. The three players with middling stacks do not appear to be sitting anywhere else and the four big stacks are playing between four and eight tables each. So what can we can deduce from this table line up? Well the fact is that we don’t always need to use software like Hold’em Manager to rate the game that we are playing in. The four big stacks are clearly regs and whether or not they are winning regs remains to be seen but at this stage then we must assume that they are. However these players need to be treated with caution and playing conventional poker against them will be met with conventional poker in return. If you try and get involved in big pots with them then expect them to have a big hand as well. So you may find that you will be better off only playing small and medium sized pots against these players and this means avoiding big pots. The two short stacks would appear to be short stack regs who will be playing a short stack strategy and so you need to be careful entering pots when they raise or stealing their blinds for that matter. The three medium stacks look weak to me as big stacked regs would not have such a stack size and shallow stack regs would have left the table long before their stack reached such a size. These are the types of players who may stack off shallow and who may allow themselves to be pushed away from pots quite easily. There is no fixed strategy in a vacuum in a game of NLHE where you need individual strategies to combat each opponent type. Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk