In my last article, I claimed that the two factors most cited in discussions of moving up, winrate and bankroll, don’t tell the whole story. If you’re thinking about moving up to a higher stakes game, you should also consider some other factors.

The consideration is your overall comfort level at your current stakes. You should be comfortable with the money, and you should also be comfortable with your opponents. One of the biggest keys to being comfortable against your opponents is having sharp hand reading skills. In fact, you should definitely be able to out-hand read your opponents before you consider moving up. This article is about trying to measure your hand reading skills to see if they’re up to snuff.

The Ultimate Hand Reading Test — The River

Hand reading is important in every form of poker. This article will focus on no-limit hold’em because it’s currently the most popular form of poker, but the ideas here apply more universally.

The river is the betting round where hand reading skills translate most directly to winning cash. If you can’t hand read for beans, you can still survive at no-limit if you focus on avoiding the river. You can play short-stacked and rely on a tight opening range and some preflop stealing to grind out a profit. Or you can nit it up, refusing to the get money in without a great hand.

But if you want to win big at no-limit, you need to read hands, and if you read hands, the river is your best friend. You have more information about your opponents’ hand ranges on the river than on any round before. Good hand readers can use that information to find great value bets and good bluffing opportunities that lesser players miss.

You can tell a lot about whether you are ready to move up or not by how you play the river compared to your opponents. You should be generating a big edge for yourself on that betting round.

Thin Value Betting

Are you consistently betting thinner than your opponents? If you play micro stakes or small stakes no-limit, you should be. When you’re ready to move up, you should be able to identify numerous situations on the river where your opponents just check their hands down and you would have bet (correctly) for value.

Here’s a common scenario. I see a hand like this one played dozens of times during each session. Someone open raises and a player in the blinds calls. The flop comes J-8-5. The blind checks, the raiser bets three-quarters pot, and the blind calls. The turn is a 2. The blind checks, and the raiser checks. The river is a K. The blind checks, and the raiser checks. The blind shows A-8, and the raiser wins with Q-J.

The player with Q-J didn’t read his opponent’s hand very well, and as a result he missed at least one reasonable-sized bet. When a player calls from the blinds, check-calls the flop, checks the turn, and checks the river, a medium or small pair is always a good part of his range. The river king is unlikely to have hit the flop check-calling range much, so Q-J figures to be a good hand in this situation. Furthermore, many players will feel compelled to call the river bet due to the fear that all the checking may have induced a bluff.

Do your opponents give you free showdowns like this one often? If you play $2-$4 no-limit or lower online, I can answer that question for you. They do. Do you give free showdowns like that one if you hold Q-J? If you do, then consider refining your hand reading skills a little bit before moving up. The higher you go, the fewer free showdowns you’ll receive. If you are sitting at the higher limit giving free showdowns but not receiving them, your results will suffer.

If you’re thinking about moving up, review your past play and pay special attention to your river play. Are you making good value betting decisions? Are you missing value consistently? Are you consistently making better decisions than your opponents are against you? Obviously your play doesn’t have to be perfect before you can move up, but it should at least be significantly better than your average opponent’s play.

River Bet Sizing

This one is exclusively a no-limit skill, but it’s another important hand-reading-based one. My bet sizing varies far more on the river than on any other street. I’ll make four-times pot shoves on the river, and I’ll make one-quarter pot miniature bets. My bet sizing choices are informed largely by my estimate of my opponent’s hand range. If I think my opponent has a strong range, but I have an even better hand, I’ll make a huge overbet hoping for a big payoff. If I think my opponent is weak but possibly willing to call something small, I’ll make the small bet. (Obviously, the better my opponent is, the more I have to engage in leveling games with my bet sizing. I can’t allow strong opponents to figure out what I’m thinking just by looking at my bet size.)

I think that smart bet sizing decisions on the river can contribute well to your winrate, and good bet sizing also goes hand-in-hand with good hand reading skills. How do you size your river bets? Does it work out for you? Again, go through hands you’ve played and review your bet sizing decisions. Are you making them smartly, or just betting randomly? How about your opponents? Can you decode your opponent’s river bet sizes and use that information to make better decisions? If you consistently size bets better than your opponents do, that’s a clue that you might be ready to move up.