How to widen your range against fish

Dara O'Kearney says that most Regs pick the wrong hands to go to battle with bad players.

When you know a player is weak, the adjustment should universally be to play more hands against them. Whether they are too tight or too loose, if they are going to be making mistakes, you want to be in the hand with them when they do. 

The biggest mistake I see regulars make is they take this too far and play too many hands against fish. There is a more sensible way to widen your range against bad players. 

This is a GTO UTG opening range at 40BBs: 

The mistake I see Regulars make when widening vs fish is they will add hands like A9o, K9o, and QTo to the range. These hands are usually only good for winning a small pot and if another good Reg spots what they are doing, they can 3-bet and force them to fold. 

Widen with nutted hands

Instead of adding hands like A9o or QTo, they should instead be adding 'nuttier' hands like A2s, K5s and 22. There are less combinations of these hands so you can add more of them, and they are much better hands because they can flop Gin. 

A hand like K5s or 22 will play better multiway and can play better as a defend against a 3-bet. When you hit well with a hand like this you can happily get your stack in. 

When Regs add A9o to their range, they are taking a risk to mostly just steal the blinds. When you, instead, add a hand like K5s to your range you are looking to stack somebody. 

So if you are playing against a bad player, play more pots with them, but do so with hands that you plan to stack off with when you hit. 

If you want more insight like this, Dara has a regular newsletter where he gives free tips like this all the time.