Either He Was Winning, or I Was

It's black - it's white

A very interesting - and intelligent - change has come over the poker community in recent years. Since the 1980s, I would hear people say, "I put him on ace-queen, so I …" or, "I put him on a straight draw, which meant …" That is, people would assign their opponent essentially a specific hand, and then proceed from there. But the truth of poker is rarely that simple. Few players are so completely transparent or unidimensional that we can reliably say, "He has a pair of jacks." Sure, there are certainly times when you can read a hand that accurately. In particular, weak-passive players sometimes play their hands all but faceup. I'll give two examples, just for completeness:

Limit hold'em: A very weak, extremely passive player three-bets an early-position raiser. The big blind calls, as does the initial raiser. The flop comes 10-8-3 rainbow. Both players check to the three-bettor, who checks, as well. The turn is a king. They both check again, and he bets. Yes, he has A-K; you can take that to the bank.

No-limit hold'em tournament (in fact, I saw this one happen): It's early in a major tournament, with essentially everybody at 10,000 in chips. The blinds are 25-50. The under-the-gun (UTG) player opens for a raise to 150. Everyone folds to the small blind, who makes it 600. It's back to the UTG player, and he makes it 2,100. The small blind thinks briefly, and tosses five more 1,000-denomination chips into the pot. The UTG player freezes like a deer in the headlights. He thinks long and hard. Ultimately, he mutters under his breath and mucks his hand. I saw one of the hands - I won't say which one - but I think it's safe to say that if both participants in that pot were thinking players (and they were), one of them had A-A and the other had K-K.

However, both of my examples above are by far the exception. It's rare that you can so surgically extract a player's exact hand from the range of holdings he might have. And that's the magic word: range. Over the past few years, I hear the very good players, particularly the young Internet kids, say, "Well, I thought his range was 8-8 plus, A-10 plus, K-J plus," that sort of thing. There's even software out now that will enable you to see how your hand stands up against a range - using the exact sort of notation that I used in the previous sentence.

When you start thinking like that, you become much more dangerous, because your decisions are correct (assuming that you model your opponent's range well) against a much more realistic set of hands than, "Well, I put him on A-J, so I didn't think the queen hit him."

This brings me to a limit hold'em hand I played recently.

I was playing six-max hold'em online, and had 7-5 suited in the big blind. Everyone folded to the button, who raised. Well, my stats (and notes) on this guy said that his raising range, when opening from the button, was probably the top half of his cards. For 7-2 odds, it was well worth taking a flop. The flop was K-10-7, with a two-flush (not my suit). So, I had bottom pair and no kicker. In a six-max game, against a button raiser, this hand might well have to go to the river. I checked, and, as expected, he bet. Folding was out of the question, but should I check-raise and try to take control? I decided not to. My opponent was very aggressive, and would happily three-bet just about any king, Q-J, the flush draw, and probably a few other hands. I had no interest in a raising war, given my hand. So, I just called. The turn was another 10. That was actually a pretty good card for me, as it didn't change who was winning. I checked, actually thinking about check-raising if he bet. With my measly pair of sevens, and the flush draw out there, a lot of cards could be scary on the river. If I could move him off something like A-9 right now, I'd be delighted to do so. I'm still not sure if I would have check-raised the turn, and we'll never know, because he checked behind me. Hmm. The river was a completely blank trey. It didn't make the flush, and wasn't an overcard to my pair.

What now? First, I had to think about my opponent's range of hands. Suddenly, with laserlike clarity, it came to me. He had exactly one of two hands: a king or a flush draw. With the king, he'd want to see a showdown, but not have to face a check-raise if I had (or chose to represent) a 10. With the flush draw, he'd certainly want to see the river card - again, not wanting to pay two big bets on the turn for it.

I figured that he was about a 7-3 favorite to have the king, based on the range of hands he would have raised. But this told me an important thing: If I bet, he would fold his flush draw and call with a king. I could get no value from betting. So, I checked, and he bet. Thinking it through again, I could find no flaw in my logic; 70 percent of the time, he had a king, or the moral equivalent (for example, pocket nines); 30 percent of the time, he had the busted flush draw and was trying to salvage the pot. Getting 4-1 on my money, it was an easy call.

He did, in fact, have the busted flush draw. It was actually stronger than that - as he had A-J suited of the trump suit. So, he had a whopping 20 outs on the turn.

Most importantly, I felt good about the decision I'd made. Of course, if he'd turned up a king, I would have been disappointed. But I expected to be disappointed, as one does when the thing one wants has only a 30 percent chance of happening.

You see here the value of "putting" your opponent on a range of hands, rather than just a single mythical read. In this case, that range was just two broad groups, with a probability for each. But that thinking enabled me to make the right decision - whether I'd won the pot or not.

Lee Jones is an executive host for the European Poker Tour and the author of the best-selling book Winning Low Limit Hold'em.