Okay, you’ve figured out how to put your opponent on a few likely hands or better yet a range of hands, based on his play so far in the hand and what you know about him. What now? What do you do with that knowledge? If you want to really dominate the game, and squeeze every dollar out of your opponents, then you need to think on another level, way beyond simply reading hands.Once I read my opponent for a range, or a few potential ranges of hands, I sort them into groups with three things in mind. Frequency, Affectability, and Relevance. <READMORE>
Frequency – How often does my opponent have this range of hands? Let’s say that I am looking at a raise from a tight player preflop, and from what I know about him I can put him on a range of hands that only includes AA, KK, QQ, JJ, and AK. If I have QQ, his hands go into these groupings. Remember that this is hypothetical, and we are assuming that I know enough about this player to be fairly confident in my assumptions.
We use a mathematical understanding of hand frequency, modified by the likelihood that our opponent would make the play he did with a certain hand. If he limp reraises in early position, we all think AA right away, but KK or AK is a possibility from many players as well, and if the player is a maniac or very unconventional the range could be much wider. With a typical player you might want to make AA twice as likely as KK or AK because it is less common to play KK or AK by limp reraising preflop.
Mathematically I know that QQ is very unlikely, and I won’t win or lose much money against it, so the frequency and relevancy are low enough that I pretty much ignore the possibility.
AA and KK are each .45% of all hands, as is any pair (this is a good number to remember). That means this group is .9% total. Because I think there is some chance that my opponent would limp-reraise with this group instead of raising, I assign it a slightly lower chance of.8%.
JJ is also .45% and I’m a large favorite over the hand.
AK is 1.2% of all hands, and I am only slightly ahead of it.
Given this situation I would not reraise. If I get reraised I probably have to fold, and if he calls me I’m not going to make any money on the flop because he will have a very good read on my range of hands, and if he can’t at least beat a pair of queens he won’t put much money in the pot.
Relevance.
In order to make our decision more accurate, we can also assign relevance to a group of hands. Assigning relevance to a group of hands is something many intermediate players don’t understand and something that would really help them make more money. With the QQ above I assigned it very low relevance because it was highly unlikely and also didn’t mean much to us in terms of win or loss, but the flop gives us an even better look at why relevance is important.
The flop is K, Q, 4, and is comprised of three different suits. Now we look at our hand groups and reassess things. The KK has become a little less likely, and the JJ and AA became a little more likely, but there are much more important modifiers here. The first consideration for me is that if my opponent has KK here I’m going broke. My opponent may very well play AK or AA as if it were the nuts here, and I can’t let myself be scared off my set of queens, so if I’m facing KK I am simply going to lose all my chips no matter what I do.
I assign a relevance of zero to the possibility that my opponent has KK, because I can’t do anything about it or affect the outcome if it is true. If he has KK he gets all my chips, and I can’t change that. I would also assign a relevance of zero to the possibility that my opponent had 44 if the preflop play had made that seem like a possibility, because if my opponent has 44, I think I’m going to get all of his chips no matter how I play the hand.
The basic rule of relevance is –
“If you can’t have an effect on it, ignore it.”
It’s not always true, but it’s a good way to start looking at relevance.
In our current example, we know that our opponent doesn’t have QQ, and we’ve decided that KK is irrelevant. We also know that an opponent holding JJ isn’t very relevant, because we aren’t going to make anything from that opponent on this hand, and they will usually fold at the slightest sign of aggression from us.
The only two hands left with significant frequency and significant relevance are AK and AA. It is important to note here that we are way ahead of both of these hands, and we just need to worry about how to get these two hands to put the most money in the pot.
It may seem a little complicated when presented in print form, but getting hand ranges and simple calculations like these to be almost instant really doesn’t take much work, and it makes life a lot easier, not to mention more profitable. In the case of the example hand we found a way to eliminate a bunch of possibilities and play the hand in the most profitable way we possibly could.
Next month (yes I’ll be doing this again, hopefully more often), I’ll continue this thought process with a little math on how to extract the most money in this situation and how to work your way through that kind of thought process.
I’ll see you at the final table,
Fox
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