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Reading hands is a critical poker skill. The better you can key in on the sort of hands your opponents have, the better decisions you will make, and the better your results will be. Most players use some sort of hand-reading process to inform their decisions.

There are three parts to the process of reading hands using the tool of hand ranges. These are to figure out what you are holding, what the other players are holding in regards to a range of cards and what hand is expected to have the highest value. There are 169 possible different combinations that any player can be holding at the beginning of the round.

At the start of a hand, all of the people at the table have the same hand ranges. This is because there is no information available to differentiate between them. In using ranges to read what cards an opposing player may be holding, there are usually more than one option or range that you have to be aware of. In reading hands using ranges, you need to scrutinise everything that takes place in the game. The other players’ tells and knowledge of previous betting patterns are used to help narrow down the potential cards that they could be holding.

Once you have an idea of the range of cards that are held be the others on the table the better you will be to make decisions about your own hand.

It is vital to keep updating your picture of what others are holding on the table after each player makes a move. This is a process of educated elimination where you discard unlikely possibilities, which eventually leaves you with a more accurate picture as each new piece of information is incorporated into your already constructed probability grid.

Reading poker ranges is simply a series of mathematical probabilities informed by body language and betting patterns. As you play more and more this process becomes a more automatic process, as you learn to eliminate unlikely hands and ranges of hands. This further improves your own game as you make better decisions concerning the playing of your own cards.

Considering hand ranges in the first instance demonstrates the fact that we can never have a perfect knowledge of anyone else’s hand from the small pieces of information that we glean from a poker hand. When a player raises preflop he is more likely to be holding a pocket pair, an ace with another card of seven or above, two cards higher than ten or maybe a suited connector. If he is an aggressive player, it is likely that he would bet with any of the preceding possible hands. We are able to conclude what is more likely by counting the number of hands that fall into each strength category, as it is more likely that he is holding a hand of strength. Comparing other players’ hand ranges to what we can already see on the board enable us to calculate the number of strong, medium, and weak hands along with their types is what hand reading is all about. With the information reading hand ranges gives us we will be better informed about which of our hand should be played or folded, making us a much better player with a greater chance to win more often.

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