The people who say they can accurately range someone to the tenth decimal are either liars, extremely delusional, or play with the same 10 players for the past 15 years.

This thread is full of good responses to this, so I'm not going to add to it, but I've definitely met the delusional types at the table who loudly make claims like "this is not in your range!" after playing with me for 30 minutes, or "you're supposed to pay me off fish!"

I just smile.

My comment stands, except I should have directed it to Java. OP is out of line and ranging an opponent, within reason, is a learned skill. The fact that OP does not have that skill does not mean others are similarly unskilled.

All the posters are giving great reasons why ranging is crucial to winning poker.

Here's something for skeptics: Go play 500 hands online on Ignition Poker, download all the data 24 hours later, run it through a HUD, and replay the hands, putting your opponents on ranges. Ignition gives you the hole cards of your opponents, so you can test your skills at ranging.

Perhaps the OP is really reacting to this: Ranging is very hard to do in real time. Even if you can range in real time, you don't have the luxury of an equity calculator, which often yield surprising results.

In real time, it's better to use heuristic principles, like the ones gobbledygeek suggests. In addition:

1) don't lose chips with middling hands; extract value with strong hands;

2) attack opponents who check twice, miss a c-bet, or call on a drawy board; check, call or fold against opponents who 3-bet flop, 2-bet turn or river.

3) don't raise against calling stations

4) position, position, position, don't overvalue hands out of position preflop

5) Table selection is one of the most undervalued skill. Play in games where you are the best or second-best player.

6) embrace variance. OP, it seems like this would help you. If the good players beat the bad players all the time, the bad players would never play with us. Make the bad players feel good so that they want to play more than you. Give them a big smile when you get sucked out or get coolered. When you suck them out, treat them with kindness. Most players come expecting to lose their money. Let them have a good time doing so so that they'll come back. To the arrogant sharks who post to this forum and are better at poker than I am: I would never want to play with you. To the excellent helpful posters here who are better than I am: I'd be honored to lose my money to you.

Meh, just tar and feather the original OP

All this sensible talk might change our rep.

At last, someone understands what I was saying.

The holy concept of "ranging" is a practical impossibility at the table. It's sort of like a soldier in battle trying to measure the precise yardage to the enemy position (compensating for wind speed and direction, of course) so he can fire his weapon with optimal effectiveness. By the time he figures all that out, he'll be shot in the head.

But as a blasphemer, I do submit to whatever punishment is appropriate...

The fact that you think OP does not have that skill does not mean that OP actually lacks it. OP simply thinks it's not as valuable as it's touted to be.

OP apologizes for being "out of line," due to his neglect of DEKE01's Sacred Rules For What People Should and Shouldn't Be Allowed to Say (14th edition).

Ah, but it is possible to accurately range hands down to a very few hands, or even one. I've done it, as have many others. It's not that unique a skill. However, you seem to think some people claim to do it on all hands, all the time. This is false.

Being generous, I would say hands can be narrowed down that far 10% of the time, probably less. Ranging hands to a 75%+ accuracy, however, can be done about 2/3 of the time, or more. Which is more than enough to improve the quality of your decisions and profitability.

As to those that try to brag about ranging others, while in a game. I've seen them, in one form or another, for years. They know about a concept, learned a little and think they know a lot. We have a name for that type: know-it-all. You can be sure that anyone referring to ranging in-game in more than a casual reference, doesn't understand it very well.

One example I recall was a guy that talked about Skanskley bucks.

That should depend on the standard error of the variable, no? Live hold 'em is all but designed (and honed through evolution) to have a vast standard error.

Also assuming you're using .05 as the two-tailed p-value, which is pretty standard but always worth thinking about.


Absolutely! And incorporate tiny samples of data, as long as you're willing to reevaluate. You're better off with a "shaded" read that's right two-thirds of the time and wrong one-third, as long as you don't lean on it too heavily.

If a guy raises preflop 5 times in two orbits without showing down, I'll infer something between a population read (i.e. he just got good hands) and a read based on a small sample (he's aggro). I might shade this read up or down based on physical appearance or table talk.

But I would also look out for opportunities to update the read, either reinforcing or backing off from it.

Maybe we should distinguish between 1) ranging in the post-hand analysis we post here, and 2) putting opponents on hands live in real time. OP's point is 1) isn't really helping him with 2).

Does anyone really calculate EV with a range in live real time? Instead it's: what hands are beating me? Given my read and his play, how often does my opponent have those hands? What hands am I beating? How often does my opponent have those hands? In most cases, this all goes pretty quickly, and the decision is easy. We don't post those hands here.

The hands we do post are the tough ones like Hero OOP caught a piece of the flop with a trouble hand on a wet board against a weak player. Ranging here becomes a way to understand the dynamics of the hand. OP is reacting to the fact that posters often give all sorts of differing advice in the posts because a small change in range has a big effect on how to play the hand. I have more respect for the posters who in these situations reply: I would fold but a reasonable play given an alternative read is to raise.

It helps that the bulk of the player pool at $1-3 and $2-5 is quite passive, especially beyond the first aggressive action. It's not uncommon to be against someone who I would feel marginal about including AK or QQ in their 3-bet range, and probably not include KK in their 4!. Lots of NLHE players are driven mostly by fear.

Yeah, definitely don't do that.

Instead, try to throw out "strategy" that's on the level your opponents are already thinking on, which you want to infer. "Yeah, you had to check there. He probably has a flush." "Oh, I put you on ace-king, but you surprised me with queens!" Gish gallop. Baffle 'em with bull****.

On the military metaphor: German rangefinders in WWI were superior to the Allies'. Ludendorff said that the best defense against the British tank was nerves of steel to fire artillery accurately. The British tank was a useless weapon in its first eighteen months.

One quick heuristic I've found based on Ed Miller's The Course and lots of hands here:

Type 2 boards (semiconnected, semi-dynamic; think QT6, either rainbow or with two of suit) are the key ones where you need to evaluate barrel-bluffing strategy. Why Type 2, and what do I even mean by that?

- On Type 3 (JT8 two suits) your intuition about whether or not get involved is usually accurate.
- On Type 1 (K62) again your judgment is usually sensible.

But on Type 2, often you can barrel the turn with air on a favorable turn card but give up on a bad turn card. And after you think through a bunch of these, you realize that any new rank "in the zone" (e.g. between seven and king on QT6) improves a great part of a reasonable flop continuation range:


K obviously improves AJ, KQ, KT, J9. KJ now has top pair + open-ender. QJ, JT pair + OESD. AK, K9 top pair + gutshot.

J improves AJ to 2nd pair + gutshot. KJ to second pair + OESD. AK to Broadway. JJ, QJ, JT obviously improve. Etc.

9 improves almost everything. KJ, T9, 98, 97, 87. Possibly 99.

8 improves 97, T8, 98 (pair + gutter), 87, 86, etc.

7 improves 98, 87, 76, T8, 97, on and on.


You get the idea. This is a fairly common situation, and I don't need to think through all the reasonable hands that improve on QT6 when a 9 turns. I just note, while planning my line on the flop, that many turn cards are going to make my opponent more tenacious so I should plan my barreling strategy accordingly.

BTW board pairs aren't nearly as big a deal here btw. You should be aware, of course, but they make that particular card making trips less likely in your opponents' hand(s) than the other cards that hit the board.

I don't disagree with you, but unless the person you're ranging is the old man who hasn't dusted his chips off since 1976 I think it's very difficult, especially when only playing a couple of hours with someone, and them not showing any of their hands, to determine their entire range. If a player has thrown away hands for two hours just because he's card dead, you'd never think he could raise K6s under the gun. That's more what I was saying.

Nah. It’s more just being aware that there are factors to consider when taking your shot - you don’t need precision when the enemy gives his position away (bet sizing, lines they take, hands you see at showdown that took a certain line and sizing).

It’s that easy, equating ranging accuracy to usefulness/money making is theoretical drivel.

Whoa, that may be true, but we should be using a Baysian approach to ranges here and using a lot of priors of typical LP players. Ed Miller does a fantastic job of doing this in Playing the Player.

Yes. Ranging at the table is a blunt instrument at best.

However, it's also not all that valuable in retrospective analysis, as the data sets we have still aren't large enough to accurately determine ranges. Unless we've been playing with our particular V for years, of course. Most of the time, it's GIGO. Useful, perhaps, as an intellectual exercise, and an attempt to negate the fundamental aspect of poker: critical decisions must be made based on incomplete information.

Grunch- you could analyze large online databases for how different players play certain spots (the owners of this site can help you with software) also the whole GTO thingy lets you see how a computer constructs its range.

Ranging live is hard and sometimes it's made harder. In a 1/3 on the river, the pot was $1,200+ and I was facing an $850 shove, with one player left to act, I had already taken about 2 minutes and was narrowing in on a decision when a player, not in the hand, called a clock.

It was sufficiently distracting and the floor only gave me 30 seconds. I couldn't make a decision, so my hand was killed.

So yea, ranging live can be very tough.

(it worked out, the guy left in called and would have beat me)