05 Oct 2024 Beginner This article is for beginner players mental game ranges You’ve probably heard the word 'range' during a conversation about poker or while watching some of our poker videos. But do you know what ranges are? Do you know that understanding this concept is essential to becoming a winning player? If your answer is no, this article is for you. So, let’s break it down! Range thinking is the most important concept for your profitability in poker. What Are Ranges? To show that this concept is simpler than it seems, I’ll use an example from outside of poker. Imagine two restaurants. Restaurant #1 is a buffet – a self-service restaurant with many food options. In it, you’ll find: 3 different types of rice, 2 different types of pasta, various kinds of meat (beef, chicken, pork, and even fish!), plus a variety of salads. In summary: the variety of food at restaurant #1 makes the set of possibilities really wide. Restaurant #2, which sells sushi – obviously, you won’t find a wide variety of food here, as only fish is available. This limited variety of food makes the set of possibilities much smaller than in Restaurant #1. But what does this have to do with poker? How does this example explain ranges? Trust me, you will understand. Let’s suppose today you decided to play online poker. You open the software, find a good table, and sit down. Then the following situation happens: you’re on BTN, everyone folds, and you decide to raise. SB folds, and BB calls. What can we say about the possible hands of each player in this situation? Variety of Hands When you make an open raise from the BTN, your range of possible hands includes all strong hands. That’s because when raising, you could have hands like AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AK, AQ. On the other hand, the player in BB just called your bet – they didn’t raise or fold. To understand the possible hands he has, let’s divide the analysis into 2 parts: First, let’s consider the fact that the opponent didn’t fold, so we can eliminate the weakest hands from his possible range. This means that by the time he calls, we know he won’t have hands like 72o, 52o, or J2o, for example, since those hands are too weak to call a preflop raise. Now let’s talk about the fact that they didn’t raise your bet, meaning they didn’t 3-bet. When the player just calls instead of raising, it shows he doesn’t have the best possible hands in his range, such as AA, KK, and QQ. In other words, BTN has a range advantage over BB in this spot. Why? Because since the opponent didn’t 3-bet our open, we could be the ones holding the premium hands like AA, KK, or QQ. This is how we should think when making decisions in poker – we’re not putting the opponent on a specific hand but on a set of possible hands — RANGE. Now that we’ve explained the range concept, let’s move on to the second question. Here’s your sentence without capital letters: Why Is Range Thinking Crucial to Becoming a Winning Player? When we understand preflop ranges, we can think about which types of flops will be better for each player. For example: Continuing the previous spot, let’s think about a flop like A♥K♠3♣. Who do you think this flop is better for? For you, who raised on BTN, or for BB who just called? If you answered that this flop is better for you, you are correct! That’s because, unlike the opponent, you have many hands in your possible range that will connect well with this flop. For example, AA, KK, AK (and all of these are hands that the opponent would likely 3-bet with). Now, consider another flop: 7♥6♥5♣. Who do you think this one favors more? If you answered the BB, you are right! This happens because the BB will have some hands they called your open raise with that you wouldn’t have opened, such as 65o, 76o, 84s, and 43s. So, you should be more cautious when continuing aggression on this flop compared to the previous one. On the other side, the opponent can be more aggressive — making more check-raises on the 7♥6♥5♣ flop than on the A♥K♠3♣. But that’s a topic for another article! Two Important Types of Ranges Now we’ve reached the most important part of this article! Since you’ve learned the concept, I’ll teach you the two different and most important types of ranges that exist in poker. Pay attention! Let’s imagine the following hand: BTN vs BB, flop A♣7♥2♣, the BTN bets 1/3 and the BB calls, turn Q♠, BTN bets the pot, and the BB calls, river 6♥, and the BTN goes all-in. What can we say about the ranges of each playe has in this situation? The BTN player has a very extreme range of hands, meaning: either he has a very strong hand or he is bluffing! Meanwhile, the BB player has a range of hands focused on more medium-value cards. This means he doesn’t have hands that don’t connect with the board at all, but he rarely has extremely strong hands (like sets), otherwise, he would have raised at some point in the hand. This is an extremely important situation in poker. BTN has a polarized range, meaning it’s polarized between very strong hands and bluffs. BB has a condensed range, as they don’t have extremely strong hands or very weak ones. Polarized and condensed ranges are important concepts used for effective bluff catching, to understand why some players bluff more than others, and to avoid making polarization mistakes. We’ll talk more about this in the future. For now, I suggest you focus on recognizing situations where your opponent might have polarized or condensed ranges.
