On Hand Reading

Common questions a new player trying to improve their game will ask an established player are:

"How often should I raise pre flop?"

"What should I do when someone with position on me is very aggressive?"

"What's your tournament strategy?"

There is an inherent problem with these questions - they are non-specific. As a result, the answer is almost always "It depends."

Winning poker strategy is, essentially, three steps repeated over and over again.

1) Figure out what your hand is (this is obviously very easy).

2) Figure out what your opponent's hand is. This is a bit more difficult, and in practice, it's more realistic to determine their range. A player's range includes all likely hands they can be expected to hold in a given situation.

3) Figure out what action will have the highest expected value (EV), using the information gleaned in steps one and two. This is generally fairly easy to do, assuming you did a good job on number two. In poker, information is not just important, it's the entire ballgame.

Considering how easy step one and three generally are, hand-reading (the common name for step two) becomes the single most crucial factor in maximizing profit.

The best poker players continually put their opponents on correct ranges. It may seem like a sixth sense to some, but the ability to hand-read effectively is mostly a repetition of the same series of logic questions over and over every hand, every street, every decision. The more hands you play, the better you will get at answering these logical questions correctly – and your hand-reading skills will increase rapidly.

Let's start at the beginning at the beginning of the process. I will provide an example taking place in a six handed Hold'em NL game and explain how the same process works on any hand. The secret is that you take every piece of information given to you and you work through a process of elimination to get to your best guess as to what your opponent is holding.

At the beginning of the hand, all of your opponents' hand ranges are identical. The hand has not begun, there is no information yet, therefore anyone can have any of the 169 different hands possible.

Two people fold and the next player raises 3x the big blind (BB). This player's range has now changed. The more you know about the player, the less guesswork there is, but for the purposes of this example let's assume we don't know much about him. We will just assume he is a standard, textbook player.

A textbook player raising in the cutoff (one position before the button, as our opponent has done here) is probably raising with something like ATo+, A2s+, 22+, KJo+, KTs+, and QJs.

We decide to 3-bet (re-raise) to 12x the BB on the button with AKs. The blinds fold and our opponent just calls. Excellent, we now have more information with which to narrow down his range even further.

Assuming that our opponent is a textbook player, we can assume that he will fold most of the weaker hands from his previous range to our big 3-bet. Let's assume he folds AJo, ATo, A2s-ATs, 22-77, and all combinations of face cards aside from KQs. This leaves us with a likely range of AQo, AKo, AJs, AQs, AKs, 88, 99, TT, JJ, QQ, KK, AA and KQs. In only two actions (him raising and then calling our 3-bet), we have already narrowed his hand range down from 169 possible hand combinations to this much more specific range.

But it gets better! We haven't used all our available information yet. Our opponent chose not to 4-bet us. Against a textbook player, we can safely assume that he will be 4-betting QQ, KK, AA, AKs and AKo most of the time, allowing us to narrow his range even further to be likely holding AQo, AJs, AQs, 88, 99, TT or JJ.

This process is repeated every time a decision is made. After every piece of new information, simply repeat the elimination process, discarding unlikely hands from their range, leaving you with a more accurate range of possible holdings after each new piece of information.

The game of poker is nothing more than a series of logical problems, repeated over and over again, which you attempt to solve based on the information provided. Over tens of thousands of hands, this process will become largely automatic as you eliminate unlikely hands over and over again to arrive at likely ranges, which in turn, allows you to make better decisions with your own holdings.

by Mark Vos