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 Put Your Opponent On A Goddamn Range
Someone PM'd me asking the following:
Hello,
I hope you don't mind me messaging you.
In a lot of your posts you talk about putting your opponent on a range. This is something I' m having trouble with as I constantly raise with a good starting hand, get called and always get beat.
Can you recommend any articles that would teach me how to do this with some accuracy? I had a look around but I can't find an article relating to this yet.
Specifically I' m playing 2nl NLHE.
Thanks for your time,
xxxxxxxx
I rattled off the following response but then decided to post it in a thread instead:
Hey xxxxxxxx,
This thread http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...ad-t91945.html explains some basic ideas, but it's basically just applying some logic to what you know about your opponents' likely actions and what they mean. Here's an example:
Let Villain here be a tagg player who plays tight in EP, loose in LP, and c-bets a whole lot of flops, but isn't very aggressive on later streets without the goods. We'll take these reads and tendencies we know about our opponent and use them to figure out a pretty close range of hands for him after each of his actions.
Suppose we're playing microstakes NLHE 100bb deep and a tagg player opens to 4x in EP. At this point we can put him on a range of something like {AQ+, 66+} or so depending on what we know about him specifically. His range could be as narrow as {AK, 99+} or it could be as wide as {AJ+, KQ, 22+}, but it will be somewhere in that ballpark because we know he's a tagg and he will be opening a tight range in EP. For now let's go with {AJ+, KQ, 22+}.
Let's say we call his raise on the button with 65 of spades. The flop comes Qs 7c 3d and the flop pot is about 9bb after the rake. Our opponent fires a c-bet of 7bb into us. Let's figure out his range now.
This opponent likes to c-bet a lot of flops, so he will probably bet with something like all of his sets, all of his missed broadway hands, all of his top pairs, his strongest second pair JJ, and some of the weaker PP hands in his range like 22 and 44 (trying to get us to fold something like 55 or 66 or whatever). So now his range is probably something like {AJ+, KQ, JJ+, 77, 33}.
Suppose we call his bet, and the turn makes the board Qs 7c 3d 8s and we remember that we hold 6s 5s. The turn pot is 22bb or so after the rake, and our opponent checks. Now his range has changed again (ranges change after every action) so we can narrow it down some more. This Villain probably wouldn't check this turn with any top pair hand or better so that makes anything in {QQ+, AQ+, KQ, 77, 33} much less likely. He also would probably bet at least some of the time with AK and AJ if he turned the nut flush draw, so we can note that AsKs and AsJs are unlikely as well for his turn checking range. Therefore, his likely range now is something like {AJ, AK, JJ} not including AsKs/AsJs.
We'll stop there since we've gotten far enough to extract some important ideas in the process of deducing a range. First, you have to realize that later in the hand, certain hands are very unlikely because of how the previous streets played. For example, here you wouldn't expect your opponent to often have Q7 on the flop since he wouldn't have raised it preflop. For a similar example, you can't think it's particularly likely he has 88 on the turn if you don't think he c-bets it on the flop.
Second, there's often a sort of "fuzzy" factor to these ranges when you have some hands that you aren't sure he would play in a certain way. For example on the flop here, it's hard for us to know how he's going to play his second pair hands JJ-88. He's probably more likely to bet JJ than 88, but he might not bet any of them at all. There's a certain amount of guesswork involved to try to make smart estimates. Similarly, a lot of people would check QQ on this flop at least some of the time trying to slowplay top set on a super dry board to extract money from bluffs since it's super unlikely the button would hold a hand that could stand more than one street of betting. So that means on the turn we have to realize that QQ isn't going to be as likely as 77.
Third, you will need to have some understanding of how hand combinations work. This post of mine from a long time ago explains it pretty well http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...tc-t75711.html but the general idea is that on a flop of say Q73 if our opponent's range includes both AQ and 33, it's much more likely he has AQ than 33 just because of the number of ways he could be dealt the hand.
Hope this helps.
That was my response. I find it downright hilarious that out of the dozens of people I have berated for not putting their opponents on a range that this is only the second person in probably the past 4 months who has actually asked me about it.
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Maybe they 
Originally Posted by daviddem
