Poker tells can give you a lot of valuable insights, but they shouldn’t be the only thing you consider when making decisions.
If you want to be good at reading your opponents when playing poker, you need to make use of all the information available.
Everything from bet sizing, behavior, and even the time they take to make a decision, can be important in figuring out your opponent’s holdings.
Let’s take a look at the most effective ways to read your opponents in poker.
The Most Important Part: Putting Your Opponents On A Range
No matter if you’re playing live or online poker, the most important part of reading your opponents is putting them on a range.
The ‘range’ is the various possible hands they could hold, so putting them on a range means trying to figure out what those hands could be.
As the hand plays out and your opponent makes more decisions and takes more actions, you can use this information to narrow down their range.
It’s a vital skill to master.
But instead of thinking about ranges, many players try to guess the exact hand of their opponents on the river. This approach doesn’t work.
Good players don’t make blind guesses; they use a methodical approach.
Even though it requires a lot of practice, you can learn to put your opponent on a range by following these four simple steps.
Step 1: Analyze preflop actions
If you want to put your opponent on an accurate range of cards by the river, 바카라 you should start your work preflop.
The first thing you need to consider is your opponent’s position.
They will be playing completely different hands from under the gun (UTG) and button (BTN), so it’s vital to assign them a realistic range.
A player who is raising from the first position will not have 63s in their range, so is very unlikely to have strong holdings on the flop with 633.
However, a player on the BTN can easily have such hands, and way more other 3x holdings, so you need to play differently against these ranges.
Knowing the position is not enough. You also have to identify your opponent’s type.
If they’re passive, they could be playing just 15% of hands from the cutoff (CO), while an aggressive opponent could be opening 35% or even more.
The same thought process should be applied for other situations when someone limps, or you face a 3-bet.
When you evaluate your opponent’s position and playing style, you can already make an educated guess of what hands they could be playing.