when someone says villain range is 20% how do you come up with this figure?

The use of a heads up display. A program such as PokerTracker 4 or Hold'em Manager 2 will help. You can get trials of these or use a more simple HUD (heads-up display) such as Jivaro.

When someone says a persons range is 20% preflop that generally means they are playing the top 20% of hands, this is the VPIP stat in a hud. As there are a limited number of hands in any given game it gives you an understanding of how tight a player is, how weighted their range is towards premium hands that are straightforward to play.

In omaha this would generally be premium pocket pairs, run downs and double suited hands without danglers in general. Something like that.

is there a specific stats in hm2 or pt4 that = the 20% range, like this is prob a dumb question but if the players VPI is 20% does that equal range that everyone uses when they do pokerjuice sims and put the player on a 20% range?

anyone?

If villain is button, short stacked, super aggressive, 3bet 13% btn vs co.
You are co.

Everyone folds to you preflop. You raise. Villain 3bets from button. Blinds fold. You call with the SPR of 1.

Flop comes.

You check, he bets pot all in. What is villains range? ~13%.

You have to think a bit what the stat is you want to be observing.
Positional Pfr & vpip, 3bet, 4bet and such.

ok, say UTG opens 15% and gets called by two callers, and cbets 55% of the time, what would his range be when he cbets the flop?

Hard to say. Depends on the flop texture. Also we are not talking about %range anymore we are talking about bluffing frequency and precieved value and protect range.

Because he is utg and cbets 55% he is more likely to bet strong draws, top pair +, overpairs, two pair, trips, straight.
Also depends how many players are before and behind.
Like if one is behind and he is nitty tight, im more likely to cvet as a bluff. Whilst maybe never bluffing if the player behind me is a loose caller or if i have 2 players behind me.

In this example villain has ~15% in his range pf. He is also probably discluding some hands in the top15% of hands and playing worse than 15% of hands like T986 and stuff.

I'm just getting with the above examples given i have never really much used software previously and instead just played and learned that way, but now am adding more maths into it even though its not my strong point, just wanting to learn the basics basically, appreciate your efforts ty, but I'm not really understanding it tbh

The first example you posted was easier to understand given it was a easier example, but the second example i posted and then asked about and reading your answer, well I'm totally

This was posted in the pokerjuice thread


I've been doing a lot of this ^ where i just enter the exact cards i think villain is holding and adjusting them around to get a different guide with equities. would this be a more accurate way of doing equity sims then just entering 15% or 20% etc but more time consuming, or not?

It depends on what you are looking at.

Preflop ranges can be expressed in %. If you know a player opens 15% of the time from UTG you can roughly assume he is opening the strongest 15% of hands even if it's not entirely accurate. The most basic application of this is to look at Preflop all ins. Example: AA vs 15%



Postflop is a bit more complicated.
Lets assume you know UTG opens 15% and you call with KKxx on the BTN, the Flop comes A83 now you might assume he will cbet 70% and x/fold 30% in a heads up pot.
The first thing you can do is look how your equity vs his 15% has changed on that board.

preflop:



postflop:



You can also go a bit more into detail and look what his range is made of on the flop.



As you can see he has toppair+ 60% of the time so despite cbetting 70% he actually is very value heavy. He also has 2pair+ 27% of the time so his range hits this board quite hard.

In reality you probably won't know as much about your opponents strategy and they will be far more complex, this is just intended to be an example of how you might look at how your hand plays against villains range.
If you want to take it a step further now you could look at how your whole range plays against villains range.

Ranges do help to read peoples hands but with this thinking it is very hard to consider during play. During play you should consider your equity in pots vs hands villain is likely to be continuing with. Get experience playing. Equity calculations like these will be very difficult to do during your play and are good tools to analyse play after sessions.

Focus on your play, exploiting weaknesses in your opponents and making good plays. Start off small when using software, use a HUD with a few stats if you are going to use a HUD and start with VPIP/PFR/Afq, once you are used to using them you can add stats like C-bet %, Fold to C-bet %, 3-bet%.

Blackrain79's blog has a good microstakes hud that I use, it has about 12 stats, you can just put that in Pokertracker4 and use the first line of stats, then as you get comfortable introduce more of the stats to your play.

I find in PLO that VPIP/PFR/C-bet/Fold to C-bet/3-bet/Fold to 3-bet are very useful to start.

ok, thanks everyone for explaining much appreciated!