While live poker players rely heavily on physical tells, online poker players do not have the luxury of seeing the posture or mannerisms of their opposition. While identifying physical tells is an important part of live poker, there are other reads or tells you can get on an opponent playing online.
Poker players communicate through actions at the table – whether it be a bet, a check, hesitation or acting quickly. Using deductive reasoning skills is the key to interpreting their actions.
Observe
Whether you prefer playing at online poker sites or live at local casino poker rooms, you need to have an idea of your opposition’s hand range, and how they might play these hands. Whether we’re involved in a hand or not, we are always paying attention, watching the players at our tables, trying to determine whether they are loose or tight, passive or aggressive. We can then utilize the information we have noted for a later time and place when we ‘get involved’.
Identify and Categorize
We also want to figure out where the ‘good poker players’ are. A good player is a chameleon. They blend in with their surroundings and are able to adapt their image as necessary. Additionally, we want to figure out who the bad players are. Identifying the players who cannot change gears as effectively as the good players are the ones who will be easier to read. All the while, we want to make note of any information we can obtain on players, attempting to both categorize our opposition, as well as try to come up with an appropriate hand range they might play.
Hand Ranges and Betting Patterns
Once we have an idea of a player’s logical hand range, we should be able to further narrow down their likely holdings after the flop. Again, we are going to use deductive reasoning to try to narrow down what our opponents are likely playing, based on both our previous observations, and the way the hand is playing out. The more vague our information is, the less confidence we can have in our conclusions. As a result, we cannot always make the best decisions.
Try to seek out patterns in their post-flop play. If an opponent is betting every time it is checked around to them, let him play into you. The more often someone is betting, the less likely it is they have a top quality hand, so it may be easier to call with a weaker hand, such as top pair or even a lower pair.
There are a number of questions you can ask yourself when trying to figure out what your opponent holds. Does he normally bet big with a big hand or does he tend to slow play? What purpose could he have in betting this amount? Does he understand the relative strength of the cards he is holding? Is he putting me on a hand or is he just playing his own cards? Is he likely to shut down if I call his bet on the flop?
One thing to keep in mind here is that none of this is much different from how you read players in a live card room. Online poker players typically give us information through their actions just as live players do. The luxury of seeing their faces is not there in online poker, but the betting patterns surely are.
