[Closed] I can't understand ranges...

I'm not entirely sure of this, but I think I'm pretty close. It'll be a good test for me to see if I did understand it correctly, so here goes...

A range is a set of cards you think your opponent may have. For example, you could say you think he has a PP of 77 or higher, or AJo or higher. These ranges are based on reads most of the time, or they could be based on statistics.
In the last case, you could for example have an opponent playing 25/5 all the time (thats a VP$IP of 25 and a PFR of 5). If you have enough hands on him, you could base your read on that. I believe it's something like this: he'll call with the top 25% of cards, and raise with the top 5%. So if you see him call, but not raise, you could say he has 2 cards that belong between 75 and 95%. (This I am not entirely sure on, again, mostly as I don't have extended hand histories on other people (never more than 250 hands) and don't like my play based on such a small samplesize, and other than that, I mostly play without, especially now since I'm playing more sng's than anything else)

Don't think all this for granted, but I think it may get you started

oh, only just now noticed this was the sng forum - in fact, I dont use stats at all for these. Reason? The playstyle changes too much during the course of a sng, so you cant rely on them, imo

I know cannell agrees with me, but apparently theres people (other coaches) who dont, its really up to you to see if you want to use a HUD

Hi Biglion,

fostieh has pretty much explained. Almost every decision in the end game of a SnG will rely on ranges. Before you act you need to know what range of cards your opponant will raise or call with. A great tool for playing and learning hand ranges with is ICM trainer, found here.

ICM should help you alot with these ranges.

Best regards,
Stiev

Originally posted by cannell555
Hi Biglion,

fostieh has pretty much explained. Almost every decision in the end game of a SnG will rely on ranges. Before you act you need to know what range of cards your opponant will raise or call with. A great tool for playing and learning hand ranges with is ICM trainer, found here.

ICM should help you alot with these ranges.

Best regards,
Stiev

Thanks Fostieh and cannell. My question was directed to understand what chenny8888 in his video and all the trainers call hand ranges ...

Is the concept that Fostieh said?

I used the ICM Trainer for a while. I think I will use it some more time and try to improve my game. Its really ugly in the endgame and that's the most complex part of it.

Anyway, besides that I don't have a good endgame play I have a ROI over 25% in Full Tilt and PokerStars.

Hello Biglion,

A range is basically a group of cards that you can put your opponent on. This can either be a fixed group e.g. like Fostieh said the top 5% or top 20% of the starting hands - or even more specific hands. For example you could say on a specific board such as 3s6s8h that your opponent who is a rock has a very tight re-raising range that consist only of strong hands such as sets, overpairs and combo draws. Therefore you could tighten his hands down to 33, 66, 88, 5s7s, JJ, QQ, KK, AA (just as an example).

Since it is next to impossible to put your opponents on SPECIFIC hands, you should always think in hand-ranges (so all hands he might be playing like this with).

A good tool for understanding ranges and playing with them is the Equilator

There is also an article on the Equilator and ranges in general - but since this is gold you cant read it yet: http://www.pokerstrategy.com/strategy/fixed-limit/1047/

Basically what you can do with the equilator is calculate the equity of a specific hand against another specific hand OR the equity of a specific hand vs an opponents range:

In sit and goes this is important since in the late phase people start pushing with a broad range of hands and it is important to know your approximate equity against their range.

Hope to have helped!

Best regards,
SoyCD