It’s fully plain to you that one player has the nuts, as an example. And you watch fascinated, as another player gambles into the nut hand with NO outs.
To compound the blunder, the player who is drawing dead now calls a raise on the brook to lose even additional cash. Before the winner is turned over, you mentally call the winning hand and aren’t at all stunned when the 2 cards you were expecting to see are exposed.
Why are hands so simple to read when you are NOT involved? Good query.
Why are they so troublesome to read when you have YOUR cash in the pot?; is another good question. The player who makes the least misjudgments, misreads and downright DUMB plays is most certain to go back home with the money. I am going to give you an exercise that’s quite complicated for a change. Once in a while you should be given an opportunity to go to another level of play. If you’re like most players (myself included), you will not be ready to complete this exercise for long. At best you can only be ready to manage a minute or two of the exercise before failing. One night the week after next, before you get out of the auto in your card room car park and go in to play, I would like you to stop for 1 or 2 minutes and concentrate. I would like you to visualize yourself as you sit behind the wheel. As you see yourself, pretend that you’re a director in a film where you’re the star.
Now you aren’t the player, you are the director watching an actor playing you. The person that’s usually you, now is an actor playing you, ok? For so long as you can maintain the exercise, watch yourself play poker from a camera angle just over your right shoulder. In the picture frame, the camera can see all of the players at the table and can zoom in on your hand when it is dealt to you.
Rather than you putting your money in the pot, you are watching an actor putting his chips in the pot. Now the camera follows everybody in turn round the table. From this detached standpoint, all of a sudden everybody’s motivations for acting are made public. To your awe, you’ll end up announcing about the actor playing you. The guy in the 3 seat glaringly has the best hand. Now as the director, you tell the actor that’s playing you to throw the hand away. Naturally, the actor does what he’s told. The exercise is complete when the player in the three seat turns over precisely the hand is detached, uninvolved you put him on. You have now done what you could not do before. You have played a hand as if you were not emotionally and financially concerned. Do not expect to be in a position to maintain this exercise for long. But if you can do it even for some hands a night, the difference in your play can be serious. Poker will change into a game of mistakes for the other players, not you.
Tags: Poker Hands, Read Hands