Home on the Range

The ability to accurately put your opponent on a hand is very difficult to develop. All of the top players are able to figure out an opponent’s hand with surprising speed and accuracy. It is much easier if you know your opponent well. In a live game, you can combine the way that he plays a hand (checks or bets, bet amounts, position, and so on) with physical characteristics (pauses, chip handling, voice, posture, and so on). When your opponent is relatively unknown to you, you must rely on guessing and comparing his play to what hand you think a typical player would have in order to take the actions that he has taken. One of the best ways to do this is to put your opponent on a range of hands, and then try to refine the range as the hand progresses. The unfortunate part of using this method is that even when you are right about his range, it often contains some hands that are much better than yours and some that are much worse. This means that it’s still not clear what you should do.

Let’s take a simple example: Your opponent makes a big all-in raise and you are sure that he has a big pair — aces, kings, or queens. You have two kings. What should you do? Against aces, you want to fold, but against queens, you want to call. Since there is already some money in the pot, you should probably call, especially if there is some chance that he has only A-K or a smaller pair. Still, you aren’t going to be happy when he has aces. I will now describe a hand from day 1 of the World Series of Poker Europe that illustrates the process and pitfalls of putting your opponent on a hand.

The blinds were 200-400, with a 50 ante, and I was in the big blind. Five players limped in. I generally don’t look at my holecards until it is my turn to act. If you don’t know what you have, you can’t give anything away. I had the A K. This is a spot in which I might raise with any two cards, hoping that no one will be able to call a big raise. This type of “punish the limpers” play used to be more effective when most players had never seen it. Now, this type of raise is more likely to be called or even reraised by a suspicious player. Since I have a real hand, I would welcome some action. I make a big raise to 3,500, which I hope looks suspicious. The first limper, who was under the gun, reraises to 8,000. Everyone else folds.

His play should show aces or kings. If it’s only a semi-legitimate reraise, it also might show A-K, queens, or jacks. There is, of course, some possibility that he really doesn’t have much of anything and is trying a resteal. I decide to call and await developments, especially since my A-K makes it mathematically half as likely that he has aces or kings. The flop comes K 10 4. This is certainly a good flop for me. I am now likely to be ahead of any hand except aces or kings. Kings are now extremely unlikely, since only the two red kings are unaccounted for. I am starting to think he was on some kind of bluff or semibluff. If this is the case, I don’t want him to stop betting, and if he really has aces, I’d like to lose as little as possible. I check. He checks!

This is very surprising. I expected him to bet with either aces or a bluff. The most likely explanation is that he was bluffing, and has now given it up. There is a small chance that he is making another tricky play (his first was the limp and reraise) with aces, or even a set of kings or tens. The turn is the 7, which now gives me a draw to the nut flush, as well as top pair with top kicker. There is around 20,000 in the pot already. He has another 40,000 left, and I have more. I lead for 13,000. I’m happy to win this nice pot right away, but I certainly don’t mind a call from some random hand that I have dominated. He moves all in! This is shocking. My first thought is that he had aces all along, but if that is true, he has chosen a line of play that is both risky and tricky. Two kings make the most sense, but that’s also mathematically the most unlikely hand. Perhaps he has decided to be tricky with some other type of hand — like A-Q, Q-J, or Q-Q, with the Q. I guess that his most likely hand is aces, and I have 11 outs (a club or a king), so I am getting almost enough pot odds to justify a call. When I consider that he also might have a wide range of bluffs or semibluffs, this becomes an easy call. I am preparing to call, but he seems strong. I start to wonder if he could have been stealing and backed into a club flush. I finally decide that he might make a smaller raise with an unexpected flush. I call.

Disaster! He shows the two red kings. Instead of the 11 outs I had versus aces, I have only eight clubs, since the 10 would give him a full house. I am mentally kicking myself for not trusting my gut feeling that he was strong when he moved in. Then, a miraculous club comes on the river. I win a huge pot, and go on to finish day 1 as one of the chip leaders.

I think this hand illustrates how an “expert” tries to put his opponent on a range of hands and make the best decision possible based on that range. You are probably thinking, “Some expert; this donkey Zolotow managed to get most of his chips into the pot without ever having the best hand, or even appropriate odds for playing the worst hand.”

Steve “Zee” Zolotow, aka The Bald Eagle, is a successful games player. He currently devotes most of his time to poker. He can be found at many major tournaments and playing on Full Tilt, as one of its pros. When escaping from poker, he hangs out in his bars on Avenue A — Nice Guy Eddie’s on Houston and Doc Holliday’s on 9th Street — in New York City.