Beginner mistakes Part 1: Seeing monsters under the bed

A lot of new poker players who have read a book or two seem to want to prove their ability by “reading hands” -something they learned about in the book they purchased for $10-$20-but all too often they make the mistake of choosing too narrow a range of hands their opponent might be holding.

Sometimes they do this for what I call the “Cross-Fingers” reason; which is when you pick the one hand your opponent might hold that you can beat, and ignore the 10 other possibilities. However, the main culprit when it comes to putting your opponents on a very narrow hand-range is what is referred to as “Seeing Monsters under the Bed”.

Far too often a new player will assume his opponent has a very tight hand-range -usually singling out hand in particular-and ignore all evidence to the contrary. You’ll see this when a player gets 4-bet all-in holding KK and puts their opponent on AA -which could be the case for some players-even though they have seen this player 3-bet shove QQ, and 3-bet hands as weak as AQ in the past.

So when it comes to putting your opponent on a range of hands you want to make sure you are using specific evidence, and not simply assuming there are monsters lurking around every corner, just waiting to get you.

Hand-reading is an art; putting a player on a Hand-range is a science. You can typically get a really good bead on an opponent’s hand range based on their previous play, whether its thinking about the top and bottom of the hands you have seen them play in similar scenarios, or using software like Poker Tracker to determine their VPIP and PFR percentages, and then use that information to formulate a likely hand range for the player.

While it’s important to narrow down your opponent’s hand range as much as possible just make sure you are not narrowing it down so far that it doesn’t resemble their actual hand-range -and whatever you do, don’t assume because you were proven right one-time (maybe you call with your KK and are shown AA) that this will be the case every time! Until you have solid evidence that says this player will only get it all-in pre-flop with AA there is no reason to fear the Monsters lurking under your bed.

In Part 2 of this series I will examine how overvaluing your implied odds causes new players fits at the poker tables.