Hand-Reading and Moving Up

In my last column, I claimed that the two factors most cited in discussions of moving up, win rate and bankroll, don’t tell the whole story. If you’re thinking about moving up to a higher-stakes game, you also should consider some other factors.

One consideration is your overall comfort level at your current stakes. You should be comfortable with the money, and you also should be comfortable with your opponents. One of the biggest keys to being comfortable against your opponents is having sharp hand-reading skills. In fact, you definitely should be able to hand-read better than your opponents before you consider moving up. This column is about trying to measure your hand-reading skills to see if they’re up to snuff.

The Ultimate Hand-Reading Test — the River
Hand-reading is important in every form of poker. This column will focus on no-limit hold’em, because it’s currently the most popular form of poker, but the ideas here apply more universally.

The river is the betting round where hand-reading skills translate most directly to winning cash. If you can’t hand-read for beans, you can still survive at no-limit if you focus on avoiding the river. You can play short-stacked and rely on a tight opening range and some preflop stealing to grind out a profit. Or, you can nit it up, refusing to get the money in without a great hand.

But if you want to win big at no-limit, you need to read hands, and if you read hands, the river is your best friend. You have more information about your opponents’ hand ranges on the river than on any round before it. Good hand-readers can use that information to find great value-bets and good bluffing opportunities that lesser players miss.

You can tell a lot about whether or not you are ready to move up by how you play the river compared to your opponents. You should be generating a big edge for yourself on that betting round.

Thin Value-Betting
Are you consistently betting thinner than your opponents? If you play micro-stakes or small-stakes no-limit, you should be. When you’re ready to move up, you should be able to identify numerous situations on the river in which your opponents just check their hands down and you bet (correctly) for value.

Here’s a common scenario: I see a hand like this one played dozens of times during each session. Someone open-raises and a player in one of the blinds calls. The flop comes J-8-5. The blind checks, the raiser bets three-quarters of the pot, and the blind calls. The turn is a deuce. The blind checks, and the raiser checks. The river is a king. The blind checks, and the raiser checks. The blind shows A-8, and the raiser wins with Q-J.

The player with Q-J didn’t read his opponent’s hand very well, and as a result, he missed at least one reasonable-sized bet. When a player calls from one of the blinds, check-calls the flop, checks the turn, and checks the river, a medium or small pair is always a good part of his range. The river king is unlikely to have hit the flop check-calling range, so Q-J figures to be a good hand in this situation. Furthermore, many players will feel compelled to call the river bet, fearing that all of the checking may have induced a bluff.

Do your opponents give you free showdowns like this one often? If you play $2-$4 no-limit or lower online, I can answer that question for you. They do. Do you give free showdowns like that one if you hold Q-J? If you do, consider refining your hand-reading skills a little bit before moving up. The higher you go, the fewer free showdowns you’ll receive. If you are playing the higher limits and are giving free showdowns but not receiving them, your results will suffer.

If you’re thinking about moving up, review your past play and pay special attention to your river play. Are you making good value-betting decisions? Are you consistently missing value? Are you consistently making better decisions than your opponents are making against you? Obviously, your play doesn’t have to be perfect before you can move up, but it should be at least significantly better than your average opponent’s play.

River Bet-Sizing
This is exclusively a no-limit skill, but it’s another important skill related to hand-reading. My bet-sizing varies far more on the river than on any other street. I’ll make shoves of four times the pot size on the river, and I’ll make miniature bets of one-quarter of the pot size. My bet-sizing choices are informed largely by my estimate of my opponent’s hand range. If I think my opponent has a strong range but I have an even better hand, I’ll make a huge overbet, hoping for a big payoff. If I think my opponent is weak but possibly willing to call something small, I’ll make the small bet. (Obviously, the better my opponent is, the more I have to engage in leveling games with my bet-sizing. I can’t allow strong opponents to figure out what I’m thinking just by looking at my bet sizes.)

I think that smart bet-sizing decisions on the river can contribute significantly to your win rate, and good bet-sizing also goes hand in hand with good hand-reading skills. How do you size your river bets? Does it work out for you? Again, go through hands you’ve played and review your bet-sizing decisions. Are you making them smartly, or just betting randomly? How about your opponents? Can you decode your opponents’ river bet sizes and use that information to make better decisions? If you consistently size bets better than your opponents do, that’s a clue that you might be ready to move up.

Ed’s brand-new book, Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em, is available for purchase at smallstakesnolimitholdem.com. He is a featured coach at stoxpoker.com, and you can also check out his online poker advice column, notedpokerauthority.com.