There’s more to adjusting your play than just looking at the number of opponents.
It also matters what their playing habits are. How loose or tight they tends to be, and how aggressive they tend to be adjusting to game conditions in general is important, not just adjusting to the number Of opponents.
Let’s look further at adjusting to game conditions by an analysis of a hand. This is a hand that was played by an Internet poker acquaintance of mine and discussed on the Internet.
Out hero was on the small blind and held Q 
J .
The game was a loose and passive 10/20 game with a couple of very loose players and no real strong players. Six players limped in, and the poker player one seat before the button raised. Everyone called.
It was a family pot with all ten players seeing the flop.
The flop was 10 
8 
3 . The first few players checked. Someone bet. A couple of players called.
Someone raised. The pre-flop raiser made it three bets. Now our hero is faced with $30 to call, and the pot has close to $300 in it. What should he do?
First I’ll tell you what he did do, and why he did it. He folded. The reason he folded was that he thought that he was almost certainly against more than one two-pair hand or a hand that had flopped a set and that even if he caught one of the four cards for a straight someone else might still make a poker full house.
So, he reasoned, the approximately 10-1 pot odds that he was getting would normally be enough to call for one more card to see if he caught his gutshot straight draw, but it wasn’t enough in this case.
He was wrong to fold. Not only were the odds he was getting more than enough, but his hand also was much better than he thought.
Most of the time Holdem can be looked at as a struggle a made hand and a draw.
That’s what our hero was doing because there were so many people competing for the pot, he upgraded his normal estimate of what the best hand, the hand he was drawing to beat, actually was.
If someone actually did have two pair, then his hand really wasn’t good, and folding was probably good idea.
That’s the conclusion that looking at Holdem as a struggle between a made hand and a draw leads to. That, however, is not always the right way to look at Holdem.
Sometimes you can come to more profitable conclusions by looking at the game as just a game of money and odds. That’s especially true at loose tables.
Although it’s true that having many active hands does increase the chances that one of them has hit the flop very well, the chances of that happening really aren’t that high.
What is much more likely is that many players have picked up weak draws on the flop. Hands such as second pair or two overcards are much more likely on this flop than two pair or trips.
Occonents with hands like 8 6 
are just more likely than opponents with hands like 10 10 at a loose table.
The way to look at the situation in a loose game isn’t in terms of what the likely best hand is, it’s in terms of what the likely draws are, and with this flop, the likely draws are all fairly weak draws.
Our hero has a lot more than four outs with this hand. The backdoor flush draw adds the equivalent of about two outs, and there is no strong reason to think that the best hand is any better than a pair of 10s.
Many poker players would raise a flop like that with a hand like J 9 or even A 3 . A lot of hands could raise, but our hero could beat them by hitting one of his overcards.
The overcards add somewhere between zero and six outs to a total of between six and twelve outs. That’s a strong draw and is almost certainly the best draw at the table with this flop.
Our hero should be thinking about betting and raising, not folding or calling.
In a tight game, bet the best hand. in a loose game, bet the best draw. That’s the primary secret to adjusting the play on the flop to table conditions.
Pick the Right Table / Picking a Seat / Theories of Poker / Betting Theory: The Odds
A Theory of Starting Hand Value
A Theory of Flop Play: Counting Outs and Evaluating Draws
The Dynamics of Game Conditions / Table Image / Player Stereotypes
Women and Poker / Spread-Limit Games / Double Bet on the End Games / Kill Games
Short-handed Games / Tournaments / No-limit and Pot-Limit Poker
