Getting Analytical W/ Hand Ranges 101
Starting out with Hand Ranges
Hand Range: The entire group of hands a player could have in a given situation.
Why is this important?
Well, have you ever noticed just how UN-satisfactory poker analysis is when you talk in terms of what ACTUAL specific hands your opponents had? For one thing, while at the poker table we simply do not know exactly what they have, which is a very ambiguous situation and can create problems when we try to analyze our thinking process. The fact is, when trying to determine if we made the right play or not we shouldn’t be using their exact holding to be a confirmation or rebuttal to the overall correctness of our play as we didn’t have that information at the time- so how can we honestly try to improve our poker thinking with so many variables floating around?
The answer is in hand ranges, where we actually consider not “gee I wonder what they have, maybe it’s this” but instead progress to “these are all the hands I think he could have in this situation. 88+, KJo+. How am I doing against this range, did the flop help this range, et cetera.”
See, now we are getting somewhere! At the start of the hand the range for your opponent is as wide as it will ever be.
For instance, you feel that your opponent would open raise their button with their best %27 of hands, which includes all pocket pairs, A7o+, and some mid range suited connectors.
Now let’s say you have 88 in the big blind. 88 is a 55% favorite against that range above, but will be very difficult to play after the flop out of position because there will be overs most of the time and you’ll only improve to a set 1 in 8 times on the flop. You’ll be constantly wondering if the other guy hit and it will make it very hard to profitably play your hand. So in this situation you feel that your hand will be easier to play if you reraise, so you do.
Now your opponent reraises you! And let’s also assume that you aren’t pot committed at this point and can actually fold if it makes sense to.
Well, it’s time to adjust the hand ranges. We estimated his button range to be his top 27% of hands, but what is his range for re-reraising before the flop against the range he thinks you’ll be reraising his button open with?
Since we feel he would fold his worse aces and suited kings we eliminate them from his range. Some of the smaller pocket pairs too. If we come up with a range like 88+, KQs+, our equity plummets to just 40.48% and now we get to make the decision to either muck or go with the hand based on pot odds.
See, at no point did we try to pretend that we were reading our opponents mind and guessing his exact cards. . . that just doesn’t happen too often in real life and is an impractical way to approach the game analytically. What does happen often is that through a series of decisions you observe you are able to rationally narrow your opponents range until every now and then you are left with just one or two hands that make sense. And when you call out their cards and make that great call or fold, feel free to let them think you read their mind. But we’ll know you just used logic. And now we’re playing the game.
Poker Stove is a free, great tool for helping to analyze hand ranges. If you don’t have it already, give it a go!
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