Quote Originally Posted by miracleriver
Thanks for the nice post. I have a couple of questions regarding raise-calling ranges

Quote Originally Posted by biondino
If a player in early position raises, he *should* have a fairly strong hand, as we've seen above So your hand has to be STRONGER than his range. [...] If he is tight and raising in early position (EP), then he might have AQ+, TT+. This means that to call or raise his bet, you want to have AK, QQ+ (i.e. a stronger hand than his range pre-flop - in his case I would probably re-raise here)
1. How do you determine if a hand is stronger than a range? Is it something that only comes the experience of playing many hands and analyzing them?

2. At the micro-limits it is not unusual to see several players call a raise before it gets to you. What adjustments, if any, are required in these cases? For example in a 10-handed game utg raises; he's tight, so his range is AQ+, TT+. There are 2 callers. you are CO with AKs.
1. In simple terms, if your hand is ahead of most cards in a range, it is stronger than that range. Obviously this is not the whole story, most obviously because some weaker hands,such as SCs, play very well in position against a tight PF raiser. But if you know the guy won't be raising any ace below AJ, and you are holding AJ, then you already know that should the flop come Axx you will be in a very tricky position - even if he actually holds 55 he can choose to rep the ace (as pre-flop raiser he should be doing so) and you're suddenly facing at best risking a lot of chips to get a fold and at worst pot committing yourself vs AK.

2. First of all it's been over a year since I played any 10-handed poker apart from tourneys. But let's consider the hand. UTG is obviously strong; his two callers, probably less so (micro players DO limp/call with AA, we know this, but as a general assumption we will consider ourself ahead of their ranges). If he does only hold TT+ and AQ+, how many hands can he have that we beat? 12 x AQ and that's it. We're level with AK and effectively level with TT-QQ, so we can discount them; we're behind KK (3 possible combos) and AA (3 possible combos). So actually, we're ahead of more hands that he could be holding than we're behind. Plus, of course, we have position. So my action here is to re-raise - say 5 times his bet, which will put enormous pressure on UTG and will almost certainly fold the callers if they have low PPs, Ax or any other combo. We can't call because then we're seeing a flop in a swollen pot with 3 villains and reverse implied odds. Not fun.