The Art of Hand Reading: How to Guess Your Opponent’s?
For those who aren’t very good at it, the ability to put a poker player on a hand is a tough concept to grasp, and when watching it done correctly, it appears mystical and almost magic-like. Misconceptions abound about the notion of determining what an opponent is holding, and many players even believe that the goal of putting a poker player on a hand is to deduce the precise two cards in his hand.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Although it’s uber-cool to announce your opponent’s two-hole cards to him and disturbing for any opponent to be seen as that transparent, it neither happens very often nor is it important in the overall scheme of playing winning poker.
While you’ll occasionally run into a very uncreative opponent who plays as though his cards were face-up, and now and then, you’ll take a deductive stab at an opponent’s hand that hits the nail squarely on the head, just enjoy the moment because it doesn’t happen very often.
The key to putting a player on a hand is knowing your opponent, which means getting a fix on his playing tendencies. If you don’t know your opponent’s playing tendencies, you won’t be able to assess his playing range in given situations accurately. If you can’t decipher his style and playing directions, his hand will usually remain a mystery, and you won’t know how well your hand plays against his range.
You’ll be adjusting to your opponent’s style of play. As a result, it’s more important for you to arm yourself with knowledge, skill, and ability than it is to have a specific playing style of your own. If you can master this skill set, you’ll find times when you can win with absolutely nothing in your hand and other occasions when you can make the toughest of laydowns – saving money in the process – because you are sure of your ready and willing to release hands that might be the death of other players.
Your style might be tight in some situations, while it’s loose and aggressive against different opponents. This ability – to understand your opponent’s weaknesses and how to manipulate your play to take advantage of those flaws – makes you difficult to defend against while putting your opponent in a position of having to adjust his own game to play poker against you. When that happens, you might find your opponent out of his comfort zone and easier to exploit.
The First Law of Hand Reading
You can begin putting a player on a hand by making this assumption and holding to it unless proven otherwise by a player under study. We’ll call it the first law of hand reading:
The earlier a player’s position in the betting order, the narrower the range of hands he probably holds.
When an early-position player calls a bet before the flop, he probably has a big pair, a couple of overcards, or a small team, hoping to flop a set or get out if he doesn’t. Players are likelier to jump into the fray with a wider range of hole cards in later positions. That makes putting them on a hand more difficult. But it’s not impossible, and it can be done.
When push comes to shove, you don’t have that many choices at the poker table, and each of them can provide information about your opponent’s hand:
If no one has bet,
- You can check.
- You can bet.
If there’s a bet before it’s your turn to act,
- You can fold.
- You can raise.
- You can call.
Assuming your opponent bets – and it’s a standard-size bet, one he’d make with absolutely nothing or a pocket pair of Aces – you can begin to put him on a hand. Even though you won’t be able to determine the precise two cards he’s holding, some sort of hypothesis is far better than guessing.
Home on the Range
This hypothesis, this initial reckoning about what your opponent might be holding, is called a range. A range represents all the hands a player might have when he took that particular action. Let’s say he raises the blind from the middle position, and based on what you’ve seen so far, you figure he’d make that play with any pair of fives or better, A-9 offsuit or better, A-8 suited or better, and K-Q.
You can use a shortcut to describe this range by writing 5-5+, A-9o+, A-8s+, and K-Q. In the simplest terms, you’ll want to fold your bad hands, re-raise with your good ones, and probably call with hands that offer huge implied odds as long as you have good reason to believe you can take his entire stack if you make a big hand. To do this, you and your opponent must have sufficiently sized stacks to make this kind of play worthwhile. If either of you is short-stacked, the effective stack size – the amount of money you can lay for on this hand – is smaller than the two stacks.
The message here is simple: Don’t play long shot drawing hands when you can’t possibly win enough to more than cover the long odds against completing your draw.
This is an oversimplified view of things, to be sure, because even though you have a hand that is not toward the top portion of your opponent’s likely range of holdings, you might continue playing if you have reason to believe that a bluff on this or a subsequent round might win the pot. Even if you have a mediocre hand, one that you suspect will win the pot heads-up against this particular opponent only about 40 percent of the time if things went to a showdown, but you think a bluff would succeed 20 percent of the time, the combination of successful possibilities gives you a playable hand.
Walk a Mile in His Shoes
That first law of hand-reading, “The earlier a player’s position in the betting order, the narrower the range of hands he is probably holding,” is a special case of putting yourself in your opponent’s shoes. If he raised from the middle position, think about the hands he would need to have to rise in that spot.
When you do this, be wary of assuming your opponent would make that play with the same hands you would need if you were in his position. He might have a range similar to yours, but it might differ. He could be a much tighter player, or he could be loose and aggressive – or he could vary his range depending on how he reads your playing style.
Poker Complexities
That’s one of poker’s complexities: He’s reading your hand while you’re reading his. And while you might be making a play contrary to one indicated solely by the strength of the cards in your hand, he might be doing the same thing. Nevertheless, with every action your opponent takes, you should be able to narrow down his range of indicators from your starting point to another, more precise moment, where you can be more accurate about how you should play your writing about the content of hands you believe he is holding.
If you think this process can get needlessly complicated, with wheels within wheels dizzily spinning, disavow yourself of that assumption right now. While you might run into some very sophisticated players at the poker table, you won’t often run into them unless you regularly play against the world’s best. For most situations you run into, the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one.
While poker’s a lot of complexity and deception is the rule rather than the exception, don’t make it too complicated, or the only one you’re likely to fake out will be yourself.
Where to Look for Your Opponent’s Weaknesses
When first deciphering a player’s style, pay particular attention to how he plays top pair with the ultimate kicker. It’s a common hold’em hand that far too many of your opponents will play more recklessly than they should.
If you’re lucky, you’ll find opponents who are always willing to go all-in with a top pair-top kicker as long as the board is not otherwise threatening. When you run into a player like this, please note it. You will eventually take all his chips, which shouldn’t take too long under normal circumstances. This is the guy you’ll want to play all your pairs against as long as the price is not too high. You’ve got him hooked when you flop a set, and he makes top pair. The same will happen if you make a straight, flush, or two-pair. You won’t need many hands like this to turn almost any session into a winner.
Focus on the Opponent Game
It would be best to be conscious of how your opponent plays straight or flush draws. Does he try to get there as inexpensively as possible, or is he aggressive with them? Does his style depend on how many opponents he’s confronting, or whether he has additional outs – such as overcards – to accompany his draw? Some players are always prone to raise their draws. Others aren’t. Some predicate their play on their assessment of their opponents, along with any other outs they might have, the number of opponents in hand with them, and how that impacts their implied odds if they are fortunate enough to complete their writing.
The Second and Subsequent Laws of Hand Reading
If you know nothing about your opponent, you can start by making some assumptions about them. But don’t hold onto these assumptions once you gather more information because the straw man you are constructing is unlikely to be exactly like the reality of the guy or gal across the table.
- Your opponent knows at least something about the position and its importance at the poker table.
- Most of your opponents are not brain-dead. They understand that each bet made is designed to accomplish something.
- If they over-bet the pot, they have a reason for it. A common sense for overbetting is to price draws out of the pool.
- If they under-bet, they have a reason for that, too. Many players underbet to lure in callers or make a little wager – a blocking bet – that they expect their opponent to call. A blocking chance is usually caused because it seems a better alternative than checking and calling a bigger bet from your opponent.
- An opponent who calls a raise in a late position usually has a speculative or drawing hand.
- He usually has a big starting hand when he re-raises and wants to protect it.
Fear and No-Fear
These are opposite sides of the same coin. Some players always suspect monsters under the bed and assign ranges to other players’ hands, making it almost impossible to call or raise unless they hold the best hand. That’s not putting a player on a hand; it’s taking yourself off of a hand – your hand, to be precise – and if you do it too often, you’ll find yourself without a bankroll to play with.
Accepting Inevitable Losses
There are some hands you’re bound to lose money with and maybe go broke altogether. That’s OK. Sometimes, you can’t prevent losing your buy-in. But the stone-cold nuts don’t come around often, and you can’t presume that monsters are always under the bed. Most of the time, they’re not there at all.
Other poker players seem always to put their opponent on a range of hands they can beat most of the time, permitting themselves to play a wider variety of hands than they should. Please do not put your opponent on a hand by assuming he has to have a range of hands you can beat. You have to temper what you want to happen with the reality of what your adversary probably has, not what you hope he’s holding.
More than a few otherwise good players are lifelong money losers because they approach situations out of fear. At the same time, others lose out of unrealistic assumptions predicated on how weak they wish their opponent’s hand were.
Putting players on hands is not the application of any one particular skill. Using all the information at your disposal – observed tells, betting patterns, probability, and anything else you can factor into the equation – helps you narrow down a large number of possible holdings into a reasonable few. Then, you must test your accuracy by following the hand attentively to its conclusion. It’s a formative process, to be sure, and the more you practice putting players on hand ranges, the more accurate you’ll become.
And because any accurate read can save you an entire buy-in or win you one, an enormous amount of value accrues from learning and practicing this ability.
