Poker Ranges Examples
The Poker Ranges tool can be used to help you think more about your opponent's range and can aid in helping you narrow down their range when you are thinking about what they could really have. It helps you to narrow down an opponent's range by taking into account your hole cards, the community cards, and any dead cards that you are aware of.
In Winning Poker Tournaments, Apestyles (a well-known internet pro) talks about his equity with Ks Js in hand 128. He mentions that his equity is 36% against a range of 88+, AQ+.
Using our tool, one can see why this is the case in 30 seconds or less. Simply select Ks Js as the hole cards and click Next, click Next for board cards (don't choose any), click Next for dead cards (don't choose any) and select 88 99 TT JJ QQ KK AA AQ AK as the range followed by OK.
Let's walk through an example. The first screen when using the tool tells you to select your two hole cards. Let's use Jack of diamonds, Ten of diamonds. After you select these two cards click on Next.
The next screen asks you to select 0-5 board cards. These are the community cards and the number of cards you select will depend on where you are in the hand you are analyzing. If you are looking just at a pre-flop situation, just click Next. If you have only seen a flop, you would select 3 cards, and so on. For our example we'll say we flopped two-pair, Jack of hearts, Ten of spades, Six of diamonds. Once you select these, click Next.
Next you may select any "dead" cards that you are aware of. During a typical Texas hold'em game you will not know of any dead cards. However, maybe someone turned over a card by mistake, and in that case, you would select your dead cards. Our example has no dead cards, so just hit Next.
On the screen that comes up next we see our hole cards as well as the board cards. Now we need to decide what hands we want to analyze as a range that our opponent may hold.
First thing we want to do is decide if suits matter. Since there are not any possible flush draws out there (besides back door draws of course), we will not select "Suits Matter" at the bottom of the graphic. However, if you are looking at a situation where flush draws will matter, then click "Suits Matter" and the other half of the hand cube will show up and you can select just suited cards.
Now let's start looking at some hands that may like this flop and select them. First, we will consider straight draws, which inlcudes King-Queen and Eight-Nine, so select these combinatins.
Some other hands that would clearly continue are Jack-Jack, Ten-Ten, and Six-Six, and Jack-Ten, so select those hands too.
Assume he would also like his Ace-Jack and select that hand. Finally, your opponent may think his overpairs are good, so select Queen-Queen, King-King, and Ace-Ace. There may be a number of other combinations that will continue on this board, but these are some of the most likely and will give you a good idea of the benefit of using this tool.
Now hit "OK" at the bottom of the page and we will see our matrices with the number of combinations of possible holdings that our opponent may have in this situation. If we add up the green "winning" hands and the red "losing" hands we can get a good estimation of how willing we should be to put a lot of money in the pot with this hand in this situation.
This is a great way to analyze hands in addition to using your replayer when you are doing some hand studying. The more you use it, the more quickly you will begin to visualize your opponent's hand ranges, helping you make better, faster decisions at the tables.
