I have been readying Ed millers. Read Hands at no limit hold em. Book have any of you guys read this book and, if you have what do you think about the hand combinations section do you guys know any shortcuts on this

The book is excellent.

There are no shortcuts.

Well, no shortcuts, but you can get better with practice.

Flop J T 2

Villain plays any two broadway, any pocket pair.

How many combos of sets can he have?

How many combos of 2-pair?

How many combos of over-pair hands?

How many combos of top pair hands?


With practice, you should be able to answer each of these questions almost instantly. But only with practice.

Questions above are ONLY the easy part.

Value of the exercise is what you do with the information.

9
9
18
36

Beep.

Hello?

I would certainly like to see tis go more in depth. Even if we are at the point of being able to answer these questions what are we to do with the info we gather?

Is it something along the line of there are X combos of this and Y combos of that. He just calls. This then eliminates some part of his range that he would raise with depending on whether he is aggressive, passive, or.....?

Does this book go into all of this kind of thinking?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_lVSrPB6w

Yes. The book teaches you how to read hands, AND it tells you what to do with the information you have gained.

Consider:

You are first to act. The turn falls. You put Villain on a range (by counting hand combos) and you evaluate how the turn helps or hurts Villain's range.

You think of your showdown equity if the hand gets checked down. How likely is Villain to be willing to check down with the various hands in his range?

You think of whether Villain will call you with worse hands. Will he raise with better?

You think of whether Villain will fold better hands. Does he fold enough of his current range in order to make a bluff profitable?



This is just one situation. Ed Miller goes over many situations in the book. My experience in reading the book was that counting the combos was tough to learn (my example from the previous post was quite simplified), and the exercises got tougher from there. However, I plodded through the whole book, and I don't regret it.

The book teaches both "how to read hands" and "what to do with the reads you've gained."