Some players already think of poker hands in terms of ranges however newer players will have questions like, “Did you have Ace-Queen?” or, “I think you have Three Nines” these players are thinking the wrong way to play Poker.
Whilst we can obviously corner our opponents’ hands to contain certain holdings, poker is a game of imperfect information so all we can ever do is try and think what hands our opponents could hold and not pin them down to a single holding and base our play off this random belief.
Let’s learn how to put our opponent on a range of hands
What this will allow us to in turn do is work out a strategy that can be based on playing against our opponents most likely hands, if for instance, a board has two cards of one suit and our opponent bets aggressively they could have a number of hands, a flush draw is definitely in their range and so too will hands like sets and two pairs as they would want to protect against these hands.
What information can we use to decide how to play our range
In Poker there is information on every street of action and many players games are completely unbalanced so often we will get a better idea of our opponents’ likely holdings as we gain more information and play more streets.
Let’s say our opponent comes out betting a board of 6 7 2 rainbow (meaning no flush draw)
But then as the board progresses and picks up overcards making the final board read: 6 7 2 A K
They slow down with their betting choosing to check the turn and river we can eliminate hands with an Ace in them almost immediately. Our opponent most likely has a hand like 78, 79, 88, 99, TT, JJ, QQ that hates the runout and is trying to get to a cheap showdown on an ugly board for their most likely holdings.
What tools can we use to work out our equities in hands?
There is a great free tool for Windows users to download called PokerStove, with this you can enter in your opponents’ likely hands and work out how much equity your exact hand has versus their range.
How does this help?
With this information, we can combine pot odds and our expected equity in pots to work out if we are playing correctly in the long run.
Let’s look at an example:
We defend our Big Blind with K8s and flop a piece versus our opponent’s late position open raise…
So here we can see how we are doing versus a pretty decent late position raising range… It will include some hands that have us crushed on this board like KQ, QQ, AQ, QJ, QT, 88, 44…
However even including these hands we still have 64% equity versus our opponent’s entire range, we cannot simply just give them a good hand right away.
As more information is unlocked during the hand we can look to slim down our opponent’s range, as good players will not look to triple barrel bet with marginal holdings, these types of bets will just be bluffs or value hands.
Give this new way of thinking of hands a try
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