Reading Our Poker Opponents

Ideal poker strong hands can only come our way once in a while in games. Hence, we must develop skills in exploiting what hands are available to us, and the hands of other players. But a better skill is getting an idea of what the opponent holds and intends to do and using that to our advantage.

Reading our poker opponents involves a lot of skills from sharply observing their behavioral reactions�like facial expressions and body gestures�to hand and betting playing patterns. But the essence of reading our poker opponents really depends on hand-reading them. Hand-reading entails mind-reading skills that analyze the opponent's mindset drawn from the player's betting patterns. From these patterns a player's hand situation and play intentions can be readily discernible.

Facial and body gestures will then have meanings in the context of effective hand-reading our opponents. A smile after the flop from an opponent that has never raised pre-flop begins to have meaning, rather than just relying on the smile alone and judging that as a sign of hand and playing strength. A frown from a player who keeps raising and finally goes all-in begins to have a clear picture.

Reading our poker opponents should be systematic. A systematic reading goes through three phases: the ranging, exclusion, and combination probability phases. With this system a hand reading in poker becomes more specific and reliable. Possibilities are narrowed down until the options become specific enough to place the hand in question in a more identifiable manner. However, we should also beware of some improper motivations in reading poker hands. These are the times when even sharp hand-readings become meaningless when poker decisions are still based on emotional preferences rather than objective systematic hand-reading results.

Finally, we may also step further and have an advanced form of hand reading our poker opponents. This is actually doing more than just reading our opponents�we try to pre-read our opponents' actions even before they make them. According to some experts this is really the goal of reading our poker opponents�to somewhat pre-empt them in their course of action. Is this possible? It is, if we maintain a habit of always collecting information on our opponents so that we catch their pattern and the stimulants that trigger such patterns to emerge. If we recognize these stimulants, we may be able to predict the player's recourse.

Thus, reading our poker opponents is one of the essential tactics in the game of poker.