Reading Hands Using Hand Ranges

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Reading hands is a critical poker skill. The better you can key in on the sort of hands your opponents have, the better decisions you will make, and the better your results will be. Most players use some sort of hand reading process to inform their decisions.

But not all hand reading processes are equally good. Many of them are hit-or-miss, leading the practitioners to make occasional brilliant plays, but perhaps even more often leading them astray. These hit-or-miss systems often have something in common: They focus quickly on one (or a few) possible holding to the exclusion of other possibilities. You may have heard someone relate a hand story to you that sounds like this:

“Well, he raised preflop and I called with 6-6. The flop was Q-T-7, but I put him on A-K so I decided to call him down unless another big card came.”

The problem with this thinking is the narrow focus on one hand, in this case A-K. Sure, most players raise preflop when they get A-K, but they also raise with A-A, K-K, Q-Q, J-J, and often many other hands. Many players would fire a continuation bet on a Q-T-7 flop with many of those holdings, not just A-K. It’s misleading to focus so narrowly on just a single possible holding so early in the hand. Instead, when you’re reading hands, you should think in terms of hand ranges.

Thinking in terms of hand ranges acknowledges that we can’t have perfect knowledge using just the small bits of information we get during a poker hand. A preflop raise doesn’t indicate specifically A-K or J-J or any other hand. The most we can know is that, typically, when our opponent raises he’ll have, to use an example for a hypothetical opponent, one of the following hands: any pocket pair, an ace with a seven or better, two cards ten or higher, or maybe a suited connector. (When discussing hand ranges, writers generally use a shorthand notation. The preceding hand range could be written in a short hand as 22+, A7+, KT+, QT+, JT, T9s-54s.)

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