Entry #5 - Perceived Ranges

New to LiquidPoker? Register here for free!

Forum Index > Poker Blogs

MARSHALL28 United States. May 01 2008 13:29. Posts 1904

Entry #5 - Perceived Ranges

This article is going to be a bit long, but I think worthwhile if you stick with it to the end because the insight I gained might help you to understand the inner workings of the game a little bit better, just as it has me.

Okay so, I've never been big on the mathematical side of poker, I mean, I can do the rudimentary calculations, but I've always relied on my psychological skills in order to beat the game. I think this is a big reason why I'm capable of high winrates versus thinking/adjusting players, yet tend to have so much trouble killing fish. So as an addendum to my recent post about my entire run up to 1knl being pure luck, I'm going to add that I ran very well over that period in time, but I've recently discovered a lot of the reason behind my success. That's what I am going to share in this article.

Anybody who frequents this blog knows that I play a crazy lag style, always trying to play big pots and always attempting to push my opponents off hands when mine is second best, or induce a bluff or calldown when I have the goods. That's basically what I did, and when you play a lot of big pots over a relatively short sample size (100k hands) your variance is going to be huge which is going to account for high (or low) winrates.

So I was just approached by a past student of mine who is struggling to beat the mid stakes games, he came to me with something along the lines of: I have taken the entire month of May off from work and want to focus purely on my poker game, what do you think I should do and is there any kind of deal you can offer me?

I thought about this for a little bit, and of course since I've coached him before, I already knew what some of his specific weaknesses were. But I also knew that he had been through the standard 'sweat and ask questions' style of coaching many times by many other players. This obviously hasn't gotten him to the point he wants to be. So what I ended up suggesting was a month long course, in this course, the majority of focus would be on discussion and application of the specific concepts necessary to beat the games he plays in. What I told him I'd do is come up with a syllabus (yep, homework assignments included) that covered the most pertinent topics, and we'd spend roughly 20 hours over the course of the month discussing these concepts, as well as reviewing the sessions he plays during this time to make sure he is understanding and applying these concepts correctly.

Obviously since I have never done anything like this before, I had to first figure out exactly how to structure this so that we would be covering the basics first and gradually progress to more advanced concepts. I've spent about six hours already preparing this, and I'll list here the topics we will be discussing in the structure that I came up with (so if anybody actually takes a look at it and thinks there might be something important I'm missing or that I've possibly structured it incorrectly please feel free to lend me your advice:

Hand ranges and game theory: Focusing on G-bucks, as well as comparing that mathematical approach to poker with Pooruser's article on Singularity, which takes the focus off the math and into a psychological approach.

Hand Reading;
A. Importance of position
B. Reading board texture
C. Knowing your opponent
D. Evaluating villains hand range
(I decided to leave out 3rd and 4th level range evaluations since I thought that aspect might be better covered at a later point)

Psychological fundamentals:
A. Balancing your range
B. metagame
C. Bet Sizing/Bet Timing (tells)
D. Multi-level thinking/Leveling

For the last week he said he wanted to talk somewhat about Live play since he plays in live deepstacked games regularly, so I thought a good way to finish it off would be to cover...

Live play; and
Deepstacked play

So from here I had to start scouring the internet, I've probably read close to 80 articles trying to pick out the best ones that illustrate these concepts. Most of what I found was garbage, generally a lot of what was posted on 2p2..... ironically (I'm hilarious aren't I?). But by wading through a lot of this muck, I actually came across quite a few VERY good articles that helped me personally to understand my own game and why I have struggled so much this year.

So anyways, late in 2007 during my huge upswing, I was constantly labeled by the better players in the game as a lag/station. I always knew I was a calling station, but my reasoning at the time seemed to be "Well, I've come this far, how can I let it go now, besides -- I'm not about to be bullied or pushed over by anyone." Now, based on my image, being a calling station was actually good, but not for the reasons I elicited above.

What I have learned by going through all of these articles about the way I approached the game has everything to do with perceived hand ranges. So here's how you have to think about it... The wider your perceived range preflop, necessarily, the worse your range will be by the time you get to the river. Conversely, the stronger (tighter) your perceived hand range is, it will necessarily have to be considered stronger by the time you get to the river. You can even take this a step further (or deeper if you wish) and presume that your perceived range is going to begin being assessed by your preflop action, but more importantly the position from which you acted, meaning position ends up being the most important thing in evaluating a hand range (Of course we are able to gather more information on later streets but that's a different and longer discussion).

So, getting to the point (finally I know), any thinking opponent is going to realize what I'm doing, and by betting and inflating the pot attempting to constantly push them out, they are forced to adjust in one of three ways, one to get run over, two to tighten up preflop and hope I don't notice him waiting for a hand, or three being to call me down and play back at me with a looser range, which would necessitate that his perceived range will also be weaker by the river THUS making my light call downs in the end generally positive expected value. ---Assuming I'm playing well and reading villain well, AND villain isn't TalentedTom or JonnyCosmo who own me and read my soul.

Anyways, hope this was insightful, because it was for me, GL,

Marshall

0 votes

Last edit: 01/05/2008 13:33

MilZo France. May 03 2008 21:20. Posts 1333

Nice read, thanks.

S1KLYF, this is the profession we chose