Poker Ranges Explained

Well hello everyone, it's been a while since we've done a video, but I plan to do a little prep before the world series, do some study of my own and possibly give you an idea of ​​what people study nowadays and how they've

poker

evolved. The title of this video is going to be getting familiar with the

ranges

or something and essentially for a lot of you this is going to be something elementary, if you're from the younger generation you've probably already put in a lot of work to use them. kind of your regular Atrix and rank charts, but I think for a lot of players who are maybe

poker

fans or players during the 2004 to 2010 era, this will all be, for the most part, pretty new to you.

When I make a video where I'm breaking a hand, I try to be as generic as possible, like you know he might have this, he might have this, but then if I upload this and I try to stay on track. where we discuss the hand at a very elementary level for the most part so that you understand it and what I want to do here is familiarize you and help you become a little more familiar with the idea behind ranks and ranking. of how that's developed over the years and when we think back to say again, you know, at the height of the 2004 era, poker worked, there was nowhere where the term range was actually used, it just It wasn't a thing, I mean, obviously people put people in

ranges

. of hands, but it looked very different than it does today, so, for example, if I raised from the bottom and a player very tight to my left raises me again in second position, well, I have it in a range of hands, but I did not.

Don't think about it in those terms. You would think okay, well this guy has aces, kings, queens or ace kings. Well, let's really break down this specific situation and just so you know, the combos and how decisions are made based on one shot. You may like to identify people in a range, but I want to look specifically at this example just to give you an evolution, show you how this whole thing evolves, like in the old days, you raised under the gun, player 3 bets you from under the gun more There was a lot of players where their rank was just Queens Kings, Aces or Ace King, meaning basically those are the only hands they would make, with every other hand they would call or fold, it's like ace, queen, they're going to crush.

Jack's 10's are going to flatten now, let's say you're sitting there with Jack, specifically now the flop comes eight five two, well there are also a certain number of players who are always betting pairs and checking back when they don't have a pair higher because obviously I raised under the gun, which is a strong position and I ask for the re-raise, so normally in this place what the players would do is if they had the aces, queen kings, they would bet and if they had the ace king, they would bet. check, so essentially this was like you knew that the person's rank was exactly one hand, which was ace king, so obviously you know that these types of players are not the ones you will find in most tournaments or cash games In cash, people have a much wider range of hands.

They are going to re-raise with some suited connectors, but there was a time when there were a lot of players who fit perfectly into this category and it was very easy to have, so you knew they would have such a tight range pre-flop on an Un 3-bit pot in the situation, then your bet would dictate even more, you know exactly what that range is, and there has been the check that specifically represented exactly one combination of hands and that was always a skink, so you could play accordingly with his jacks he simply called the raise preflop and then on the flop of 85 two check folds.

I'm not kidding check fold; many of these players, whereas if they check again, you know your jacks are good as long as an ace or king doesn't make it to the turn. River Gus Hansen I remember in 2005 he played such a strange hand where everyone was like, what did you do there? There was one hand where we had jacks and he was pretty sure his opponent had ace king, but he didn't pre-flop the board. It was really nice for him, like an eight and five odds type situation, he checked the flop, he checked the turn on a brick and then you know, he was waiting, he knew what the player had, he was probably in Ace King, but he also felt that It was like that.

Gus Hansen said the player was going to call him anyway, so he decided to literally wait to see if they beat him and then he found out they were going to call him on the river, so he checked all the way on the river and hit in white. went all-in with the jacks, the player called with the ace king. I guess it's another way of looking at evolution and I've mentioned it before, maybe on the podcast or whatever, but it really rings true: anal poker used to be or at its elementary level, it was like you knew that the process of thinking is what is my hand versus what is your hand, what do I do, what do I have and what do I think they have in my head, or am I behind or am I getting the right simple hand. versus hand so that became you know what my hand is because you know what you have versus the entire range of hands your opponent could have and then you play accordingly from there, that evolved further into understanding in certain situations you know how to play my range versus my opponent's rank and this is going to be really important if you really want to get to the sophisticated level of playing this game at a high level because you have to be very aware of what your rank can and can't entail or what it is weighted on. or what it's not is because against really smart opponents in certain situations, if you're trying to bluff or make a move, they'll understand that based on the way you played the hand pre-flop and on the flop, that's not the case. .

Add up the story, don't you know it's true? And you know another way to look at it as well is that there will be some flops or boards where a player will have what's called a range advantage and essentially what that means. Meaning you know that a player is more likely to have a stronger hand in a given situation, for example, if my dog ​​is barking, for example, if a player under pressure raises and the big blind calls and the flop is a rainbow of seven two, well, player with a range advantage would be the player under the gun because a large percentage of the range of hands that the player under the gun is going to play will contain an ace, while the big blind, especially if there is ease, will be The price is to play a lot more like six eights five sixes and you know, garbage hands, so in this situation it is important that the other player, whether he has the ace or not, understands that he has a reach advantage, so that even if you have If you have something like ten Jack suited, you should still bet here because you simply have more hands in your range that connect with that flop, so the big blind, let's look back again, to the classic, You know, Jack's versus. where you think the players rank is aces kings queens or exactly ace kings then there will be situations where even today you can still find yourself in this situation so the question is how do you know if that is the opponent's rank if you continue with the jacks, let's say for example you opened, the players went all in and you're sitting there with Jack, well obviously there are other considerations like where you are, what stage of the tournament you're at, you know there's a bunch of others and you already know. things to think about, but if you're just thinking in the void, you know if JR Jack is getting the right price to continue well, the way to do it or one of the ways to do it is, of course, we look at the pot odds what we have.

We are getting it right, but then we can count the combinations of cards or hands that the player could have that beat us versus those that didn't, for example, which one was ahead of us? Well, we are. in front of the Ace King just because we are behind the Aces, Kings or Queens, well, how many Ace King combinations are there? Think about that for a second. Okay, so you have one ace, play four kings, you have another ace, play four kings, another ace. with four kings in another race with four kings 16 combinations of Ace King that your opponent could have if this is the range you place them in well, how many combinations of aces, kings and queens are there, the easiest way to do this is to find out How many combinations of a pair could there be?

Well, yes a pair of aces. How many combinations of aces could there be? Well, I mean, do the math here. You have an ace of spades. You know, I'm sorry. Ace of spades. Ace of clubs. Ace of Diamonds. ace of hearts, that's three, then you got the next two and then you got one, that's six combinations per pair, so now if you're in the situation, you're looking at eighteen combinations that have destroyed you where he has aces, kings or queens and then 16 combinations where you're actually ahead, so it's pretty close, but of course you have to take into account the fact that when you're going to play against that range, you're in big trouble because the ace king is still I will beat you a very important part of the time, we call it a coin toss for a reason because it is similar to a coin toss, so 16 times you will be in a coin toss situation, 18 times you will be a four to ...a dog, so if you were to put your opponent in a range like that, it would probably be especially in a tournament where you're looking to conserve chips and not flip as many coins if that was your opponent's range and that's it what I could have.

Unless they are very short in chips, you should most likely still fold. There is another term that I want to touch on briefly and I don't want to go too deep into it because it requires a whole video, but when Recounting combinations like we did there, you know the 18 pair combinations versus 16 ace king combinations, sometimes you will have information that will be blocked if you call them, you know that you will block a certain number of combinations, so let's say for example that you have those jacks and you are facing that player who has ace king aces or kings or queens, what would happen if you saw the dealer expose an ace, so there's a dead ace and you're in?

This is exactly the same situation, well what does that do to Khamenei's tricks? Well, on the one hand, it takes away four combinations from the Ace King, so you go from 16 to 12, but it also takes away, you know, three combinations of aces in hand, so then we're down from 18 to 15, so , again, normally when you're looking at situations where you're going to use blockers to make a decision, normally you're not going to do it because you see a flash card, it's going to be because you have a certain card in your hand and again I said, like I said, I don't want to go into depth. too much into that because what I really want you to get familiar with is understanding ranges and how that leads to card combinations and how that's going to help you. in difficult situations, make more sophisticated decisions correctly, so it's not like old school poker, it's like well, you know what I think I have, well, let's count if we put them in a range of hands, like how many combinations I have , how many combinations there are. value and then how many combinations you could have that could be Bluffs, so I think we'll do a series of videos before the world series where I'll extend this kind of thought process by breaking down the hands in a little more of a sophisticated way instead of just like you know he has that, but I want to do it in such a way that you really understand in the comments below if any of this blather starts to sound like huh what are you talking about?

You know you are moving forward. Put the comments there myself or maybe someone else who is smart will explain it to you, but I would really like to do a more detailed analysis head to head. videos, but that will require, I think, a different way of talking about hands in general. We'll have to be a little bit not nerdy per se, but we'll have to be a little bit more sophisticated, so I hope you. enjoy this style of video we will probably release about one a week until the World Series of Poker and then we will probably start the world series of poker vlogs daily and throughout the World Series of Poker we will also Of course, as he is part of any poker blog, there are a lot of hands and I'm going to try to give a little more nuance to the high-end breakdowns than you're used to, but we'll do it at a pace you're comfortable with.

So please let me know in the comments below, like I said, if you feel like this has value because you're digesting it in such a way that you feel like you're really getting it.