Read your opponent’s cards

If you watch as much poker on television as I do, you probably saw poker stars make predictions about each-other’s pocket cards. It may have struck you how accurate their descriptions can sometimes be.
The fact is however, that really good poker players can make such accurate predictions about their opponents’ pocket cards, and the bad news for you is, they can do it online too. The relative anonymity of the internet is not going to save you from these sharks.
Sooner or later, you too will have to learn some of the tricks these guys use to guess what you’re hiding in the hole. The reason why you’re not safe from them even when playing online, is that they’re using a tell you just can help broadcasting: betting patterns. The situation is much more complicated than just being on the lookout for the way a guy bets, it involves piecing together a puzzle from several other tells: the type of player you’re faced with, other reads like the speed of betting, checking or raising, board texture, and of course, the betting patterns themselves.
Whenever you couple betting patterns with boards texture, and you know by and large, what kind of player you’re faced with, chances are, you too will make some pretty accurate predictions.
In order to get a read on what type of player you’re facing, you have to let the first 10-12 hands go down easy and watch out for whatever your opponents are doing. Try to categorize them into tight-aggressive, tight-passive, Loose-aggressive and Loose-passive types. That’ll give you a good initial lead and when it comes to analyzing the betting patterns.
Let us see a few sample betting patterns though, that give away pretty easy tells regarding the strength of hand a player holds:
- Call, Check, raise. This betting pattern is bad news. It usually means your opponent has something of a monster, and he just slow-played it. The problem is, you won’t be able to tell, until he comes out betting and raising. At that stage though, you’re better off folding, even if you’ve already pot committed yourself, because h will most probably take down the pot. Few players are skilled and disciplined enough to pull off such an elaborate bluff, so you’d better believe him. There’s still a possibility that he’s on a semi bluff.
- Raise, bet, check, or Raise, check, check. These are signs of weakness. This pattern usually means that your man got hit with something good on the deal, but was completely missed by the flop. In the former case, you can put your guy on an A,K or K,Q. Most players will raise with these hands on the flop. If they have something like a low pair, and the flop comes a bunch of high cards, he may loose all appetite to show any strength when he knows he’ll most probably fold it anyway.
- Check raises are bad news too. They are almost 100% signs of strength, few players would ever try a bluff on a check raise. The worst thing about check-raises is that you don’t know you just walked into a trap until you find yourself in its midst.
If you have the nuts though, you shouldn’t be concerned with any of these patterns. Of course, having an idea about what your opponent has, can be beneficial in this situation too. If you know he has something big, almost as big as your hand, you should go all in to take him for everything he has.
All articles written by (c) James West.