Nitreg

Today we are going to discuss how you can read hands. The best way you can think about this concept is by thinking about a funnel:

As you can see, the funnel starts out wide at the top and is very narrow at the bottom. Our opponent’s hand range (and our hand range) get narrower and narrower every single street as we gain more and more information from their actions.

Watch the video below to get a better understanding of this concept as well as an example (if you can’t see the video, click here).

Hand Range Analysis Example

Check out this hand I played recently at $50NL full ring against a solid reg. The results of this hand aren’t as important as the thought process that goes behind it. Street by street try figuring out a hand range villain can have.

Here is a rough example of something you might come up with:

PREFLOP
{22-AA, Broadways, 67s-9Ts, A9s, and a few other hands are possible}
FLOP
{AK, KK, 99, 88, 89, K9s, AA, KQ, KJ, KT, A9, Q9s, A8s, TT-QQ, 9Ts, JT, JQ, 67s, QT, 22-77, AT-AQ}
TURN
{KK, 99, 88, 89, AA, K9s, A9s, 9Ts, AK, KQ, KJ, KT, JT, QT, AThh-AQhh, QJhh}
RIVER
{KK, 99, 88, 89, K9s, A9s, T9s, JThh, QThh, AThh, QJhh, AJhh, AQhh, AKhh, AA, AK, KQ, KJ, JTo, QTo, QJ}

In the above approximate ranges, the red text is the top of villain’s range, the blue text is the middle strength hands in villain’s range and the green hands are the bottom of villain’s range. These ranges aren’t perfect by any means and we don’t have any reads to go by about how he plays certain hand ranges postflop, but this is a pretty good estimate of what his range could be with the limited information we do have.

As always, if you have any comments or questions please feel free to post them in the comments section below. Stay tuned over the next few days as we will expand on this concept and show where math and combinatorics are added to further define villains range and give us a better clue as to how we should play against him.