Board Textures And Hand Ranges

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Last issue I wrote about how the most useful way to read hands relies on the concept of hand ranges. Because your opponents do not provide you perfect information with their checks, bets, and raises, you cannot quickly narrow down their holdings to just one or a few hands. Instead, you must assign ranges of hands to them given their actions, and you can refine these ranges as the hand proceeds.

You’re off to a good start if you can come up with relatively accurate hand ranges for your opponents as you play. But it’s also important to use these ranges to make the best playing decisions. The first step to doing that is to consider how hand ranges interact with board textures.

A board texture is classification of board type based on what hands the board makes probable. For instance, a board of K 8 6 2 makes flushes probable, but full houses and straights impossible and two pair hands relatively improbable. Given the sorts of hands people generally play, a board of K J T makes straights, two pairs, pairs, and straight draws relatively probable, while flushes and full houses are impossible. These are two very different board textures.

Different board textures interact with players’ hand ranges in different ways. Some textures paired with some ranges will produce a lot of strong and medium-strength hands. We saw an example of this in the last article. Our opponent in that hand raised preflop with a range of 22+, A7+, KT+, QT+, JT, T9s-54s. The flop came Q T 7 . Most of the hands in our opponent’s range flopped either a pair or better or a straight or flush draw on this flop. Usually you shouldn’t bluff when an opponent’s range fits so well with the board texture. With a bad hand in this situation, you should typically just give up.

Other board textures will produce mostly weak hands. For instance, our opponent raises preflop with the same hand range as before. The flop comes 6 4 3 . How does our opponent’s range fit with this board?

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