In poker, we are always trying to identify the hands of our opponents, so that we can make the best decisions with the cards we hold. In the movies, we often see professional poker players having near magical powers that let them know their opponent’s exact hand. While this makes for great drama, it is not how poker is usually played.
What poker players do to identify their opponent’s hand is to think about the range of hands they could be holding. Occasionally you can narrow this range down to one hand and look like a genius, but typically there are a number of hands in an opponent’s range.
You have to look at every action that’s taken place in the hand, combine it with what you know about your opponent, and then estimate the types of hands they could have. Live tells and any information about how they have played hands in the past just help us narrow down their range even more. Once you have estimated their range, you can make even better decisions as to what to do with your hand.
The easiest way to introduce using hand ranges is to use an example. We’ll construct a situation where you’re facing an opponent who is not really thinking about what your cards are, so he is known as a ‘first-level thinker’ (i.e. he just plays his hand). These types of opponents are very common in low-stakes and even in mid to high-stakes games. They are the types of opponents you want to seek out and if you look at the next article you’ll see why!
Read Part II