Of all the skills required to be a good hold 'em player, the ability to read hands is one of the most time-consuming and difficult to master. It requires that you play or watch many, many hands, and that you expend the mental energy necessary to work through each hand, so you arrive at correct conclusions.
It also requires that you pay attention to the game and the players in progress even when you're not in the hand, which is something that the average low limit player doesn't usually do. And all of this assumes that you started with a good, solid, practical and theoretical understanding of all of the other aspects of the game.
If you already play in a regular game, the good news is that you already have some practice reading hands, even if you're not yet an expert at it. You already know about all of the possible combinations of questions you can ask about the play of a hand, and about the many different situations that can arise. Fortunately, many of these situations and questions are so similar that they can be reduced to a manageable number that will give you a satisfactory conclusion most of the time.
Because of the huge number of variables involved in reading hands, the impossibility of covering every feasible combination of events in the play of a hand, and the fact that this is intended to be a beginner's book, I'm going to help you learn how to read hands by asking you to accomplish the following assignment.
There's a principle in teaching that says that if you're going to teach someone something, one of the very first things you have to do is determine what the student already knows about the subject. This ensures that the student and the teacher are "on the same page," and that they begin the lesson in the appropriate place.
In this lesson, you get to decide exactly what your level of competence is, and we will start at that point.
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Maybe you've noticed that most of my advice on how to play relies on your having an idea of what your opponents are holding. By now you're probably asking, "How can I know what they have with any certainty?" Don't worry. It's possible to figure out what they have, and sometimes their hands will even be quite obvious, but knowing your opponents' hands usually requires you to take in a lot of different information correctly and quickly and arrive at a conclusion in time to play your hand without holding up the game.
If you're trying to read another player's hand, some of the questions you might ask yourself are:
1. What do I already know about this player?
2. Has he played a hand like this before?
3. What position is he in?
4. Is he in the blind?
5. Did he raise before the flop?
6. Did he call a raise before the flop?
7. Did he check-raise on any round of the hand?
8. Did he call a check-raise?
9. How does he react to other players' bets and raises?
10. Have I picked up any tells from this player?
11. Statistically speaking, what are the odds that he holds the hands that I think he might hold?
12. Why did he raise before the flop, on the flop, or on the turn or river?
13. Why didn'the raise before the flop, on the flop, or on the turn or river?
14. If I put myself in his place, and I played the hand the way he has from the beginning, what would I have?
15. What are his pot odds?
16. What does my common sense, experience and logic tell me he might have?
These are a lot of questions to ask and answer in a short amount of time (in the heat of the battle, no less!), and they're only a sample of the many questions that could be asked. Fortunately, many hands are similar in the way that they're played, and the fact that you might play hundreds of hands per playing session will give you plenty of practice reading similar hands.
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Tags: game, heat of the battle, poker