Poker Book Review: 'How to Read Hands at No-Limit Hold'em' by Ed Miller

Poker News / Short-Stacked Shamus / 02 December 2011 / Leave a Comment

“Most of your opponents in small-stakes games don't use the process described in this book to try to read your hand," explains Miller. "They try to guess hands you could have, and often their perceptions are colored by their emotions.”

We all know that in no-limit hold'em it is important to think beyond our own hand and give some attention to figuring out what our opponents might be holding. Of course, that's easier said than done for a lot of us, especially those among us who automatically fear the worst whenever a flop c-bet fails to get a desired fold. If you fall into that group -- or if you are simply looking for solid, well-presented advice to help bolster your NLHE game -- Ed Miller's latest offering, How to Read Hands at No-Limit Hold'em, provides an excellent source of instruction.

In addition to numerous strategy columns he has contributed to Card Player magazine and frequent postings on his aptly-named website, Noted Poker Authority, Miller has now authored or co-authored a half-dozen strategy texts, all of which focus on limit hold'em, no-limit hold'em, or both.

Thanks both to Miller's consistently clear, accessible style and the wealth of insight one finds in his books, titles from Miller are highly regarded within the poker community, frequently recommended as must-reads for those looking to improve their hold'em games. Thus even in an era when poker strategy books have largely given way to instructional videos, forums, and coaching, the appearance of a new text from Miller has already been greeted with anticipation and interest.

As the title suggests, How to Read Hands at No-Limit Hold'em presents an extended, focused lesson that primarily concentrates on one crucial aspect of NLHE, namely, how to deduce from available evidence what hands are among those our opponents are likely to hold. The book is chiefly geared toward small-stakes live games -- i.e., with blinds of $1/$2 or $2/$5 -- although the advice it contains readily applies to the micro/low limit online games, too.

The book is arranged in three parts. The first part, titled "Core Hand Reading," begins by discussing player types typically encountered at the small-stakes NLHE tables, then addresses at length central concepts for reading hands on all streets (preflop, flop, turn, and river). Then comes another long part titled "Hand Reading Variations" in which special circumstances are addressed, including those times when opponents do more than just call our bets but start raising and reraising themselves. Finally comes a short section of hand analyses, "Hand Reading in Practice," which brings together the many ideas that come before.

Nits, Fish, and Regulars

While the idea of grouping our opponents into categories isn't new, Miller provides a somewhat different approach to this exercise when he characterizes the small-stakes NLHE game as primarily attracting three core types: the nits, the fish, and the regulars.

As Miller explains, all three of these types possess certain characteristics that can help us with our hand-reading. And -- importantly -- we rarely if ever encounter at our $1/$2 games masterful "Tom Dwan"-types who cannot be classified as belonging to one of these three groups. Those who play at a higher level generally play for higher stakes, Miller reasonably points out, thus making the task of reading hands at the small-stakes games somewhat easier to manage.

After additionally arming us with a few "principles" of these games (i.e., players at these games do what they do for a reason, players tend not to bluff correctly or enough, large bets tell us more than small ones), Miller constructs beginning hand ranges for each of the types based on preflop action. Then, as we proceed through the flop, turn, and river, Miller shows us how to narrow down those ranges according to board texture and betting.

Stop Guessing, Start Reading

Since most players at these limits (even the fish) tend toward "fit or fold" poker, their calls of our bets after the flop generally signal that they have something with which to proceed, described by Miller as either a "strong fit" (made hands, draws) or a "weak fit" (overcards, underpairs).

The method of analysis recommended by Miller for figuring out what kind of "fit" our opponent might have is mostly probability-driven, although as already suggested how we go about making such calculations should be opponent-dependent. For example, once we've determined an opponent is a "nit" or relatively tight player, we are able to construct a hand range for him after he calls our preflop raise. Then when he calls our flop bet, that allows us to narrow his range further, and so forth through the hand.

Then, from within that range Miller invites us to think about combinations of possible hands as indicated by unseen cards. Some of these calculations are quite involved, but Miller's explanations are clear and easy enough to follow. He also provides shortcuts for making such calculations on the fly, although his primary advice is to get used to doing such work between sessions in order to make it easier to make decisions at the tables.

Thus, say, when a nit calls our preflop raise from the blinds, check-calls the flop and turn, then bets out on the river, Miller shows us how we can make a fairly precise (if not exact) read of our opponent's hand by looking at his preflop calling range, how his calls on the flop and turn narrow that range, then figuring out on the river what combinations of hands are still available with which he might bet into us.

Such effort will immediately distinguish us from many of our opponents, says Miller. As he explains, "Most of your opponents in small-stakes games don't use the process described in this book to try to read your hand. They do try to read your hand. They're just not systematic about it. They try to guess hands you could have, and often their perceptions are colored by their emotions. They think of hands they're worried you could have. Or they think of hands they hope you have."

Thus it is Miller's goal to show us how to avoid such fuzzy thinking influenced more by fear and hope than by logic and analysis.

Thinking Beyond Our Own Hand

The second part, "Hand Reading Variations," covers a number of topics and situations, including what to do when opponents don't "cooperate" and starting raising us, how to handle multiway pots (common in $1/$2 games), how to recognize "polarized ranges," and other tips for further narrowing opponents' possible holdings.

Throughout the book, Miller punctuates sections with useful exercises that give readers opportunities to do the kinds of away-from-the-table work he's recommending. He also provides ideas for how to profile players relatively quickly based on their play plus an understanding of the relative percentage of loose and tight players one typically finds in small-stakes games.

For much of the first two parts, Miller sticks with discussing concepts, although he often illustrates ideas with hand examples. Interestingly, in many of these examples our hand is not even noted -- instead we're basing our reads primarily on the actions of opponents (calling, raising, reraising) and the community cards. The method highlights how reading others' hands has much more to do with factors other than the two cards we are holding than some of us might think (although we do account for those cards when removing them from our opponents' ranges).

We are told what our hole cards are in the sample hands from a $2/$5 game that Miller discusses in Part III, "Hand Reading in Practice." In each he takes us up to a decision point -- e.g., it has been checked to us on the river and we must decide whether to bet, and if so, how much -- then carries us through the process of profiling, analyzing action, then counting and discounting hand combinations in order to narrow down our opponent's range and base our decision on the resulting probabilities.

Developing the Hand-Reading Instinct

Toward the end of the book Miller describes a typical conversation he has with his students regarding a commonly-faced situation in no-limit hold'em. You raise before flop and are called, then after a Jc-7d-2s flop your c-bet gets called. The Kc then comes on the turn, at which point Miller asks his students "'What hands could your opponent have now?'"

"Nearly every time," says Miller, "the first hand my students will say is 'King-jack.'"

Is this you? Does your "hand-reading" often work this way, that is, almost instinctively to narrow down your opponent's "range" to a single hand that might well be labeled "Worst Case Scenario"?

As Miller shows his students, in this case K-J is in fact an unlikely holding -- something a simple understanding of probability helps clarify -- and in fact that overcard on the turn is often going to be a good one on which to barrel again.

It's hard, though, for a lot of us to get past emotions and think logically in these spots. Or, indeed, most spots. All of which makes Miller's How to Read Hands at No-Limit Hold'em a especially valuable resource for the player with some experience and knowledge at the game who wants help improving upon this crucial skill of hand-reading.

Miller's book is currently available as an e-book via his website, Noted Poker Authority.

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Can We Assume No-Limit Hold'em Always "Plays Bigger" Than Limit?

Poker Strategy / Short-Stacked Shamus / 01 September 2011 / Leave a Comment

Back during the World Series of Poker I recall a certain "WSOP Hand of the Day" between Matt Matros and Jonathan Lane that came up during Event #52, the $2,500 Mixed Hold'em (Limit/No-Limit) tournament eventually won by Matros. The pair were heads-up for the bracelet, and after Lane had won a sequence of LHE hands to take the lead, Matros retook the advantage and after winning this particular NLHE hand soon cruised to victory.

I've had the chance to help cover a few of these Mixed Hold'em events at the WSOP over the years for PokerNews, including a couple of memorable ones in which Gavin Smith won his first bracelet (in the $2,500 Mixed HE event in 2010) and Erick Lindgren his first (in the $5K version of the Mixed HE in 2008).

In these tournaments, players alternate between a half-hour of fixed-limit hold'em and a half-hour of no-limit holdem. When talking about that Matros-Lane hand I mentioned how often in these events -- especially during the latter stages -- LHE "plays bigger" than NLHE, thereby resulting in larger chip swings. That observation was somewhat anecdotal; that is to say, I was thinking of what frequently had happened in the tournaments I'd seen, and not of any sort of mathematical breakdown of why that might be the case.

Obviously with these WSOP mixed HE events the schedule of blind increases directly affects how "big" LHE and NLHE play, relatively speaking. But the issue got me thinking... how do LHE and NLHE compare when we're talking about regular cash games? In other words, what are the relative "swings" players experience when playing LHE as opposed to NLHE?

On the surface, it might appear a simple question to answer. Perhaps thinking about how we can only win a few bets per hand in LHE while we can double-up or lose our entire stack in a single NLHE hand, for many of us our instinctive response would be to say no-limit clearly "plays bigger." In fact, it is a commonly-held assumption that players who wish to avoid big swings are encouraged to stick with LHE rather than try NLHE, since in the fixed-limit game they stand to win or lose much less on average.

But is that actually the case? Like I say, watching these mixed hold'em tourneys has gotten me wondering -- when it comes to comparing entire sessions or longer-term segments of play, is it possible that LHE sometimes plays as "big" or even bigger than NLHE?

In The Math of Hold'em, authors Collin Moshman and Douglas Zare devote a series of sections to "Statistics and Variance" in which they explain concepts like "standard deviation" and their application to bankroll management. There the authors note how when it comes to online poker, in limit hold'em "your standard deviation is typically about 15 big bets per 100 hands for full ring, [and] about 17 big bets per 100 hands 6-max."

Adding the disclaimer that all of these figures are obviously going to be affected by how loose or aggressive you and/or your opponents are, Moshman and Zare go on to note that when playing NLHE online "your standard deviation is typically about 85 big blinds per 100 [hands] for full ring, and about 95 big blinds per 100 for short-handed." (The authors note also how the relative deepness of the stacks are going to affect things in NLHE, too, but to keep things simple we'll set that aside.)

So let's say I'm a "typical" player and I am trying to choose whether to sit down at an LHE or NLHE table. I have $100 with which to play, and I'm going to take a seat at either a $0.50/$1 NLHE table or $2/$4 LHE table. And while I expect to win, I also don't want to lose my money too quickly, so I'm trying to pick the game that poses the least risk to my hundy.

I'm thinking here of what players often buy in for at these particular limits when playing online. I know, for example, that in Internet Texas Hold'em, Matthew Hilger (interviewed here) says with regard to LHE that "I prefer to sit down with at least forty times the big bet to minimize the chance that I might have to add chips later." Thus I wouldn't really be following Hilger's advice by sitting down with my 25 big bets here. But just eyeballing the games I think many would probably think of $0.50/$1 NLHE and $2/$4 LHE as being in the same neighborhood, stakes-wise.

Looking back at Moshman and Zare's figures, then, let's do some math. If during 100 hands of LHE I experience "standard deviation," I'd expect to win or lose as much as $60 (full ring) or $68 (6-max.). Meanwhile, if during the first 100 hands of NLHE I remained within the expected range, I'd be looking at winning or losing as much as $85 (full ring) or $95 (6-max.).

One can win or lose more, of course. As I mentioned, the authors do note that the relative looseness/tightness of a game can affect the standard deviation -- by as much as 15% in either direction in LHE games and 30% in NLHE games, they say. That means that if I happen to draw a loose LHE game, it could in fact "play bigger" than would a tight NLHE game.

All of which is to say, that while it looks like NLHE typically is going to be a game in which one experiences somewhat larger swings than in LHE, the difference isn't necessarily as enormous as one might expect. In fact, it looks here as though the chances that I'll burn through my $100 -- or, perhaps, double it -- aren't hugely different whether I play $0.50/$1 NLHE or $2/$4 LHE.

That's, assuming, of course, I'm equally proficient in both games. And that my opponents are as well. And, well, a lot of other things, too.

Even so, I think we can still take away another lesson here -- in fact, one about avoiding another assumption, namely, the one that says by sticking with LHE we'll avoid the big swings of NLHE.

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The Limits of Being Human in a No-Limit World

Poker News / Short-Stacked Shamus / 11 February 2011 / Leave a comment

There's something about that select group of poker players who play for the highest stakes that tends to encourage the rest of us to think of them as somehow not of our species. I'm talking about those players we see routinely competing for five- and six-figure pots in heads-up matches online, or who we watch take down similarly gaudy-sized scores on the live tourney circuit. To us mere mortals, it's easy to think of such individuals as somehow fundamentally different from us, playing the same game we are, but in ways and for stakes we can only imagine.

Of course, no matter how we might look upon them -- even "mythologize" them as we sometimes will do -- they are, in fact, human, too. Ultimately their status as somehow something different has more to do with how others view them than what is actually the case. Like most things in poker, when it comes to creating these seeming "gods" of the game, perception is more important than actuality.

That said, it is reasonable to say that while the highest-stakes players are certainly human, they still likely view the game -- and a lot of other things -- very differently than do most of us. The ability to do so is part of what makes them great, and allows them to compete at the stakes they do. As Al Alvarez notes in his 1983 narrative The Biggest Game in Town when speaking of such players and what makes them different, "It is a question not just of a different level of skill but of a different ordering of reality."

There were a couple of stories in poker this week that highlighted both how we sometimes view such high rollers as somehow not human while reminding us that indeed they are very much so. Perhaps not coincidentally, neither story was strictly about poker, but more of the "human interest" variety insofar as both focused more on players' lives away from the tables. And both highlighted the fact that while these players might sometimes order their "reality" differently than most of us do, the problems and issues they can face are -- just like ours -- most certainly real.

One story involved the 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event champion Peter Eastgate. You'll recall how the 25-year-old from Denmark somewhat surprisingly announced his intention to step away from poker prior to last summer's Series, as well as his auctioning off his WSOP bracelet for charity back in November. In a post here called "Money Matters," I speculated that after having won poker's biggest prize Eastgate might've found himself in a position in which he felt there was nothing left to play for, the money (and perhaps other things) no longer mattering the way they must for poker to seem a worthwhile pursuit.

This week Eastgate announced he intended to return to poker, with plans to participate in the EPT Copenhagen tourney later this month as well as in the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship in March. In a statement over on the PokerStars blog, Eastgate explains both the reasoning behind his having taken a break from poker as well as why he wants to return.

The statement reveals Eastgate to be a thoughtful young man to whom many of us who haven't played for the highest stakes can nonetheless relate. "Sometimes in life a person can feel lost and wake up one morning not recognizing who he is," Eastgate begins, showing that despite the cool, emotionless exterior he consistently demonstrated during his 2008 WSOP ME run (remember his seeming non-response following the final hand?), he's certainly as feeling and vulnerable as those of us who haven't enjoyed multi-million dollar scores.

Eastgate goes on to talk about his two years of "living the life of a high profile poker pro" and how that experience had gradually caused him to have "lost track" of himself and who he was. He also notes how the money did, in fact, matter, explaining that "when there is no financial pressure it can sometimes be hard to get motivated to move forward as a person."

Having now had the chance to step away for a period and reconnect with loved ones and friends, Eastgate believes he has discovered a way to strike a balance in his life. "I feel I have figured out how I can combine playing poker with a healthy life outside of poker," explains the Danish pro.

It's that last statement -- regarding the struggle to live a "healthy life" as a high-stakes, "high profile poker pro" -- that connects Eastgate's story to the other one from this week that also got us thinking about how these players aren't as invincible as we might sometimes make them out to be. I'm referring to the story of that much-publicized prop bet between two other young poker pros, Ashton Griffin and Haseeb Qureshi, the so-called "Million Dollar Bet" about which there has been quite a bit of discussion over recent days.

Both Griffin and Qureshi have emerged over the last couple of years as successful high-stakes online players, with Griffin having added some significant live scores, too, including a victory at the 2010 NAPT Venetian High Roller Bounty Shootout last February.

As you've likely heard, the bet involved Griffin laying 3-to-1 that he could run 70 miles on a treadmill in a 24-hour period. Qureshi eventually bet $285,000 that his friend would not be able to perform the feat, with Griffin booking an additional $15,000 worth of action from others. All told, Griffin was risking $900,000 to win $300,000. And perhaps he was risking more than that, given the extreme physical challenge he was up against as well.

Ultimately Griffin won the bet, though not without a significant amount of drama along the way, much of which is compellingly chronicled in Qureshi's two blog posts this week "The Million Dollar Bet, Pt. 1" and "The Million Dollar Bet, Pt. 2."

Qureshi expresses a lot of regret in his posts for making the bet, having genuinely feared for the safety and even life of his friend over the course of the 24 hours of Griffin's run. I won't rehearse all of the particulars of Qureshi's account -- you can read it yourself -- other than to say it does show that while some of these individuals may make bets or take risks most of us cannot imagine undertaking, they are still quite susceptible to all of the same doubts, fears, uncertainties, and troubles faced by us all.

Near the end of his account, Qureshi wonders if there might be something "deeply unhealthy and imbalanced" about the world of high-stakes poker, a line that perhaps echoes Eastgate's suggestion that he needed to look outside of that world in order to become "healthy" and balanced. I wouldn't pretend to know one way or the other whether that might be the case, although it does appear from the outside that the "different ordering of reality" that goes on in that world would definitely be challenging for those trying to survive in it.

If they're human, that is.

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