Speed Reading the Board

Learning to read card pips, not numbers, frees up brain cells

By Bill Haywood       
© 2004 VelocityBooks.com      

One of the rarely discussed problems in live poker is being able see the community cards. It is surprising how straining it can be to make out the cards when sitting at the far end of the table.   With some effort, you can make out the difference between a jack from a king. But the point is, it takes extra effort, which distracts from understanding the board, and you may miss how the cards interact.  Distance reading can be hardest in home games where the players themselves deal. With a professional dealer, the cards stay in the middle, but at home, the board can be at the full length of the table. It is even more an issue in stud, where you have to read not a single community board, but the entire table.  The internet has spoiled the art of reading cards because on screen, everything is up front and obvious. It is easy to tell if the board can make a flush or straight. This can be a problem when an internet person plays poker in a physical casino or home game, or if your eyesight is aging. 
      The problem is not just perceiving the actual cards – most people who can get a drivers license can see to the end of the table. The difficulty is in reading and understanding the board. If you've ever helped children learn to read, you've seen them get so wrapped up in sounding out individual letters that they completely miss the meaning and context. This is the problem with reading physical cards.  You can see that a J♥ fell on the turn, but miss the fact that it may have made someone's straight. You are so busy inspecting the card, you fail to notice how it coordinates with the rest of the board.
      Efficient reading of the board is simply a skill like any other that requires practice. The point of this article is to teach some speed reading tricks, so you can read the board as a sentence, not sounding out each individual card. It reduces your mental strain, and frees up neurons to think strategically. You will learn to read cards by their patterns and design, rather than the numerals or letters. It is not rocket science, and you already do it to an extent. But simply by being conscious of the need to speed read, and with a wee bit of practice, your thinking game will become a bit more effortless.
      Ace through six are easy to read from the pips alone, though it is worth noting how the 5,6,7 differ. Notice that all pips are arranged in one of three columns.   Card values are changed by adding and removing pips from the established columns.

The seven is the same as the six, but with one pip added to the middle. Seven is the first card without instantaneous recognition, so here is the trick for recognizing it. Seven is the only card in the deck that is not identical top and bottom. Look:

Flip it upside down, and it looks different.  Same card, but it has a north and south.  The unpaired pip is due to seven being an odd number.  The five and nine are also not even numbers, but their odd pip is placed symmetrically:

So the easy rule for seven is to look for the off-center middle pip. Get in the habit of noticing this, and a seven leaps off the table.  Find the seven:

With the eight, nine, and ten, the pips are getting crowded. Except for the jack-king, they are the slowest to be recognized. The nine is the more distinctive, notice how it has the single pip dead center. 

The eight and ten are the hardest to distinguish:

Here are two patterns to note.  The first is that both eight & ten make a circle in the center, but the ten is notably bigger and elongated.  Below are just the center portions for 8,T of each suit.

With the eights, all pips are equidistant, while the tens elongagte.  Just look to see if the center is a circle or oval. 

There is another way to tell tens from eights which seems simpler, but actually adds a step.  The trait to watch for is the number of pips in the long columns: four vs. three.

That works, but requires an additional thought, because the long columns on nine and ten are identical...

so once you determine a card is not an eight, you then have to tell whether it is nine or ten.  This is straightforward, just look at the center column pips:

I'm in the habit of just looking for a circle or oval.

Court cards

Gaze a moment at the face cards, and note how much variation there is even within ranks -- several versions each of the jack, king, queen.  Especially compare the kings and jacks, for they are the hardest to distinguish.  (A friend reports going all-in with pocket kings that turned out to be jack-king, and I went all-in with a jack-king, part of a nut straight that turned out to be pocket kings.  Oof.)

Despite the variations, there are consistencies in the head gear.  The queens have a curved hood which makes them easy to spot.

Below are some heads that have rolled.  The clearest difference is that Jack crowns are red and the kings' are yellow.  Jacks are also clean shaven and have yellow hair.  Kings have gray hair and beards. 

You probably already have an intuitive sense of the court cards, even at a distance.  But the crown trick allows a snap decision so your attention can shift to more important things.  There are also differences in the things they hold, though that seems unnecessarily complicated to me.   More useful is that jacks hold objects on the left, kings (who have divine right!) on the right.

Kings hold things on viewer's right	Jacks hold things on viewer's left

Practice

The first exercise is very simple, just scatter cards around the living room and identify them.  You just have to be far enough away not to be able to read the numerals or letters.

The next step is the crucial one.  You want to do more than just identify cards at a distance like a bird watcher.  You want to read and comprehend the board as well as if it were your place mat.  This time, distribute 3-5 card community boards around the living room.  You want both different angles and distances, because that is what you'll get in a game.  Now deal yourself two-card hands where you sit and for each of the various boards, answer the following questions:

• What draws are possible?
• What's the nuts?
• Are there high cards on the board that opponents likely paired?
• Do you have any pairs?
• Do you have a draw?
• What hands could beat yours?

Draw more hole cards and repeat.  There is also an online drill here at Holdem Tight.

This is not the sort of practice that must be done constantly.  Just do it enough for familiarity, then work it into your regular play. 

There.  Now you can keep playing poker even as you enter the soft-focus decades of your life.

If you could use a collection of numberless cards, help yourself.

♣♣♣