Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 11 September 2008 / Leave a comment

The observation and use of hand ranges is critical to becoming a good poker player.

The very best players are able to narrow down their opponents range of hands to a select few through close observation of their stack size, previous tenancies, position and general psychological state. Not only are the best players very good at narrowing down their opponent's ranges, they are also excellent at disguising their own - regularly making unorthodox plays to keep their opponents guessing.

It is usually very tight players who are the easiest to put on a range of hands, as they are typically only playing solid hands in position. Therefore, you can quickly start narrowing down the number of possibilities quite quickly from just an opening raise. Say a quite tight player opens for 4x the big blind from under the gun plus one. It will be very rare that this player is making this play with anything worse than 99 or ace jack at the very worst. As a result of this, you can quickly rule out most poor holdings. If a low, coordinated flop comes out, you may well be able to bully them off the hand later on through knowing their specific hand range.

The opposite of this is true against very skilled loose players. Say Phil Ivey raises from UTG+1 instead of the tight player. Here you face a radically different situation, with Ivey's hand range being enormous. He could easily have any suited connector, any pair, any high cards, any suited cards or even total junk hands like jack three off suit (there is a great example of him raising with this type of hand in such a position in Harrington on hold'em volume).

As a result, that rainbow flop of 773 might not actually be a good one for your big pair - he could easily be involved with all types of holdings that hit this flop. Not only do you not know what range of hands he is playing, he knows that you don't know, which enables him to exert huge amounts of pressure on his opponents later on in hands - he simply could have nearly anything that he chooses to represent.

The style of coming in regularly with weak holdings is complicated and mentally draining to play. Constantly swimming upstream in terms of the maths of the hands means that you have to replace this element with the skills of board reading, hand ranges and player types. Start to think not only about your opponent's ranges, but also your own, and use it to put as much pressure on your opponents as possible.