Range Composition

Overview

Equipped with the basic ideas of betting, it is time to take a deeper look into managing ranges. In short, we want to choose our checks and bets carefully to cater to all hand classes we have in our range.

Hand Classes

Hands in your range can be categorized as one of five types:

1. Nuts – The strongest possible hands on a given board. These hands generally want to play for stacks.
2. Strong Made Hands – Clear value hands that benefit from betting for value. Hands like strong top pairs and two pairs generally fall into this category.
3. Marginal Made Hands – Decent hands that usually win against the weaker portion of the opponent’s range are referred to as showdown value. These hands generally want to get to showdown without putting too much money in the pot. Hands like weak pairs and Ace-high generally fall into this category.
4. Draws – Hands that can improve to nutted hands. These hands benefit when the opponent folds but also benefit from seeing more cards since this allows them to potentially upgrade to a nutted hand.
5. Junk – Weak hands that have low equity and low prospects for improvement. These hands often give up or are used as bluffs.

Building Strong Ranges

If we always bet with our nuts/value and always check with our weaker hands, we become exploitable. Opponents will be able to attack our weak checking range and fold to our strong betting range, which will cause our strong hands to miss out on value and force our weak hands to fold their equity. If we always bet or always check our draws, either our checking range or betting range will lack nutted hands on draw-completing turns and rivers.

Instead, we must mix some draws and some nuts into both our betting and checking ranges. Our betting range can still contain mostly strong hands, and our checking range can still be largely weaker hands, but by sprinkling some bluffs and nuts we can balance out our range and make it a lot more difficult for an opponent to exploit us.

A Note on GTO

Maintaining ranges exactly as a Game Theory Optimal solution does is humanly impossible. However, we can strive to understand what the solver does and why and apply these concepts in a practical way. By studying a solver, we not only improve our own baseline strategy, we also better understand the flaws of our opponents and how to exploit them. The next time you suspect your opponent has an overly strong betting range or an overly weak checking range, you’ll know just how to respond!