random thoughts on gaining reads

[XTR1000]

This is bothering me and since Im usually having a hard time articulating and organizing my thought in an argument Id like to open a discussion here. Oftentimes do people use phrases like "my read on him is..." or "trust your reads..." and sometimes I get the feel, that the concept is largely misunderstood by beginners.

Technically gaining a "read" on someone refers to (a) recognizing a pattern of certain actions and (b) assigning specific ranges to those patterns. Once this is accomplished one could capitalize on those "reads" and act accordingly, in detail you want to exploit your opponent by using the extra bit of information you have against him and make more correct decisions according to the fundamental theorem of poker.

You have no idea how hard it is to actually recognize a pattern. First, poker is a game of high variance. People can 3bet you a fuckton during a session simply because they´re running hot and others can c/f a million flops being just card dead. Whatever you think is a decent sample, it usually is not. Secondly does the human mind have a tendency to recognize patterns when there simply are non. There are probability guessing experiments*, where humans get beaten by rats, b/c the human mind rather guesses a (in these experiments non existant) pattern than the probability.

Recognizing any pattern alone is worthless as long as you can´t assign a range to it. We may draw conclusions based on frequencies, but yet we should keep in mind, that those conclusions are based on information with <100% certainty.

So recognizing a flop pattern or maybe even a river action pattern can be quiet hard (imagine a 20% VPIP player with 30% WTSD. .2*.3 = 6% of his hands going to showdown, ie 60 out of 1k hands provide certain information about his ranges.)

Furthermore poker is rather a statistic & probability class than a soulreading/guessing game. Its not Rounders, it´s 11th grade homework. It shouldnt be exciting, it should be chilled and calculated. I can fully understand, how good it feels to make that huge call with A high for 120BB and then praise our reading abilities. But be honest with yourself, how many of those went wrong and got immediately erased and will never be presented to our friends? How often can we actually back our gut feeling by any data that makes sense?

Discuss



*The colours red and green are presented to the participants in randomized order, but with a certain probability. After a while the participants get the chance to guess the next card.

[Parasurama]

I like this post, humans are notoriously bad at both calculating and understanding probabilities. By that I mean people's intuition about the actual probability of an event is extremely unreliable and if people hear for example that something will occur 5% of the time, they can't understand how often 5% actually is and usually think the event is much more common than it is in reality.

well 5% is what humans think "never happens"

like try to write a 5% confidence interval for 20 different things, most people get 12-16 right (60-80% confidence intervals in practice)

also, when people get 3b or 4b they think the guy is fucking with them when he's just running hot and people overadjust

[Ztech]

XTR1000

First thank you for starting this thread, I think this is a great topic of disussion. I know that I find myself struggling with these very concepts.

There are probability guessing experiments*, where humans get beaten by rats, b/c the human mind rather guesses a (in these experiments non existant) pattern than the probability.

Recognizing any pattern alone is worthless as long as you can´t assign a range to it. We may draw conclusions based on frequencies, but yet we should keep in mind, that those conclusions are based on information with <100% certainty.

I think this is spot on. The question is how do we put more emphasis on using the probability in a given situation, versus using the percieved pattern? I know that I fall into this trap.

Furthermore poker is rather a statistic & probability class than a soulreading/guessing game. Its not Rounders, it´s 11th grade homework. It shouldnt be exciting, it should be chilled and calculated.

Great statement. I know that I struggle with this area. I find it very difficult to not become emotionally invested in a big hand. I think this is an area that a person can condition themself to overcome. For those of us who are part timers, I think that we struggle with this area more than not.

[Micro2Macro]

Run good now, the long run will never come.

Nice post btw.

[bjsaust]

You can only go with the information you have though. If someone cbets 5/5 times and he cbets a 6th time, you just gotta go with 'he cbets basically all his range'. The higher percentage of the time someone does something, the more accurate the read is (or I guess conversely if he very rarely does something the read is also good).

Sure you pretty much never have 100% information, but failing to act on what information you have is a bigger mistake than making an incorrect read based on small samples (imo anyway).