The importance of hand reading

Everything from your tilt control and bankroll management to your choice of tracks on your iPod will affect your results; but probably the fundamental difference between players is hand reading ability.

By hand reading I mean being able to put your opponents accurately on a range of possible hands and also to understand their probable view of your hand. The reason it’s so important goes to the heart of poker. If we accept the premise that over time everyone will get equally lucky and unlucky and have an equal distribution of good and bad hands then what makes the difference? The difference is that good players will win more with their good hands and lose less with their bad ones. They do this by being excellent at reading hands and understanding the relative strength of their hand compared to their opponents’ before acting accordingly.

Hand reading is part art and part science. Until a few years ago players relied mostly on the ‘art’ part, commonly known as ‘feel’. This is the idea that using your experience of playing poker and your knowledge of your opponent you’d get a feel for the strength of his hand and whether he was strong or weak – maybe you’d even be able to put him on a precise hand. The problem with this method is it’s not exact and leads to big errors.

The evolution of poker

More recently the ‘science’ of hand reading has come to dominate the game. The idea is that rather than using instincts to guess the strength of someone’s hand you assign them a range of possible holdings and assess your card strength against that range. You assign a hand range based on the player’s bets and actions, but also your knowledge of that player. So for example, when a very tight player raises under the gun you can give him a very predictable range of, say, pairs of Tens or better and A-Q+.

When a loose, creative player makes the same opening raise you’d give them a far wider range – maybe all pairs, A-T+ and suited connectors down to 8-7 suited and even some first position steals with junk.

Hand reading is a skill that will develop the more you play. Remember to put your opponents on a range of hands early in the hand and then adjust that range based on their betting actions and reactions. Keep adjusting your reads based on the type of opponent and your knowledge of their tendencies, not just assigning a general range to them. As the hand changes with the flop, turn and river your read will change based on the board and their actions, but always remember the initial range you put them on pre-flop and what hands would make sense.

Read Part 2...