Poker Skills – Hand Reading

A lot of critical decisions when playing either poker tournaments or hold\’em cash games, requires you to put your opponent on a scope of hands. If you\’re able to do this with reasonable precision, your decisions at the poker table will invariably become rewarding over a period of time. However, determining your opponent\’s hole cards is certainly one of the more difficult aspects of the game to get really good at. Here is how you can start improving on it now.

The most important factor is paying close attention to the game, even when you\’re not involved in a hand. Betting patterns and certain body language tells tend to be repeated over and over by many players, and learning to recognise these can give you a huge advantage. If an opponent plays out of his normal pattern, then you should stop and ask yourself why. Typically this means his hand is uncommon too, usualy indicating a moderately good, or rather weak hand which requires a decision.

Monitoring your opponent\’s positional play will allow you to make solid assumptions about the potency of his hand. If he plays a lot of hole cards, his positional play won\’t mean much, but if they are usually tight, solid hands from early position are the norm, loosening up to a wider range from later positions.

Always watch your opponent\’s on the flop, not the board cards. Staring at the flop is often the result of his cards improving. Turning away, or a rapid check often means a potential draw or complete miss. However, if he raised preflop and aces or face cards land on the flop, be careful of a trap.

Keeping an eye on the pot and relative stack sizes is hugely important. A normally tight player who is prepared to risk a lot of chips usually means they are holding a strong hand. If he seems determined to keep the pot small, then the pot is potentially yours for just a bet. Loose players are harder to read in this case, and it\’s more important for you to have a winning hand than to even anxiety trying to understand what they are playing.

Watch how the action changes according to what comes on the flop. Keep an eye on conviction that turns apprehension, or the other way around. Run through qualifying your opponent\’s hand before they turn it over. Again, you don\’t have to be in the hand, but you do have to examine the flop and follow the betting action. Repeating this consistently will allow your estimation of hole cards to become quite exact.

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Poker Skills – When To Raise From Early Position

When you choose to play more repeatedly from early position in no limit holdem, it can present more obstacles to your opponents in distinguishing the nature of player you really are. However, it is frequently more pricey to do so, because of the intrinsic risks with having the maximum amount of players to act after you.

Let\’s assume you are NOT raising with a quality hand from early position in order trick your opponents. Some players do this with straight cards, small pairs and suited aces or kings. That adds considerable variety from early position and is absolutely going to increase your hand choice in the eyes of your opponents, but you must also be agreeable to play just as many precarious pots, because the more you play, the more you will be played back at.

This means players will be reraising you with strong hands, or bluffing back at you and quite correctly too. Also, at a full table you have nine or ten other platyers to act after you, and that could mean up to 20 unknown cards which could make hands better than your own. Usually that will be the case and you will be creating many multi-player confrontations if they don\’t raise you out. So why might you want to raise from early position then?

Professional players do this often, and its not just to mix up their play – that much is understood. The real rationale is to hit a flop in such an unsuspicious way, that other players will make costly mistakes against you because they completely misjudged your hand and over-committed chips or money to the pot. Usually it\’s a gigantic pot.

What needs to be comprehended is that most early position hands will cost you money, that is where good pot management comes into it – you need to keep those pots small, and make the ones when you do hit big. The pros recognize that in any given sitting their winnings often come from just a few of the hands played. But those few wins can be so large they make up for all the other hands, so it can really pay off in the long run.

Sometimes things do not work out so perfectly, but more often than not, playing smartly from early position will allow you to have more and more profitable games or tournaments.

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