Hallabet

If you’re first to show, table your hand unless you’re certain you can’t win.

Don’t believe what anyone tells you, unless it’s someone you’ve known for years and you can be certain they’d never pull such trick on you.

If they pull it off in one big pot, it’s already given them a huge advantage.

It’s up to you to take matters into your own hands here; don’t count on anyone else to protect you.

For example, a player may bet, and while you’re pondering what to do, you hear an angle shooter announce a call or a raise.

This sneaky trick is designed to confuse you into making a wrong decision.

Of all angle shoots out there, this is the least elaborate and least effective one.

Otherwise, they’ve just given you an extra piece of information you can work with.

For example, in most poker rooms verbal actions are binding, even if they act out of turn and the action before them doesn’t change.

So if one player bets and you hear someone declaring a raise behind you while you’re sitting there with a strong hand, you can just make a call.

Now, the player who acted out of turn will be forced to raise, and when the action gets back to you, you can spring your trap.

What I will say is that you shouldn’t feel bad about the poor guy acting out of turn when you’re sitting there with a monster.

Often, they’re doing it deliberately, not by accident, so let them have a taste of their own medicine.

Being a nice guy at the table is completely fine, but don’t let others take advantage of you.

There will always be some degree of angle shooting involved in poker.

With a game that revolves around outsmarting your opponents, this is pretty much inevitable.

Some behaviors are acceptable and tolerated, while others, like the ones described in this article, should be avoided at all costs.

If you spend a fair bit of time playing poker, especially in the live setting, you’re bound to run into all sorts of situations.

Hopefully, with this guide, you’ll be better prepared to handle them and avoid being taken advantage of at the tables.

Poker tells can give you a lot of valuable insights, but they shouldn’t be the only thing you consider when making decisions.

If you want to be good at reading your opponents when playing poker, you need to make use of all the information available.

Everything from bet sizing, behavior, and even the time they take to make a decision, can be important in figuring out your opponent’s holdings.

Let’s take a look at the most effective ways to read your opponents in poker.

No matter if you’re playing live or online poker, the most important part of reading your opponents is putting them on a range.

The ‘range’ is the various possible hands they could hold, so putting them on a range means trying to figure out what those hands could be.

As the hand plays out and your opponent makes more decisions and takes more actions, you can use this information to narrow down their range.

But instead of thinking about ranges, many players try to guess the exact hand of their opponents on the river. This approach doesn’t work.

Good players don’t make blind guesses; they use a methodical approach.

Even though it requires a lot of practice, you can learn to put your opponent on a range by following these four simple steps.

If you want to put your opponent on an accurate range of cards by the river, you should start your work preflop.

The first thing you need to consider is your opponent’s position.

They will be playing completely different hands from under the gun (UTG) and button (BTN), so it’s vital to assign them a realistic range.

A player who is raising from the first position will not have 63s in their range, so is very unlikely to have strong holdings on the flop with 633.

However, a player on the BTN can easily have such hands, and way more other 3x holdings, so you need to play differently against these ranges.

Knowing the position is not enough. You also have to identify your opponent’s type.