This is the way I look at it.

Your opponent is dealt two cards. His range of hands is any two cards.

Your opponent does X pre flop from Y position. This narrows his hand range to C, D, E, F, and G.

The flop comes #%$. Your opponent does this when you do this. Of hands C, D, E, F, and G, he would only do this with C, E, F, and G. He wouldn't play this flop this way with D. We have narrowed his hand range further.

The turn is a @. Your opponent does this when you do that. Of hands C, E, F, and G, he would only do that with C, E, and G. He can't have F. We have narrowed his hand range further.

Etc.

There's a little math (You have QQ, he would do this with AA, KK, and AK for instance.) You AREN'T completely slaughtered 66.66% of the time and a coinflip 33.33% of the time like some might say. 57% of the time you're against AK and 43% of the time you are against AA or KK.

So basically combine a LOT of what you know about your opponent, a little math, and a little logic.

the line that's created when you bend your thumb is the life line, iirc.

For me, my hand reading skills skyrocketed when I started paying a lot more attention to how an opponent bets his say TPTK.

Does he pound everystreet or does he bet 1/2 pot not wanting to scare you.

Say he bets 1/2 pot even with a FD out there, now I have a basic read on the guy of when he's strong he makes value bets (odds and draws be damned). I use that info in other situations.

Most of my reads come down to does strong= strong or does it = weak with this guy.

T

There also some statistical stuff you can do. A lot of the time with playing multiple tables, the only reads you have is PT stats. There's a sticky in the limit section on guidelines for narrowing hand ranges from PT stats.

http://livepokerforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4273

I suppose NL would be slightly different with small pairs etc being played more and hands like QJ being played less.

i'm going to take a bit of an opposite line here -- don't try to rationally deduce the holdings of opponents who aren't rational.

i think xaston's line works well against "thinking" opponents, but i think the number of thinking opponents is pretty low until a certain level ($400 nlhe?).