| |
READING HANDS
The ability to read hands may be the most important weapon
a poker player can have. As the Fundamental Theorem of Online Poker Games
suggests, the key mistake in poker is to play your hand differently
from the way you would play it if you knew what your opponent
had. The more often you play your hand correctly on the basis
of what your opponent has the less you give up and the more
you gain. If you somehow knew what your opponent had every
time, you almost couldn't lose because you would always play
correctly. It follows, then, that the better you are at reading
your opponents' hands, the closer you come to perfect play,
and the closer you come to perfect play, the less you lose
and the more you win.
Reading hands is both an art and a science. It is an art because
you must know your opponents. Before you can technically analyze
what your opponents might have, you must have played with
them for a considerable length of time, seen how they play
their hands against you, and most importantly, watched them
play hands in which you are not involved. Even when you are
not in a hand, you should not relax your concentration. You
want to discover how your opponents tend to play the various
hands they might have. Will a particular opponent raise with
strong hands in early position, or will he slow play? Will
he raise on a draw? How does he play his big hands from one
round of betting to the next? How often does he bluff? The
more you know about an opponent's general playing habits,
the less difficulty you will have reading what he might be
holding in a specific situation.
Ironically, it is not as hard to read good players as it is
to read a bunch of incompetents. When a good player makes
a play, there is a sensible reason for it, and your job is
to find the reason and put that player on a hand. But there
is no pattern to the play of a weak player, and so you must
do a great deal of tentative guesswork to put him on a hand.
Nevertheless, by playing solidly against weak, unpredictable
players, you have to win eventually. Sooner or later a sound,
logical poker player must beat someone playing by the seat
of his pants. The latter may get lucky for a while, catching
the inside straights he draws to, winning with two small pair
when you raised with aces on third street, but percentages
are bound to catch up with him. Many good players get upset
when a sucker draws out on them. While it's never pleasant
to lose a pot you were favored to win, you should nevertheless
welcome these beats. Congratulate such players on hanging
in there to make their hands. Encourage them so they play
even more sloppily. It shouldn't be long before you have their
money.
The more you play against average-to-good players, the easier
it becomes to read your opponents' hands because they tend
to check, bet, and raise for logical reasons and with a certain
consistency to their play. However, as your opponents get
tougher and tougher, your ability to read hands starts to
fall off because tough players disguise their hands and they
are sometimes intentionally inconsistent. They make tricky,
ambiguous plays like semi-bluffing, like raising with the
second-best hand, like slow playing right to the end and then
check-raising you. They may even play a hand as it would normally
be played, which can sometimes be the most deceptive play
of all. In a word, they do all the sorts of things we have
been discussing in this Site. They are trying as hard to deceive
you about what they have as you are trying to discover what
they have. And of course, you are presumably playing your
hands equally hard against them, even as you are trying to
read their hands.
|
|
