In live poker, there's a lot of downtime. Since you (hopefully) won't be playing most of your hands, you'll have a lot of time where you're just sitting around while other players fight over pots that you're not involved in.
However, if you want to improve your results in live play, you'll want to make the best use of this time possible. The best way to do this is to pay attention to your opponents and begin to pick up on their tendencies. You can start to answer quite a few questions about your opponents if you pay close attention when you're not in a hand:
- What percentage of hands do they play?
- How often do they raise or three-bet preflop?
- Does their bet sizing tell you anything about the strength of their hand?
- Do they give off any reliable tells?
- Are they tricky, or do they mostly have what they represent when they bet, call, or check?
Trying to pick up on all of this information for nine different opponents is probably a little too much to handle if you haven't tried it before. A good way to ease into this is to start by focusing on the opponents directly on your left and right. These are the players that will be in the blinds with you, and thus will be in the most hands with you as well. From there, as you become more comfortable, you can start studying players further to your left and right, taking in as much information as you're confident you can handle. Eventually, you'll find that paying attention to all of your opponents comes as second nature!
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