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Tadas Peckaitis

Top 5 Tips for Better Hand Reading without Using Solvers

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The ability to figure out what poker hands your opponent could be holding, also known as hand reading, is one of the key aspects of your game. The best poker players in the world are using solvers to train this process and understand ranges in different situations.

Listen to this article within the podcast:

However, I am aware that not everyone enjoys using solvers and analyzing the difficult math, so I have compiled 5 tips that you can use to make better predictions without complicated tools.

There are many misconceptions about the hand reading process especially among new players, so it’s important to introduce the term “range”. This refers to all the possible hands a player can have in a certain situation.

If you want to play good poker, you should be looking to determine your opponents’ ranges, not their particular hands. In fact, putting your opponent on a single hand is usually a bad idea.

1. Think in Terms of Ranges

All too often, live poker players will say something like: “I put you on Ace-King.”

In reality, these players are usually just hoping that you have that particular hand while completely neglecting all the other hands you have in your range.

If you want to play sound poker, you will always want to assign your opponent a number of different possible holdings.

You can construct your opponent’s preflop range based on several factors, all of them adding or removing hands from their range. Consider things like their position, how they entered the pot, their player type and what you’ve seen them do in the past.

For instance, an aggressive player who decided not to re-raise before the flop will rarely have pocket aces. Likewise, an early position opener should not be holding a weak off suite hand all that often.

Thinking in terms of ranges and how your hand plays against it will get you better results in the long run and will train you to think about poker in the right way, even if you do make some mistakes while learning.

Avoid these 4 common ranging mistakes (video coming soon):

2. Mind the Bet Sizing

If you are often playing against the same opponents, you will see them betting in different situations. So, be sure to take good notes on how big they bet when they have the value part of their range versus how big they bet with their bluffs. Paying attention to bet sizing gives you valuable information.

Some bet sizing tells can also be used on the entire population in a particular poker game like Texas Holdem. While all bet sizes should be well balanced in theory, most poker players don’t do a very good job of it.

If you are playing against weaker opponents, you should learn a lot from bet sizes alone.

3. Actions Shrink Ranges

When thinking about your opponents’ ranges, you should remember that every action they make changes their range in a significant way.

Let’s say a player opened from an early position, and we decided to call on the button. If this player is a thinking player, we know we can assign them a fairly tight opening range from EP.

Now, as different flops, turns, and rivers are dealt out, this player will have to take action, whether he is deciding to bet or check on different streets.

Combined with the board texture, these actions can help you shrink their range and take hands out of it. The thing to remember is that their range can never expand, so never start thinking about them having a hand that you already excluded from their range on an earlier street.

Whenever your opponent checks, bets, or raises, you should think about what hands they may be doing this with and which hands you can now take completely out of their range.

4. Beware of Your Opponent

A very important thing to consider, especially when playing in lower stakes and generally weaker games, is who you are playing against.

For instance, an early position raise from a good player will never be 98 off suite, while many bad players will raise this hand even from UTG on a regular basis.

When playing, you should try to construct a range based on your opponent’s specific tendencies whenever possible.

Dealing with the extremely wide ranges of some weak players can be difficult. But, if you can hone in on their tendencies it can also be very profitable.

5. Turn Off Your Emotions

This one may be easier said than done, but may just be the most important part of the entire process. When trying to figure out what the other player has, you can’t let your emotions control you. Have you ever caught yourself in one of these situations:

  • You know you are beat but you call.
  • You’re seeking revenge against a player for an earlier hand.
  • You think a particular player is always bluffing.

If you answer yes to any of these questions, you might want to turn things around. Using a logical and steady hand elimination process and range construction is a much better way than simply hoping to be right this time.

Don’t get too stuck on the off chance that your opponent is bluffing you, even if occasionally they may be. If the spot is such that they have more value than bluffs, it may be the time to fold.

The fact is that if you play poker, you will get bluffed out of your hands, and you will miss earning value in some spots, and that’s completely fine.

As long as you are sticking to rational and math-based decisions, you will be fine.

Challenge

Here’s my challenge to you: Write down the 5 tips on a sticky note and attach it to your monitor. In your next 3 play sessions, actively try to assign each of your opponents a preflop range of hands and narrow that range through the streets based on the 5 tips. Make reads on the strength of their range and make plays that exploit your reads. Good luck!

Now it’s your turn to take action and do something positive for your poker game.

Support the Show

These lovely poker peeps picked up my books directly from me (links below): Jan Pukmajster, William Young, Jamison Anderson, Daniel Palermo, Mark Fleming, Adam Choquette-Fuks, Bret Burns, Louis Barilovits, Chad Cheadle, BDD, Joseph Blazek, Evil Steve, Graeme Richardson, D. Woodward, Bret Burns and Frank Tanner.

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Vs Hero Stats Can Help You Fight Back

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There are many powerful HUD statistics available that can make your life easier and offer you a way to exploit other players better than ever before. One such set of statistics are the Vs Hero stats within Holdem Manager*. These stats show how a particular opponent is playing specifically against you.

*Tadas is a proponent of Holdem Manager whereas I don’t use it. But this article will be very useful for any HM users out there. -Sky

Compare Overall Stats Against “Vs Hero” Stats

Serious players know how to adjust their strategy versus different opponents, and comparing a strong player’s general stats versus how they play against you can help you understand how they’re trying to exploit you. Once you know how they exploit you, you can devise counter strike plays.

It’s proven to be a very effective strategy in my games and undoubtedly helped me to increase my win rate.

For example, let’s say your opponents is 3betting 8% from the SB versus the BTN overall. But, you look at his 3bet vs BTN Hero and see it’s 18% against you in that situation. With this information, you can easily counter it by adding more 4-bet bluffs than usual, or floating more hands since you are in position, or even opening a tighter range and letting your opponent level up.

While the vs Hero stat alone does not show you the full picture, comparing it to how your opponent plays overall will help you understand how he sees you and what adjustments you makes to counter your strategy. Just like with the 3-betting example, you can use this thought process in many spots if you have enough hands in your database on a particular opponent.

A Quick Note

It is worth mentioning that Villain stat vs Hero has little use for exploiting recreational players since they often stick to the same strategy no matter who they are playing. However, it can be life-changing against tough regulars and help you make much better decisions, so you should take advantage of the special stats your poker software has to offer.

On top of helping you to adjust versus a specific player, this feature can help you understand your own game and how other players see it, which is a perfect way to address troubling spots and fix some severe leaks once you find them.

Do Not Take It Too Far

While I love using vs Hero stats and often refer to them when making decisions against other regulars in my game, there is always a risk of taking it too far.

The biggest challenge comes when you only have a small sample size and still want to make massive adjustments, which can often end up costing you money.

If you want to target a very specific area and only have a couple of tracked hands on your opponent, you should just go for a GTO strategy and play a balanced range. So to start, just stick with a solid plan and only start adjusting your play when you actually can back it up with a meaningful sample.

Of course, even a small database can show you some tendencies, but relying on your opponent over folding to c-bet OOP in 3-bet pot just because he folded 100% till now (1 out of 1 hand) is going a bit too far. Always take a look at the sample size you have and evaluate it with proper logic.

Do Not Make It Overwhelming

While having a lot of information on your opponents is always great, do not try to fit everything you can on your main HUD panel. Instead, include vs Hero stats in more detailed popups.

The Vs Hero default popup in Holdem Manager

This is true for all HUD stats, but in particular vs Hero ones since you will be only using it in specific situations, so covering your screen with these numbers is not the best idea.

You should use the main HUD for typical stats that you will be using most often, and put all detailed information in relevant popups. This should help you concentrate on playing the game instead of searching for the numbers all the time.

Easiest to Use “Vs Hero” Stats

While there are so many vs Hero stats available to you, a lot of the time, you will not have a big enough sample size to rely on the statistic. Therefore, you can get the most of vs Hero stats in areas that you often face, and luckily these are the most important ones.

3-bet vs Hero

Stats related to 3-bets are by far the most useful ones from the preflop section.

Seeing how your opponents adjust versus you can help to understand when to tighten your opening ranges, when to steal wider and how to counter their strategy either by floating more or 4-betting more as a bluff.

Since players have very varying 3-bet strategies, I believe this is the most useful stat and a must-have for any serious player.

C-bet vs Hero

While c-betting is often more fixed than 3-betting, you can still identify players that have common leaks in this section. The good news is that these c-bet stats will often show if your opponent is c-betting too much or too little against you, and this can easily be targeted by making simple adjustments.

Fold to C-bets vs Hero

This is another area where people are playing very differently against serious and recreational players. Even if your opponent’s Fold to C-bet stat is low, and he likes to float a lot versus recreational players, he can be easily folding 60%+ to your c-bets, which makes it profitable to c-bet almost any two cards against such an opponent.

Bet Against Missed C-bet

Knowing how your opponent is playing when you decide to check after raising preflop can help you frame very effective strategies and is one of my most used vs Hero stats group.

Knowing these numbers will undoubtedly help you increase your win rate and make playing even more fun than before since you will be observing your opponents, learning and improving at a much better pace, and winning more.

So why not try it?

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A Short-Cut To Taking Poker More Seriously

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What is the difference between recreational and professional poker players? These groups prioritize different things, and I want to touch on what is important if you want to take this game more seriously.

I will not dive too deep into the strategies because that is beyond this scope of this one article. Instead, I will highlight what I think you should prioritize if you want to see consistent results.

Master the Fundamentals

First and foremost, devote your time to mastering fundamentals and build a solid foundation from which to work. I know that studying crazy spots can be sexy. However, these rarely come up in the games and it is not where the money is.

If you can learn the Game Theory Optimal (GTO) approach to the most common spots and then understand how to adjust versus different players, you will have a very big edge over your opponents.

So instead of analyzing how to play random spots that look exciting, break down the most common situations you face. Without a doubt, start by learning preflop hand ranges. Then, move on to mastering cbetting on different boards or how to play your entire range from the BB when you face a continuation bet yourself.

So, start with situations that happen most frequently. Then move to the next most common scenario and keep doing it until you have a very solid understanding of all the fundamentals.

Most importantly, structure your learning. Instead of consuming random content, concentrate on working on one specific area of the game that you are trying to improve.

Learn to Adjust

Poker has progressed, and these days players are much tougher than they used to be a couple of years back. So even though GTO approach is not ideal in all situations, you should learn what balanced ranges look like and how to approach the most common spots.

However, when you know the basics, the next step is adjusting based on specific opponents. That is where most of your money will come from.

Of course, it is quite hard to build a separate strategy against each individual. But, you can make your life easier by capitalizing on population tendencies and grouping players.

These adjustments are very straightforward. If you find that passive players are calling too much, you just value bet wider and stop bluffing against them. It is going to be an extremely profitable adjustment, and you will make much more money than sticking to balancing your ranges.

Contrary to this, if you are against aggressive opponents who are willing to fire almost all the time when you check, it makes sense to adjust again and check many strong hands and choose your complete air hands to bluff.

So this is always a moving target, but if you categorize recreational players into different groups, you will be able to exploit their mistakes and put more cash in your pocket.

Have a Routine

The days when strong players were starting their sessions after getting back from a party or just randomly deciding to play are long gone, and if you want to have good results, you should take poker seriously.

Routines get work done.

The best way to do it, as far as I know, is having a routine. If you plan when you are going to play, when you will devote time to studying and even when you will rest, it will reduce the mental effort needed to make such decisions and free up some brainpower for you.

I put a few things into my poker routine:

  • I always take a few minutes to prepare for my session. Review some hands, or read an article to get in a state of thinking about poker.
  • Removing all distractions like muting my phone, turning off the TV, or even closing unnecessary apps on my PC is a must before starting playing.
  • Detach from poker after my session. This one is not so obvious but very important, and I struggled with it for years. Especially when running bad, emotions can carry on to my everyday life, which can hurt all other areas. So learn what works for you, either watch some funny videos after your session, read something, go to the gym or whatever non-poker activity works for you. You will thank me later.

Also, getting proper sleep and regularly exercising will help you keep your energy and concentration on the table. This, without a doubt, has a direct influence on the quality of your decisions.

Detach From Emotions

Humans are very emotional species, so this is easier said than done. However, to have better results, you should concentrate on the math part of the game and keep your composure.

Of course, it is one thing to understand that you should not play when you feel a negative (or even overly positive) influence from your emotions and another thing to do it. While it is easy to avoid starting the games when you feel bad, sometimes it is not as easy to quit your session when you start tilting. But, this is something you have to learn.

What helps me the most is that I always concentrate on the actual decision and not the result it brings. If I think I played it right, that’s all that matters to me. I’ve trained myself to move to the next hand even if my opponent hit that two-outer on the river (P.S. – that should happen sometimes).

However, if you still find yourself tilting, just quit your session and take a break. It will surely help you save a lot of money, and while doing it, try to identify what caused these emotions and how you can avoid them in the future.

If you can think about every hand as a separate event, you will quickly overcome emotional decisions and start making better ones!

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