Today we are going to take a look into how to put your opponent on a range of hands, including hands that may be betting for value or hands that are looking to just bluff with their equity.

Poker is not an exact science, even the best players will make mistakes as it’s a game of imperfect information, all we can aim to do is dissect the information that is out there and use it to our advantage.

There are some key pieces of information that can alter our opponents’ ranges these include:

• The position of our opponent.
• The sizing of our opponent’s bets.
• How aggressive or passive are they playing? This will let us know how likely they are to be over or under bluffing.

Let’s look at an example on how we could break down our opponents’ ranges during a hand:

We are dealt Q♠ 8♠ in the Big Blind in a $22 tournament with blinds at 500/1000. With both us and our opponent having similar stack depths of around 100BBs. Our opponent raises to 2200 from the Cut Off (CO) Position, everyone else folds and it’s up to us…

So whilst we don’t have any actual information on our opponent’s hand we can look to start thinking of a range a player may want to raise with from late position, let’s see what this would look like…

So if we assume our opponent only raises around 25% of hands from the Cut Off, which is a reasonable assumption including a wide range with hands like 65s, 75s, 86s, 97s+, A2s+, K7s+, Q8s+, J8s+, JT0+, QT0+, KT0+, ATo+

So considering we will be getting a good price on our call from the Big Blind and we have a suited hand with a High card we can profitably defend this holding Vs our opponents perceived range as we have around 41% equity against these holdings.

We call 1200 chips (making the pot now 4800 chips) and see a flop of Q♥ 5♥ 4♦  We check and our opponent bets 2000 chips.

This is a fairly dry board, with only a few hands flopping flush or straight draws. On flops like this we can expect to see a C-Bet from our opponents’ a large percentage of the time.

In order to better put our opponent on a range of hands once they bet this board we need to make some assumptions on how the will play there hands, so let’s assume that our opponent will:

Bet with all their strong hands including top pair or better Q8s+ and QTo+
Bet with middling pairs like 65, 77
Bets with flush draws and backdoor flush draws
Bets with all straight or backdoor straight draws
Checks back with hands like 88-JJ to pot control against us having a Queen
Checks back with Ace high hands that don’t flop flush draws

Against this range which will contain a large number of C-bet bluffs with worse holdings than ours we have an easy call with our pair of Queens on this board of Q♥ 5♥ 4♦  , so we call the 2000 chip bet (making the pot now 8,800 chips) and the turn card comes 7♣.

We check again and our opponent sizes up a little and bets 7,000 chips.

We now have to assume our opponent is only going to be betting strong hands like Top pair with a good kicker or a flush or straight draw and they will check with the rest of their range.

This additional information of another bet lets us learn a little more about what our opponent’s range could look like…

So what does this mean we should do?

We still have a decent hand, we are doing well against a good portion of our opponent’s range and if we are beaten at the moment we just picked up a straight draw to come from behind.

We use PokerStove, a free tool to work out how much equity our hand has Vs our opponents range on the turn

So even including many hands that could have us crushed we still have over 54% equity in this situation, so let’s do some math and look at the pot odds we are offered and see if it pays us to call here…

The pot is at 15,800 and will be at 22,800 if we call so we are getting 7000 into 22,800 so to work out how much equity we need we just divide 7000 into 22,800 and we get 0.3070

We can then times this number by 100 to make it a percentage value, so x100 = 30%.

This means we will need at least 30% equity to be able to call here profitably in the long term and we have around 54% so we can quite comfortably call here knowing that it will be profitable in the long run.

So we make the easy call of 7000 chips, putting the pot at 22,800 and it’s off to the river card which is 2♥ and our opponent bets 18,000 chips.

Making the final board Q♥ 5♥ 4♦ 7♣ 2♥

This is a problem for our hand as a big part of our opponent’s bluffs are flush draws that just got there, so let’s take a final look at the range of hands they will get to the river with and see how much equity we have…

So as we can see our opponents range has narrowed significantly this has happened because our opponent has fired all three streets, so a large part of their range they would not play this way, what we are left with are very strong hands like two pairs, trips, straights, flushes and some bluffs that just fired on all streets, we can rule out thin value hands like one pair etc at this point in the hand as most of these hands would just check back on this wet river card. Let’s see how our equity looks on this run-out…

So we have around 24.5% equity in this pot once we have seen all 5 cards, let’s work out the math and see whether it pays us to call…

The pot is now at 40,800 with our opponents bet, so if we call we will be getting 18,000 into 58,000 which equals 0.3103, meaning we will need around 31% equity in this pot to make this call profitably in the long term.

Therefore we are not getting the right price against our opponents expected range, so we should make the fold and move on to the next hand.

Hopefully, you have found this hand breakdown on how to read people informative, I would recommend downloading the free PokerStove software which is online for Windows and available as an app from the App Store for Mac users now too!