The Anatomy of a Read
Some assume a read at the poker table comes to you magically.
Others believe it is the product of countless hours of observation.
They are both right, and they are both wrong.
Last week, I talked about using blockers to influence your decisions and how you should incorporate blocker logic based on how strong of a read you have.
I said, “My hope for your game is that you rarely utilize blockers because you’re routinely making strong reads.”
Today, I want to help you make my hope a reality!
We’ll discuss the different types of reads that one can make at the poker table, how to utilize them, and why you should rarely be readless.
#1: Intra-hand Reads
This is what most people think of when they hear the words “making a read.” It’s what happens during an individual hand at the poker table.
Tells
The most common intra-hand read is a tell.
A player does something outside of the strategic decisions during a poker hand, which you can use as a clue to further narrow their range.
Notice how I said “further narrow their range” rather than “know if they are weak or strong?”
This is because tells are best used as part of the hand-reading process rather than on an island separate from your other deductions.
Which leads me to…
Deduction
This is one of the most critical skills in poker – taking stock of each strategic decision your opponent has made during a hand, and then using those decisions as clues to deduce their hand range.
“He’s repping a flush, but he wouldn’t have played
many flush draws like that on the flop.”
Any time I use the term “hand-reading,” this is essentially what I’m referring to. Their pre-flop, flop, turn, and river decisions, each analyzed and combined to form a guess as to their hand range.
Note that “bet-size tells,” which you might assume fall into the category above, are technically part of deduction because they fall squarely within “strategic decisions during a poker hand.”
Game Flow (+ Current State)
While it has certainly lost its luster in the post-solver era of poker, game flow reads are alive and well in most circumstances.
I say “most”, because you will encounter some elite opponents at certain, more mechanical, game types, against whom you’d be hopeless in looking for adjustments to be made based on game flow.
You may be wondering about the definition.
Game flow reads are speculations, based on recent events,
of how your opponent is likely to react differently than normal.
Some examples:
Michael was down 4 buy-ins and just completed a comeback to be up 1 buy-in. He’s not going to want to take a big risk now.
Bob just got sucked out on again. He’s going to be looking to play a big pot.
Mary just got caught bluffing for the 4th time this hour. No way she tries to bluff again right now.
I’ve raised huge in position twice today on the turn against Frank, and he’s folded. There’s no way he’s checking this turn with a big hand because he’d bet, hoping to face another big raise and finally have the goods.
As you can see, game flow is still something I believe is well worth considering when making decisions.
Note that I’m including what I’ll refer to as current state reads with game flow, even though they could have their own category, because the line between them is quite blurry in many cases.
Michael’s current emotional state after completing a comeback is what presents the opportunity for a read, but the comeback is part of the game.
A current state read that’s unrelated to game flow would be something like:
Steve just had a big fight with his girlfriend and is going to be tilted and looking to gamble.
#2: Player Tendency Reads
Tendency reads are, as the name implies, information about how a player tends to play in general.
They have nothing to do with an individual hand or circumstance, though they can and should be used in conjunction with intra-hand reads.
I like to split these tendency reads into two categories, though I don’t pretend this is clearly the right way.
Data-Based
While they can be determined from statistics, data-based reads don’t absolutely require stats to be tracked.
Yes, the best place to make data-based reads is from a database, but you can also accumulate data at the live poker tables from experience and observation.
In live poker, I tend to focus primarily on showdowns – how I know someone played a certain hand – rather than make an often misguided attempt to approximate statistics.
When playing online, you can end up with a world of data at your fingertips.
Utilizing that data well in order to make reads is an entire skillset and topic of its own, but for now, I’ll simply put it in this category.
Emotional Leaks / Player Profile
While I tend to infer emotional leaks and build a player profile almost entirely from data I’ve acquired, I view it as a separate category.
Over time, if you’re astute, you can get to know players beyond their statistics.
Yes, they don’t value bet thinly enough, but why?
Is it because they don’t understand what hands are good enough to value bet on a technical level?
Or is it because they fear a check-raise, or that they are usually content to take down the pot without risking any more money?
We are all made up of both sides:
Our technical understanding and our emotional makeup.
Understanding both allows you to get much deeper inside the minds of your opponents.
Plus, it’s fun!
#3: Population Reads
When someone tells me they’ve never seen a player before and they are readless, I scoff.
Not externally, of course – I don’t want to be rude – but in my mind, I know that they are missing out on valuable information.
You really shouldn’t go into any hand readless, because no matter where you are playing, there is an average player type.
The average player you encounter at $1/$3NL.
The average player that you’ve never seen before in your small $25k buy-in tournament player pool.
The average player plays a certain way. Reverting to a balanced GTO strategy because they’re new to you is foolish in almost all cases.
The Above, Generalized
Most population reads are based on the exact same things that Tendency Reads are:
Data-based
- The stats and showdowns of the average player in your pool
Emotional Leaks / Player Profile
- The average fears and influences on the players in your pool
You can gather these in the exact same way, as well.
There is one more though, unique to the population reads category.
Stereotypes
In nearly every situation in life, we’re discouraged from stereotyping people, and for good reason.
It’s unfair to draw conclusions based on someone’s age, race, gender, or appearance. Plus, you can’t judge a book by its cover, right?
But in the game of poker, we aren’t hiring an employee or meeting a friend.
It’s not unfair to adjust your play based on a guess of how an opponent might play. In fact, it’s essentially the entire point of the game.
Also, when hiring, you’re looking for the right individual person, not an average of a population. In poker, playing against the average of all people your opponent might be, is precisely what you want to be doing.
So, yes, you can and should make generalizations!
I played a hand once on High Stakes Poker, where I made a very big fold against Bill Klein, an older recreational player who, at the time, I’d never seen before. I made the fold primarily due to stereotypes.
It turns out he was bluffing, and it turns out that he likes to play an aggressive game!
It was a bad fold against his hand, and it was a bad fold against him specifically, but against the average wealthy businessman his age, it was a great play.
To this day, I have zero regrets about the way I played that hand because I did the best I could with the information I had.
Don’t be afraid to be wrong.
You’re not going to be right every time, and you’re not supposed to be!
You’re supposed to come out ahead based on the reads you make on average.
As for stereotypes, don’t focus strictly on the way someone looks. When you speak with someone, you’re getting more and more information.
Perhaps it’s no longer the average of “Young white guys in a hoodie” but “Young white guys in a hoodie who work for their father’s construction company, are in Vegas for a bachelor party, and called a straight ‘a flush’.”
Never Readless
If you revert to a GTO game plan because you’ve never seen this person before at the $2/$5 tables, you are saying that you expect a random $2/$5 player to play optimally on average.
I call BS.
I hope you can see now that you will always have something to construct a read from.
There’s information – and money – sitting on the table.
It’s yours if you’ll just reach out and take it.
