The The Lost Art of Reading: Opponents, Cards, and Books.

In personal blogger space, I have finally moved into my new apartment and slowly but surely making it feel more like home and a little less chaotic. I will be returning to poker within the next week I would imagine, schoolwork allowing.

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The Lost Art of Reading. What do I mean? Well the poker amateur community has been so bombarded by books, television, and everything else poker, that we have strayed away from the basic strategies of poker.

An example. You can pick up any poker book, and probably watch an episode of Full Tilt's Learn From The Pros, and they will all have general strategies for any given hand. "You have this hand, you fold it in this position, and you play it like this after the flop...", etc. What happened to the old saying, "Play the players, not the cards."

So should you stop reading books on poker? Of course not, you can never suck up enough information, whether you consider it good or not. If it's good information, you follow it and expand on it. If it's bad information, you learn about it and adapt to it if you see it at the poker table.

Where people get caught up in is that they consider every poker book a bible of sorts and that there is no bad information on poker. I'm not going to convince you that any information I give here is good or not, it's up to you to decide. A good poker player, however, can discern between good and bad advice and can learn from both.

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The Art of Reading boards and opponents. Now I am not an expert, for that you should go talk to Daniel Negraneu or any other successful professional poker player. However, I can give you pointers and tips to becoming a successful reader.

Reading the board. Too often someone will look at a board and see if it hit them at all, and may forget that they have to analyze their opponent and see if it hit them as well. This is where you must start going through a list of hands that you have beat on this board and a list of hands that you are beat on this board. This mental list is important, and must be analyzed constantly.

Reading the opponent. You must first decide whether your opponent is loose, tight, passive or aggressive or you have insufficient information to apply a label to your opponent.

For example, you are playing some No-Limit Hold 'Em with someone at the table that you know is tight and passive. They suddenly come out of early position with a rare raise, now you not only know that he is a tight player but that he rarely raises any hand preflop. You must now place him on a hand like AA, KK, QQ or AK, as you would suspect him not to raise with anything else.

Another example, you are playing against a loose aggressive player, like a Gus Hansen. If he is playing aggressively, chances are you will have no clue as to what hand he may have in the hole because he does this with a wide range of hands.

Getting inside your opponents head. Not literally of course, no Hannibals running this site. This is the ultimate read, where you try and get inside his thought processes. You see the hand through his eyes, figure out what hand it would take for him to have such a betting process, for him to take his time with certain decisions and not with others, etc.

If you get into this mindset, and your reads are spot on, you are in "the zone." This happens from time to time, and probably more often for the pros. This is as good as it gets when it comes to reading your opponents.

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Bringing it all together.

Read books, but more importantly read your opponents. You can read all the strategy in the world, but if you can play as though you know exactly the kind of hand your opponent is holding, you will play brilliant poker no matter what.

So next time you sit down at a poker table, do this mental checklist in your mind for every hand. Explain every action your opponents are making based on a list of possible hands they can be holding and what strategy they are bringing to the table.

If you get too shortsighted and begin to play like a robot programmed by the 10 poker books sitting in your bookshelf, then you will become no more than a mechanized fish for me to figure out and take all your money.