Head Games - Inside Information for Learning How to Become a Great Hand Reader

The Pros: Christopher Klodnicki, Jamie Armstrong, and Scott Sitron

Craig Tapscott: What do you think are the key elements in becoming a great hand reader?

Christopher Klodnicki: The best way to become a great hand reader is to be observant. It’s important to pay close attention to your opponents’ bet-sizing, timing tells, and physical tells. In live poker, you play so few hands an hour that it can be very beneficial to pay attention to your opponents, even in the hands that you are not playing. You need to get a feel for how often an opponent continuation-bets, floats, raises light, and so on. Basically, reads are like putting together a puzzle. The picture will start to become clearer once you put a few pieces together, and the more information that you gather, the more pieces you will have to work with. Don’t try to put an opponent on a specific hand; instead, put him on a range of hands. As the hand progresses, you can start to eliminate hands based on new information gathered.  

Jamie Armstrong: To become a great hand reader, you have to consider every part of the hand. The most common mistake that people make is assigning a turn/river

range for a villain that is completely inconsistent with previous actions. First, you must avoid convincing yourself that your opponent can show up with certain hands only because you beat them or because they beat you, when they’re highly unlikely based on the action on previous streets. You also need to have good recall. Many players will bet or raise small or big based on their actual hand, instead of maintaining balanced ranges. In addition to bet-sizing, timing tells can be very helpful. When someone takes a lot of time to make a decision, it’s typically a tough decision for him to make, which can help you to narrow his range. But, you can’t always trust this, because people will balance these situations with stronger, trapping hands to induce bluffs on later streets. You need to keep each of these things in mind in future hands with the same opponents. The more that you recall about specific players and their timing and bet-sizing preflop and post-flop, the easier it is to narrow their range of hands. Also, you can group many weaker players into basic categories, as their tendencies are likely to be very consistent with each other; so, you can determine a lot about one player simply by seeing his cards from a single hand that he has played. The more experience you gain in different situations, the more you will improve your hand reading.

Scott Sitron: The key elements in becoming a good hand reader are as follows: bet-sizing, knowing your opponent’s tendencies, position, and stack sizes. For example, if a gentleman who is very tight raises from under the gun to four times the big blind with a stack of 40-plus big blinds, and the flop comes Q-7-4 rainbow and he checks, I would assume that he has A-K exactly. In general, his range probably isn’t too wide with an under-the-gun raise of four times the big blind, and he almost always will be continuation-betting with hands like A-A, K-K, A-Q, J-J, and 10-10 on this flop.

Craig Tapscott: Share the process or an example of how you go about putting an opponent on a hand range from preflop to the conclusion of a hand.

Christopher Klodnicki: Before the flop, I can put an opponent on a range of hands based on position, stack sizes, metagame, and a couple of other factors. An open-raise usually doesn’t give you much information, unless the raiser is super tight or has less than 20 big blinds. When a player three-bets and four-bets, it really enables you to narrow down ranges. Deep in tournaments, when stacks are fairly shallow, a three-bet usually means a very strong hand or a bluff. If you’re out of position with a mediocre hand, this is a situation where you have to decide whether to four-bet or not. Ask yourself questions. Is your opponent aggressive? Have you been open-raising often? Does he know that you are capable of four-betting light? How often has he been three-betting? Does the sizing of the three-bet encourage or discourage action? The deeper you are, the tighter his three-betting range for value is going to be. The goal of your analysis here is not to determine what your opponent’s hand is, but how often he will call your four-bet and how your hand will run against his calling range.  

Jamie Armstrong: Determining preflop ranges is typically very easy, but also player-dependent. Everything preflop is based upon position and an opponent’s action. Hand ranges will widen, the later the position an opponent is in, and hands will normally strengthen, the more aggressive the action taken. It’s important not to rule out borderline hands preflop, because many players will do strange things preflop while playing very straightforwardly post-flop. I tend to be the aggressor preflop, so I will force my opponent to make the decisions post-flop the majority of the time. On each street, I analyze how the card(s) could help or hurt my hand and my opponent’s range of hands, and I adjust according to my actual hand. Also, there are situations in which people will fold their entire range of hands, so bluffing rivers becomes mandatory. I think it’s very important to experiment with new things and to note a creative play that looks really cool to you, whether it’s a great spot to overbet-bluff or a good time for a thin value-bet.

Scott Sitron: Here is an example from day four of the World Series of Poker main event. We are about two or three hours into the day, and a player whom I did not remember playing a hand shoves all in from early position for 25 big blinds. I look down at Q-Q with about 110 big blinds in middle position. I put his range at somewhere around 8-8+ and A-Q or A-K. Since my hand is ahead of this range, I know that I’m going to play. It’s just a question of shoving all in to isolate or flat-calling, knowing that flat-calling will appear very strong. There are a couple of stacks with 100-plus big blinds behind me.

I feel that if I flat-call, those stacks are going to shove in only with a range of Q-Q+ and A-K, and maybe J-J. I decide that flat-calling will do the same thing as shoving, while enabling me to get away if I happen to run into a big stack behind me who has A-A or K-K. I feel that the other players will sense strength when I put a quarter of my stack in, guaranteed to go to showdown. So, I call. Then, the player two to my left shoves all in for 90 big blinds. I put him on a range of Q-Q, K-K, A-A, and A-K, because I feel that he wouldn’t risk shoving with a marginal hand here when I have him covered and am showing strength. I am so sure that he has A-A or K-K that I fold; after all, it’s the main event. 

Unfortunately, the first player showed Q-J suited and the second player revealed tens. Not only was I ahead, I was way ahead. But, I still think a fold was correct there, given the information that I had. It just happened to be the perfect storm. ♠