Hi,

Can anyone please explain how splitting ranges works? And some examples?

If not, do you know where I could find some information out please?

It may mean how certain parts (chunks) of heroes and villains range would play a certain way on flops.

Thanks

With every action you take in a hand, you further reveal your range to your opponent.

button raises 3x, small blind folds, I call in the big blind.

Just the act of calling preflop gives my opponent information about my range. He can probably rule out TT+, AK from my range. So when the flop hits:

QJTr

he can rule out sets and broadway. My range is capped at the low straight with 98 and at two pair (QJ, QT, JT). He can use this information to profit with non nut hands.

I think polarising your range is a more common term for it. An example would be that if you never raise pre flop except with AA-QQ, then your opponent will very easily be able to put you on a range when you raise pre (your range being AA-QQ). However, if you start to raise pre with hands like mid suited connectors then that polarises your range, giving your opponent less information, which is always a good thing.
This becomes more important when 3 betting. If you only ever 3 bet the top of your range then you will rarely get action. However, if you polarise your 3 betting range, and your opponents see that you occasionally 3bet light, then you will get more action on your big hands.
This is obviously quite an advanced strategy, and you shouldnt just be going wild with it and 3betting crap hands just to polarise your range. There are definitley article on this site dedicated to good hands to polarise with, and I would strongly suggest searching them out.

When you say splitting ranges, what i think of is this:

You are at a certain point in a hand, there is a range of hands that you could have here.

You have the choise to bet/raise or check/call. You would do both options with a subrange of the range of hands you have now. You need to split your current range in 2 ranges that are both balanced. For example, this would indicate that you cannot raise all of your best hands because then your calling range would lack those type of hands and thus become unbalanced. Usually we do that anyway though causing our bet/raising range to become polarised (containing mostly the strong hands and the weak speculative ones) while our calling range becomes condensed (containing mostly the medium hands)

And that brings the polarizing vs not polarizing discussion. I have to say i havent seen much of that discussion, but i assume it must be there because it seems to me that leaving a converged calling range by polarizing your betting range is something that is going to be abused by strong players. Espescially if you are going to do this while 10 tabling and looking mostly at a villains total stats instead of the specific interaction between you and this villain.

I havent read the full book, only the free to download 70 page exerpt, but millers poker 1% goes into this a little in these free 70 pages. applications of no limit holdem goes deeper into it. If you really want to learn about these concepts, you should not skip on buying these books imo. You need those as a basis and then go discuss on small and medium stakes forums where all this comes to its right. For beginners like us this is not yet what we should worry about i think.

It's much more complex than the following, but basically...

Betting/raising ranges are typically polarized (strong hands, semi-bluffs).
Checking/calling ranges are typically mid-strength hands (bluff-catchers).

e.g. I raise otb, BB calls.

Flop comes K92tt.
I will usually c-bet a polarized range, including the nuts (top set), two pairs and TPTK at the top of my range, and balance these value hands with some flush draws, gutshots and very weak pairs.
I'll check back mid-strength hands like K5 and JJ.
At the bottom of my range will be some total air like 76s that doesn't even have a BDFD. I might save money by just giving up with "zero equity hands" if I don't think villain is folding.

So my range in position as the PFR is split into groups like this:
1. Value bets.
2. Mid-strength made hands.
3. Semi-bluffs.
4. "Give ups".

I bet groups 1 and 3, and check back 2 and 4.

Villain will break his range into similar groups, but since he's typically checking before my c-bet, his range is 3 groups: Check-raises (monsters and good draws), Check-calls (mid-strength hands - aka bluffcatchers - with showdown value), Check-folds (air).

Awesome, thanks guys

Normally when I hear people talk about 'splitting ranges' it's about splitting a betting range into multiple ranges with different bet sizes.

I've been thinking about this for some time and don't really "get it" from a theory standpoint. If all our different betsizings are perfectly balanced, what would are we actually accomplishing by splitting the betting range, instead of using just one sizing?

Where villain's range is capped to x, we might want to overbet >x and bet some of the top end of villain's range for a smaller size.

Yeah actually thought it was something to do with that, makes sense.

I mean there are other spots too, that's one of the most obvious