Hand Ranges in a Game of Poker

Putting an opponent on a hand is one of the most important skills in any poker game. However, many players, especially beginners, have the wrong idea about what “putting a player on a hand” means. These players think it means picking a single hand that you think your opponent has and playing as if he had it. This can lead to disasterous consequences. No one is good enough to know exactly what their opponent has, especially on the first couple rounds of betting. Instead of an exact hand, you need to put him on a range of hands. In the rest of this article I will explain what a range of hands is, and how to make decisions using it.

When you put your opponent on a range of hands you are trying to determine all the hands he could have. Before the flop, the range of hands is often quite broad. Here’s an example: it’s a No Limit Hold’em game and your opponent opens the action with a raise in middle position. Your opponent is aggressive but fairly tight; you imagine he would always raise with AA-JJ, AK, AQ, and AKo. However, he would also sometimes raise, perhaps 20% of the time, with TT-66, KQ, QJ, JT, and T9. This brings up an important point, hand ranges are not evenly distributed. That means that not all hands in the range are equally likely. There are two reasons this might be. First, pairs and suited hands are less common than regular, unsuited hands. There are only 4 combinations (ways the hand could be made) of suited hands and 6 combinations of pairs, compared to 12 combinations of unpaired, unsuited hands. Also, as in our example above, we may notice that some holdings are less likely, as they would respresent a non-standard play from our opponent (he is using deception).

Now that we know what hand ranges are and what they aren’t, let’s look at an example of how to use them during a hand. We’re playing No Limit Hold’em again; we’ve got AK, we raised preflop and the big blind called. The flop comes K62. We bet the size of the pot and our opponent reraises all in. We each have a standard chip stack. We know our opponent pretty well, and we know he has to have at least top pair with a good kicker (A or Q) in order to make this play. We also know that he wouldn’t have called our raise before the flop with K6, K2, or 62. We now know his hand range: AK, KQ, KK, 66, 22. We can subtract KK because he would have reraised preflop. There are 9 remaining combinations of AK, which would result in a tie if we called. There are 12 combinations of KQ (we have a K), which we beat. 66 and 22 have only 3 combinations each (because of the 6 and 2 on board), so that’s 6 combinations total that beat us. It is clear from this analysis that we should call, as there are 12 combos we beat and only 6 that beat us. The fact that are two hands which beat us (66 and 22), to only one that we beat (KQ), doesn’t matter, because KQ is more likely, it has more combinations.