hand reading begins before the flop

hand range - the range of hands your opponent could potentially hold given his proclivities and the action in a given hand

pot equity - defined loosely as your share of the total pot, corresponding to the % of the time you win given your hand and your opponent's hand or hand range assuming neither of you folds.

folding equity - defined loosely as that % of the time you win the pot without a showdown, corresponding to the % of your opponent's range he is willing to fold if you bet or raise.



what you must understand

the only variables of any import are your opponent's hand range, your pot equity vs. those hands in your opponents range that will continue in the hand, your folding equity vs. your opponent's hand range, and your pot/implied odds. all of those other concepts you've read about, such as pot control, or 'thinking on the next level', or maxims such as, 'force your opponent to make a decision for all of his chips' are ultimately reducible to the above. let's look a little closer at each and hopefully recast them in a way that's perhaps more illuminating than their traditional descriptions. everything starts with..

your opponent's hand range

the game of hold 'em is relatively simple preflop. there are 1376 total possible hand combinations and these hand combinations are logically reducible to just 169 'hand types' which can be treated as practically equivalent prior to the flop, i.e. all AA are the same, or all 86o are the same.

all hand reading begins preflop. it is a very simple task to deduce from the % of the time your opponent is opening pots, or his 'preflop raise %', how his hand range is constructed. here's an elementary example:

suppose a simple position-naive opponent is opening 7% of his hands at a shorthanded nl50 table. it is not unreasonable to believe he is opening the top 7% of all hands, so let's look at what the top 7% of hands actually are: 88+, ATs, KTs, AQo+. let's enumerate each hand combo and look more closely at the results. you can use the free program PokerStove to help with this sort of thing.

AA - 6 (roughly 0.44% of all possible hands)
KK - 6
QQ - 6
JJ - 6
TT - 6
99 - 6
88 - 6
AK - 16 (roughly 1.2% of all possible hands)
AQ - 16
AJs - 4 (roughly 0.3% of all possible hands)
ATs - 4
KQs - 4
KJs - 4
KTs - 4
--------
Total hands: 94.
JJ+: 24 or 25.5%
JJ+, AK: 40 or 42.5%
Unpaired hands: 52 or 55.3%

i bet you didn't realize that someone so tight was opening with a range that included so few premium pairs, nevermind unpaired hands! if we made the assumption, perhaps misguided but neverthless instructive, that our opponent would never call a reraise with a hand that is worse than JJ+ after opening with a $1.50 raise , we may then infer that, based on the fact that he's opening 7% of total hands and JJ-AA represent only 25.5% of his range, our opponent will fold 74.5% of the time if we reraise. we can therefore make a standard reraise to $6 with any two cards and expect to make a profit. our opponent must fold at least 73% of the time: 6/(6 + $2.25) = 6/8.25 = 0.727. he folds 74.5%, so just barely. however, some % of the time we outflop his overpair or get pot odds to outdraw him, making it easily +EV. simple example but it conveys the point.

i'm going to elaborate on this significantly in the coming days and weeks. it will be used in every single hand analysis and general strategy analysis without exception. it would certainly be in the best interest of any serious or aspiring professional player to download PokerStove and attempt to become familiar with the distributions of preflop ranges of varying sizes (2%, 4%, 6%, and so on..). being able to quickly and accurately intuit how ranges are distributed will make a world of difference at the tables.

introduction

my name is Jason Young and i hail from the arboreal wonderland of London, ON where i spend my days lounging in front of the computer thrashing degenerates and wannabes alike at virtual poker tables. i started four years ago with a $50 bankroll shortstacking the $25NL games on UltimateBet.com and quickly experienced a rush of success. thereafter I quietly amassed a small but respectable fortune playing full-ring and shorthanded no limit hold 'em games from $50nl to $5000NL 30-50 hours a week and I haven't looked back since. i've been a regular participant throughout my relatively short career on the twoplustwo publishing forums and have been a member of a handful of informal 'think-tanks' devoted to analysing big bet poker in all its forms and generating novel conceptual frameworks in which to deconstruct tactics and strategies of varying scopes. that brings me to..

what this blog is about!

i will not vainly be informing everyone of my day-to-day results or how i'm faring on some quest for an arbitrary sum of cash. what i will be doing is posting a series of punchy articles that will help both beginners and experts improve their theoretical understanding of the game and hopefully their results by applying that understanding at the tables. i may include from time to time some commentary on the state of the games, gambling in general, or various topics pertaining to quotidian debauchery, but my primary intention is to provide novel instruction!