By Tony Guerrera

Watch televised poker or read the blogs of well-known professional poker players, and you’d think that being endowed with ESP is a prerequisite for becoming a world-class poker player. Becoming adept at reading people is a necessary part of poker, and it takes both practice and hard work. But reading people isn’t what popular culture portrays it to be. Reading opponents isn’t about being able to guess exactly what cards all your opponents hold. Instead, reading opponents is about putting opponents on reasonable hand ranges given the following:

• Hand starting requirements

• Betting patterns

• Physical tells

• Online tells

Hand Starting Requirements

To start, you should try to put opponents on generic hand ranges (tight or loose). After playing a few orbits, seeing some showdowns, and having a decent idea of general action frequencies, you should refine as much as possible. Figure out what hands players play in what position as a function of action that’s already occurred in the hand. Winning play is about playing well across all betting rounds, but starting hand requirements is where everything begins. Assigning opponents to ranges beyond the first betting round should be nothing more than an exercise in whittling down their initial hand ranges.

Betting Patterns

Though you’ll use betting patterns to help you assign starting hand requirements to your opponents, betting patterns are valuable throughout a hand. When playing pot-limit or no-limit poker, do different bet sizes from a particular opponent reveal information about his cards or his intended action on future betting rounds? What kind of implied odds can you expect a particular foe to cough up? How does an opponent play in position? Does an opponent abuse blocking bets when out of position as a way of trying to neutralize positional disadvantage? How often does an opponent check-raise? When is an opponent aggressive with a polarized distribution versus just the top X% of his distribution? These are just a few of the questions that you should be asking about each of your opponents.

If you play online, playing tracking software equipped with a heads-up display will help you answer these questions. But you still need to pay as much attention as possible to catch nuanced information that can sometimes be tough to extract from the numbers. And if you’re playing live, then your ability to pay attention is the only thing you have-if you don’t like losing money, don’t play if you’re in a distracted state of mind.

Physical Tells

When most people think about reading opponents, they first think about physical tells. They say, “how can you play poker online when you can’t see your opponents.” The reality is that reading opponents is mostly about pinning opponents to starting hand ranges and identifying betting patterns. If you play live and you happen to be in a situation where an opponent gives off physical tells, consider it to be a bonus (especially in the modern era of poker, where players are generally much more sophisticated than they were just a few years ago).

However, some players you encounter in brick-and-mortar games will exhibit physical tells, and in a game where every small edge counts, you should learn as much as possible about deciphering them. Two excellent books dedicated to physical tells are:

• Caro’s Book of Poker Tells by Mike Caro
  
• Read ‘Em and Reap by Joe Navarro, Marvin Karlins, and Phil Hellmuth
  

The key is using physical tells effectively is allowing them to become an overall part of the picture rather than a mechanism for promoting guessing games. If you’re making decisions solely based on things like a nose twitch or the way a player is clenching his fist, you’re most likely using tells to justify unsound decisions. If you’re using a player’s mannerisms to help shape the distribution of hands he’s on, you’re probably using physical tells productively.

Online Tells

Online tells are limited, but they still exist. In particular, some players exhibit exploitable timing tells. Timing tells simply have to do with how long a player takes to act. Like with physical tells, timing tells aren’t 100% reliable, and they shouldn’t be used as a justification for decisions that would otherwise be unsound. But being perceptive when it comes to timing tells can help. Though you should really establish baselines for your opponents, the following are some common tells to look for:

Quick checks typically indicate extreme weakness
Quick calls typically indicate a drawing hand or a weaker hand that intends to call down
A long pause preceding an act of aggression typically signifies a really big hand; the player is either Hollywooding or putting some hard thought in regarding the best way to extract value

Because some players assume that their opponents are aware of these online tells, also beware of online foes who employ reverse tells.

Knowing your opponents is a crucial component of being a successful poker player. Avoid guessing games, and become good at logically deducing players’ ranges. But no matter how good you get at reading opponents, don’t neglect the importance of fundamentally sound poker (i.e. poker that’s grounded in player-independent lines of play that are tough to exploit).

Tony Guerrera is the author of Killer Poker by the Numbers, Killer Poker Shorthanded (with John Vorhaus), and Tournament Killer Poker by the Numbers.

Copyright © 2008 Pokerhelper.com. All rights reserved.
Reproduction of this article in whole or in part without permission from Pokerhelper.com is prohibited.