In The Incentives Behind Every Poker Decision, we explained what betting, checking, raising, calling, and folding accomplish.
The next step is deciding which hands in our range should take each action.
Throughout this article, we will use a 100bb BTN vs BB single-raised pot spot at NL50 where BB faces a 75% pot bet on K95.
Your range is a team
Although we only hold one hand, that hand is part of an entire range.
Think of your range as a team. Every hand is a player, and each player must be assigned to the role it performs best.
If every strong hand raises, our calling range becomes weak. If every weak hand bluffs, our raising range will contain too many bluffs. If every hand with reasonable equity continues, we end up calling too many hands.
A good strategy does not find an action that works for each hand in isolation. Instead, it divides the entire range into groups that work together.
Start with the roles
Before deciding which action your hand should take, identify the roles your range needs to fill.
Facing a bet on K95, BB needs:
- strong hands that raise for value
- weak hands that raise as bluffs
- medium-strength hands that call
- some strong hands that remain in the calling range
- weak hands that fold
The available roles will change from one decision to another. For example, in a check-or-bet spot, the range will instead need value bets, bluffs, strong checks, medium-strength checks, and give-ups.
The process, however, remains the same:
First identify the roles the range needs. Then choose the hands best suited to fill them.
Choose the best candidates
Some hands have similar EVs across multiple actions. When constructing your overall strategy, the goal is not just to determine whether a hand can raise, call, or fold, but to determine which role it fills better than the other hands available.
Value raises
In our K95 example, sets such as 99 and 55 are natural value-raising candidates, as they are far ahead of BTN’s betting range and benefit greatly from building the pot.
K9 is another strong raise candidate. It is ahead of weaker Kx, draws, and other hands BTN will continue with.
However, not every strong hand raises all the time. In this solution, both 99 and K9 call at a significant frequency despite their strength.
This serves two purposes. Calling may still earn similar EV, and keeping strong hands in the calling range prevents it from becoming too weak.
The best value raises are not simply the strongest hands. They are the strong hands that gain the most from raising instead of calling.
Bluff raises
BB also needs weaker hands to raise alongside its value raises, otherwise the raising range becomes too strong and BTN can simply fold its bluff catchers.
Hands such as QJs, QTs, JTs, 87s, and 76s are solid candidates in this solution. These hands have limited showdown value, but they do have several properties that make bluff-raising attractive:
- they can make stronger hands fold
- they can all improve to straights
- most combos have backdoor flush draws
- they can continue bluffing on useful turns
QJs, for example, can turn the nut straight on a ten and may pick up additional equity on other cards. This makes it a much better bluffing candidate than a weak hand with few ways to improve or continue applying pressure.
Good bluffing candidates benefit significantly from folds while retaining useful equity or future betting opportunities when called.
Calls
Many of BB’s single pair hands prefer calling.
Hands such as K4s, K3s, and K2s are ahead of BTN’s bluffs and weaker value bets, but raising would usually force those hands to fold, leaving us against a much stronger continuing range.
The same principle applies to many of the 9x and 5x hands. They are strong enough to continue but usually gain little from raising.
Calling is the right role for hands that benefit from continuing but would lose value by making the opponent’s range stronger.
Folds
The remaining hands must fold.
This includes many ace-high hands, underpairs, and weak unpaired hands. Some of these hands may still have equity, but they cannot realize enough of it to justify calling the 75% pot bet.
These hands also make poor raising candidates. They lack useful blockers, draws, and future opportunities found in better bluffing candidates.
Folding is not a failure to find a role. It is how the range minimizes losses with weak hands.
Compare similar candidates
The easiest way to understand these roles is to compare hands that appear capable of taking the same action.
Both 55 and KQ are strong enough to continue, but 55 gains much more from building the pot and becomes a natural pure value raise. KQ benefits more from keeping BTN’s bluffs and weaker pairs in the pot, making it a better call.
QJs and AQo are both unpaired hands, but QJs has useful backdoor draws and more turn cards on which it can continue applying pressure. This makes it a better bluff-raising candidate, while AQo folds.
The relevant question is not whether a hand could fill a role, but whether it fills that role better than the other candidates available.
Every choice affects the rest of the range
Assigning a hand to one role removes it from every other role.
When K9 raises, it can no longer strengthen the calling range. When QJs bluff-raises, it can no longer call and realize its equity. When a backdoor hand folds, we give up our chance of improving but avoid overpaying to continue.
Every decision therefore comes with a tradeoff.
If we raised every set and two pair combo, our calls would become vulnerable. If every draw raised, the calling range would contain too few hands capable of improving on dynamic runouts. If every weak hand bluffed, the raising range would become too weak.
This is one reason solvers mix actions. A hand may be useful in more than one part of the strategy, with neither option performing significantly better than the other.
A hand’s strategy depends not only on what that hand gains from a certain role, but also on what the rest of the range loses when it is removed.
Roles can change
A hand’s role is not permanent.
K9 may call the flop as a trap before raising or betting for value on a later street. A hand like QJs may begin as a bluff raise, but become a value hand after turning a ten. A weaker draw may continue bluffing on a favorable turn but give up when the board changes in a way that benefits the BTN.
New cards and actions change the incentives behind each decision. As those incentives change, hands may be reassigned to different roles.
Roles are plans for the current decision, not permanent labels attached to a hand.
Common mistakes
Beginners often:
- make decisions based only on their exact hand
- ask whether a hand can take a certain action instead of asking whether it is the best candidate
- raise every strong hand and weaken the calling range
- bluff every hand without showdown value
- continue with every hand that has reasonable equity
- treat folds as mistakes
- ignore how a choice affects the rest of the range
- assume a hand must keep the same role on future streets
Key takeaways
At any given decision point, a range must divide its hands between different strategic roles.
Strong hands compete for value raises, weak hands compete for bluffing opportunities, marginal hands often call, and hands that cannot continue profitably fold.
Your job is not simply to find an acceptable action for your exact hand. It is to decide which role that hand fills better than the other hands in your range.
Once you understand the roles a range needs, solver strategies become much easier to interpret. The actions and mixed frequencies stop looking like isolated decisions and begin to look like different parts of one complete strategy.