Hand reading can be taken to many levels, some of the best cash game players can polarize your range, assign each hand a probability and squeeze out a little value on the river regardless of your actual holding!
At a more basic level it is often possible to tell a draw from a made hand, even at the lower levels.
What I was thinking about today is that the biggest sign of all that something is up is usually far more simple than you’d expect. A player who always makes 3 or 4 times raises in position suddenly min-bets… an opponent who continuation bets on every damn flop pauses for a while and then checks behind… a quiet player suddenly overbets check-raises the pot on a safe looking board… you get the picture.
Of course the next step is to work out what these bets mean, well we could list a few common examples (in fact there are some covered in our online poker tells article) but mostly the flow of the game, your particular opponent and the board cards will combine to give you the information you require. One more thing – you’ll never spot those unusual bets unless you know what is usual, switch off that TV and IM now and focus on the game, your profits will improve!
GL at the tables, Mark
Submitted by Planet Mark on Wed, 02/24/2010 - 12:04