BEING ABLE TO "READ" OTHER PLAYERS

There is a difference between being able to decipher what would be termed an opponent's "tell" and "reading" him or her in terms of evaluating a level of ability. To put this in proper perspective, consider that when you're observing a tell, you are employing a tactic, while your overall evaluation of another player is a more comprehensive overall "strategy." They can feed off each other, too - once you have made an analysis about a player, that will inevitably influence the way you evaluate what his tells mean, while the tells may also contribute to that evaluation as the game unfolds.

So what does such a process consist of?

As the all-time great player Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson wrote in his book Power Poker, "Stick to your first impression. Have the courage of your convictions." There's a simplicity, yet a profundity, in all that.

Out-thinking yourself often leads to trouble. It's certainly advantageous for you to be working with a degree of certainty. If you're "all over the layout," you're not likely to get into any kind of a pattern when sizing up your opponents or weighing your options on the wide variety of hands and situations that will be presented to you. If you can't act definitively, you are not only going to be very unsure of yourself, you're also going to have a problem in analyzing your play after each session.

At the same time, if you are rather inflexible, that can plant the seed for the road to ruin. With poker players, particularly those who are serious about it, there is always going to be the danger of ego getting in the way. One may be absolutely sure about a trait of his opponent, only to be purposely taken down a path that will not be determined until it is too late. Only through experience is this kind of thing developed.

The best advice is generally to avoid getting stuck on one scenario, but to instead leave yourself flexible.

That sounds easy but of course it isn't.

When it comes down to certain hands, you want to be careful as well. Sometimes you may "put someone on a hand" (assume he has a particular hand) just because you're hoping he has that hand. That may not be based on reality, but only because it might fit your plans in terms of raising or re-raising. If you're wrong, you're going to leave yourself vulnerable to being strung along, which will result in your being out money. If you leave yourself open to a number of different possibilities, with a common thread, you are in a better position to weigh one against another and won't leave  yourself wide open if you miscalculate.


As important as being able to read your opponent's abilities is being able to read your own strengths,weaknesses, and tendencies. Better yet, you  have to admit to them. That's not the easiest thing in the world. But if you know that you have a tendency to react to certain situations in a certain way, bank on your opponents picking up on it sooner or later. So being able to recognize that is a good starting place. Take a lesson from football -  while compiling a game plan, a football team studies the tendencies of its opponents, to determine what they might likely do on second down with short yardage, for example, and at the same time they must study their own tendencies so that they don't fall into that same pattern when the game starts.

If you talk to dealers who later became players, they'd say they learned a lot about reading players when they were dealing the game - information that became extremely useful to them. They grew to recognize all the biases, able to observe people in positions where they weren't consciously trying to hide them from particular opponents. And they also were able to study how the sharper players took notice of the biases of regulars in a particular card club, and took advantage of that weakness.

The lesson here is that you don't need to be a dealer, but it might not hurt to observe a game when not playing in it. After all, it has a similar effect. Being able to study and observe, over an extended period of time, not only which players demonstrated themselves to be winners and which players showed themselves to be losers, but the rationale for how they got that way, is an invaluable asset to have - if you have the advantage of that "bird's eye view."

If you're a player and not a dealer, you've got to develop your own bird's eye view, not just as it concerns other players, but yourself as well. 

It's one of the many weapons you need to take into battle.