Re: Reading hands
[ QUOTE ]
So far it sounds like everyone is saying pretty much the same thing: that they would like to have their opponents to put them on specific cards, to have their opponents' guesses be wrong, but also to have their opponent be relatively sure they are right. . . . in my experience these situations are not very common. They are even rarer when playing against good thinking opponents.
[/ QUOTE ]
I'll disagree with the last sentence. Remember the old saying: "You can't bluff a bad player"? The converse is true, too. If you're playing against a good thinking opponent, you can set up betting patterns that ONLY MAKE SENSE if you have a particular hand. The shrewder your opponent, the more likely he is to spot those betting patterns, analyze them "correctly" and credit you with that exact hand. Great bluffs succeed because the opponent is willing to trust his/her analysis enough to fold.
Simple case -- I've been playing tight all night at a live game and open big UTG. Everyone folds to me. I ask everyone what they thought I had. "Pocket jacks" is the consensus. Actually I had 33. But I figured it was a discerning enough table that they would credit me with a better hand.
Against strong players, I need a couple such pots a night to have much chance of making money with middling cards. Being habitually put on a wide range is going to make it impossible for me to pick off such pots.
[ QUOTE ]
If you are a good player, a good opponent should put you on a range of hands, adjusting this range with each new piece of information and assigning probabilities to each possible hand in this range, acting accordingly.
If most of your hands are going to occur in situations like this would it not be better for this range of hands to be as wide as possible.
[/ QUOTE ]
I'm not sure I get your point. If the question is: would I rather play against an opponent who's a skilled hand-reader vs. one who doesn't even try, sure -- I'll take Donnie Dimbulb every time. But that seems horribly obvious.
Is there a subtler point here that I'm missing?
|