Dear fellow 2+2ers,

I'm reading James ‘SplitSuit’ Sweeney's Dynamic Full Ring Poker: Beyond the Basics and thinking a great deal about what kinds of hand ranges I should be constructing for my live opponents, both in my $30 home game and in $200 or $300 casino games. Right now I'm in Chapter 14: Playing 3-Bet Pots Postflop, and I find myself wondering whether anyone knows empirically the hand ranges of live players who play ~weekly or ~monthly but who don't study the game.

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A sociology or cog-sci lab could easily enough run a poker game with cameras or whatever on the hole cards with a bunch of players who fit my description. But the equipment would be expensive, and the lab would have to be interested in a different view of the data than I am suggesting.

Does anyone know of anything like this being done? I'm not a cog-sci grad student myself (I study English), but hey, this is 2+2, so there could easily be one out there.

Should this get moved to Poker Theory or some other board? I have no idea. I mostly read here in LLSNL, so this is where I'm starting.

Thanks!

-EF

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking. The 3 betting ranges of live poker players are pretty narrow in general. QQ+, AK. With some players, it's just AA/KK. With some players it's just AA.

Obviously, thinking payers are capable of 3-betting much wider depending on the table dynamics.

I can't imagine that players would be all that thrilled about having their hole cards on camera for the purposes of analyzing their play. Live at the Bike is probably the closest thing I've seen to that. You can see their hole cards, but I think it's a step up from low stakes.

It is pretty much this. Rec players pf generally are playing their own cards. In a LLSNL game, you're generally not getting odds to set mine against a 3 bet due to the bet sizing and stack sizes. Split is primarily an online writer and online raise ranges are wider and sizes are smaller.

in 1/2nl and 1/3nl games, 3-bet ranges are heavily skewed to AA/KK, like 90% of the time a 3-bet is AA/KK at this level

at 2/5nl, 3-betting ranges are JJ+, AK with 70% of the weight being QQ+ if eff stacks are 100bb

ironically, 3-bet calling ranges in 1/2nl, 1/3nl, and 2/5nl are ridiculously wide especially when oftentimes eff stacks are under 60bb. Players will call 3-bets with 22+, SCs, S1Gs hoping to get lucky and putting the preflop 3-bettor on AK... And JJ/QQ or notorious for stacking off to preflop 3-bettors as long as the flop/Board contains no A or K

I much appreciate your replies. Am especially glad to have Venice and dgiharris ITT.

Replies so far are specific to 3b ranges live. My question was inspired by that particular chapter in Split's book, but it applies more broadly, too, since limping ranges and cold-call ranges and open raising ranges are all equally valuable information. Actually, such info would be more valuable to a live player than 3b% and ranges, precisely b/c of how rare 3bets are in LLSNL.

RE jesse123: Occasionally Live at the Bike will show a $1/$3 game, which is pretty low-stakes and plays not so different from what I've observed sometimes at $1/$2 in my home casino (Turning Stone, in NY).

I guess my broader observation is just that in live games, with so many fewer hands/hour and no good way to collect stats, we need different heuristics for singling our play against individual players at the table. By Split's standards, we are almost always playing against "unknowns," because we don't have a lot of statistical information about our villains. Now, a good memory and good note-taking certainly can help us stay handle our villains as individuals, but another cog-sci experiment might reveal the ways in which the reads we develop based upon live observation diverges from what we actually have seen. Example: we see a villain "who seems to be in every pot" for our first few orbits at a table. Would be interesting to compare villain's actually VPIP with what we heroes imagine his opening stats (and correlated range) to be. Do we habitually over- or under-estimate such an opponent's strength? For now the answer is probably that no one knows.

-EF

There are beginning level poker players at every stake, they are just fewer as you move up in stakes. I think you could draw inferences from live at the bike 2/5+ games if you identify beginning level players and analyze their play.

In general, ranges are super wide. I expect players to be limping with hands like K2 sooted. What is more shocking is that some players will limp with K2off. Some players will limp call large raises preflop with A6off.

I don't think it's super important to define their exact range, but rather just to identify players who have a really wide range. That range should become more clearly defined as actions take place throughout the hand.

If they are truly playing poker for the first time it's possible that you won't be able to define his hand at all and that's ok. If they demonstrate an inability to fold hands just take them to valuetown. I played with a blackjack player like that who played every single hand and would call with middle pair on a 4 card straight board. Later he limped on the HJ and I raised button with QQ. Jack high flop so I took him to value town for 3 streets. Turned out he had KK, but that's ok because i know his calling range was super wide.