Unfocused pseudointellectual babble about hand-reading.

Today I was playing poker, and I made a few marginal calldowns that didn't work out too well. It made me realize a dilemma with the concept of handreading.

I think I'm a pretty decent handreader, but I think I have a ton of trouble prioritizing the information that I receive.

Example, say villain is making a bet on the river that is representing a flush. I may call his bet with reasoning being "he'd have done X with a flush draw on the flop." So in other words, I was prioritizing his previous action (or lack thereof) over the fact that he made a big bet when the flush completed.


Let me try to come up with an example that establishes the dilemma of multiple information streams of varying importance.

Seat 1: burmasian ($1,556.10)
Seat 2: JugadorJR ($1,200)
Seat 3: dsilver1121 ($725.35)
Seat 4: Liquid_Club ($854.05), is sitting out
Seat 5: HenryII ($1,200)
Seat 6: loloPOZZEDu ($635.85)
HenryII posts the small blind of $3
loloPOZZEDu posts the big blind of $6
The button is in seat #3

*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to loloPOZZEDu [6h 8h]

burmasian folds
JugadorJR folds
dsilver1121 raises to $12
HenryII adds $3
HenryII folds
loloPOZZEDu calls $6

*** FLOP *** [Kh 4c Qh]

loloPOZZEDu checks
dsilver1121 bets $6
loloPOZZEDu raises to $30
dsilver1121 calls $24

*** TURN *** [Kh 4c Qh] [6c]

loloPOZZEDu checks
dsilver1121 has 15 seconds left to act
dsilver1121 bets $50
loloPOZZEDu has 15 seconds left to act
loloPOZZEDu calls $50

*** RIVER *** [Kh 4c Qh 6c] [2s]

loloPOZZEDu checks
dsilver1121 bets $125
loloPOZZEDu


So here are the tokens of information we have available to us:

1. He's making a big bet on the river. This is a first level indication of strength.

2. His bet is typed, these empirically tend to be value bets.

3. He min cbet the flop, this empirically tends to be weak, even weaker than if he checked.

4. He just flatted the flop raise on a pretty drawy board. This reinforces the probability that he wasn't trapping with his minbet, as the natural action would be to 3-bet my raise, and therefore suggests his range as being shifted toward weak pair or draw.

5. He bet a standardish amount on the turn, at this point in the hand his most likely holding is top pair or a draw. With a big hand he'd probably have put more money in on the flop, and with air he would have probably 3-bet or folded. With marginal 2nd pair type hands he'd check.

6. By the river, my line looks like i have a draw basically. Theres not much else I can have that plays this way, maybe some sort of really marginal pair or weak king.

7. Villain is 25/5/2 datamined. This was very early in my session so no history. So his preflop stats indicate general passivity/donkishness and that he's only raising with pretty good hands. His af of 2 is rather high for a donk so i don't think it makes him an less capable of bluffing here.


So we have 7 different information streams. Some of them have higher reliability factors than others. Some of them are even contradictory. His turn bet after just calling flop is indicative of a weak king, but his big typed river bet is in total disagreement, as it represents a highly polar range.

So which one do we trust? Which one supercedes the other in imporance? Do we see that contradiction as an information bit within itself (i.e. as meaning much more likelihood of air)? A sklansky book i read (i think nlhet&p) said that the most important info is simply the fact that he's betting large on the river. This makes sense, but in that case why ever try to bluff catch?

So theoretically, there must be a weighting system that all good handreaders subconsciously use to prioritize the info they are given. In the above example you might say the fact that he's made a big typed bet is highest in importance, but theres so much extraneous information to the contrary that it just doesn't make much since for him to have a big hand very often, and therefore its barely a call.



There's one other thing that kinda bugs me about hand-reading. There seems to be a contradicting duality in poker where we A) expect our opponents to fuck up and therefore we profit from their fuckups, and at the same time B) we hand-read these very same opponents by assuming that they play optimally.

This puts us in situations where we essentially get outplayed by bad play. At the same time, we have no better way to deduce their cards until we pick up on their tendencies to a much larger degree to a point where we can really get in their heads and imagine what they're thinking, which often takes tens of thousands of hands.

Anyways, I don't know what to expect from the replies to this, its just something that was bugging me today. Feel free to share thoughts.

Great post.

I'd say 1, 7, 6 (in a less complex way), 5, 2, 3, and then 4 last cuz i dont think its a good assumption (i could be wrong?).

Originally Posted by Renton

There's one other thing that kinda bugs me about hand-reading. There seems to be a contradicting duality in poker where we A) expect our opponents to fuck up and therefore we profit from their fuckups, and at the same time B) we hand-read these very same opponents by assuming that they play optimally.

yeah, but even if you dont know their exact tendencies yet you can make assumptions that someones going to play bad based on being like 25/5 or min betting the flop. so then once you see that you can start to say well it wouldnt make sense for him to do something but he could have since he sucks. i guess it would be kind of a guessing/feel thing though to decide on how often you would put a hand that wouldnt make sense to be in his range into his range.

for the hand though, a lot of the stuff he did was contradicting and after thinking about it im not really sure which piece i would lean on or why.

also i'd appreciate advice on whether to call or fold in the example

the way you prioritize the information you receive depends on the opponent you are playing, especially if you have seen him do all this stuff or not. in the hand i think its an easy fold because he is bad, you can certainly find a better spot. and i strongly disagree that the standard play would be to 3-bet the flop here after minbetting w/ a good hand, im sure this guy would expect to be led into on the turn so he could bomb. i'm much more apt to read a minbet as either a cheap bluff who will just fold if he gets raised or a hand which has a pretty wide range of decent to good hands (TP, OP, 2p, sets), making it extremely probable that the river isnt a bluff. also the flop makes it an easy check-back on the turn for him w/ draws. big river bets are realizations of previously missed value.

for the hell of it:1,7,2,6,3,5,4
i disagree with a lot of your assumptions about the flop so these would be swapped a bit if i used my own reads.

Some other info to consider in this example is that raising this min bets tends to be profitable w/ ATC so when it fails thats something of a red flag w/o more of a read.

Also while his AF is high, consider how much those min bets on the flop can skew this stat toward a more normal #

He is only raising 5% of hands which seems to weight his range heavily on this board to something better than our pair of 6s. How often does he raise JT? AhXh? or other decent draws to bluff here. Only occasionally.

Thinking about the hand from our opponents prospective its easy to think he could decide to bluff here, but to call we have to give a 22/5 min-raising min-betting player credit for, utilizing his image, reading our hand(even if its pretty clear), semi-bluffing & then barrelling when he bricks.
If he is mindlessly bluffing and just happened to pick a decent spot, we can probably get his $$ pretty on another hand.


This is a great exercises tho.

good post. i think you just gotta keep playing and thinking analytically about the stuff and you get better at it. you can't really learn from a book.