Putting A Player On A Hand
In poker, to put someone on a hand means you predict specifically what hand they are playing and act accordingly to your assumption. This is done by watching various factors like: how they bet, when they bet, when they stopped betting, their hesitations and the sort of hands they have been playing before. All this represents a certain style or range that they are playing which you can then use accordingly to reason what type of hand the player might be on.
An example of this might be if a possible flush comes on the board, and they bet, and then a pair comes, making a possible full house and they stop betting, they probably have a flush and need to see what their opponents are going to do.
Putting a player on a hand is a valuable skill, but due to the variances and inaccuracies of prediction, you can also be wrong at times and it can occasionally make you look like an idiot. If practiced diligently and over many hands, however, the profits that accrue from the times that you are actually right will far outweigh the times that you are wrong and sharpen your hand reading skills further.
The first step to improving hand reading skills to is try to make a mental list of the possible hands that a player might be calling or raising with. Then, using the board and the information that their body language presents, try to eliminate the non-possible hands from your list and look to bring it down to three to four hands. This allows you to make a good decision on how you would actually like to proceed with the hand. Sometimes it is a fifty-fifty decision, like whether your pocket jacks are the best hand or not, but this is where sometimes your reading ability will have to only come so far and you have to bite the bullet with a gut instinct decision.
