Because the number of playable hands can be insanely wide in heads-up play, MasterLJ recommends narrowing down an opponent's holdings based on "hand reading" rather than the traditional "hand ranges."
He describes this method in "Heads Up: Zero to Sixty in 15,5650 Seconds, Part 3 of 6."
Instead of starting with an assumption of what your opponent could have, MasterLJ suggests using deductive reasoning to determine your opponent's hand type. You ask yourself, "would my opponent play a draw like that? Would he play top pair like that? Would he bluff this kind of flop?"
It's difficult to evaluate hands HU based mostly on hand ranges, which is what most full ring and six-max players are used to. Thinking about other ways to deduce my opponents' holdings will help my game, although it'll take a lot of practice.
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12 comments:
Your last statement is key.
It's one thing to make mention of alternative means of reading a villain's hand, it's another thing altogether to teach your mind this different way of thinking after being so trained and familiar with a particular thought process.
I don't understand the distinction between hand reading and evaluating hand ranges...sound like synonyms to me...
Spritpot,
"Hand ranges" and "hand reading" are similar. I believe the distinction MasterLJ was trying to make is that it's so difficult to put people on a hand when they're seeing a flop with more than half of them. So rather than trying to start with a general range and narrowing it down, it's more effective to reason out whether an opponent's actions are consistent with the flop texture and his previous plays in similar situations.
Of course there's plenty of overlap between hand ranges and hand reading.
The main difference is how you think about the problem.
Isn't the way you put someone on a range by evaluating whether an opponent's actions are consistent with the hands in that range, given the board? "Hand ranges" doesn't mean starting with a range and then getting it down to only one hand, it means getting it down to a group of hands he could have.
The difficulty is that when hand ranges are so wide, it's hard to put many oppponents on any reasonable group of hands.
Yea that's what makes HU play difficult...but how is "hand reading" different? You're trying to pick one specific hand and just assume he has that rather than considering all the hands he could have?
Clearly when someone is raising 30% before the flop and c-betting 100% of the flop, you have no choice but to go with hand ranges at that point. But if someone raises 30% before the flop and c-bets 75% of the time, even that apparently small difference between 100% and 75% is larger than it looks, because it strongly implies that your opponent does not bet when he completely misses. At that point, you can start thinking in terms of what types of hands at least partially fit the flop, which I suspect is what MasterLJ is getting at (didn't watch the video- have to pay???).
That's just an example. You can apply the idea to any street or betting sequence - i.e., look at the board, look at the action so far, then map possible opposing hands onto that.
Working from the board/action back to the hand is more useful against very loose opponents because (a) you often have much fewer hands to worry about, and (b) it makes you more likely to consider hands that would be low probability otherwise. For example, Gus Hansen calls your preflop raise, then check-calls when the flop comes 742 rainbow. Check-calling hands that fit this flop are the trap hands 77 (unlikely, because Gussie would likely have reraised preflop), 44, 22, 74, 72, and 42, and the drawing hands 85 and 53, plus maybe the gutshots. Gussie would likely have bet or check-raised with just a pair, so you can throw those out. The point is that by looking at the board first and listening to the action, then putting Gus on a range of hands, the resulting list is a lot smaller than if you start with the range of hands Gus would call a preflop raise with (almost anything) and try to narrow it down.
Against (good) tight players, however, starting with the hand range often makes more sense, not only because you are dealing with fewer hands, but also because good tight players tend to exploit their image by firing multiple barrels even when they have zilch. That's something Gus-type players can't do, because they know they're going to get called. So against good tight players, you often have to just assume they have the same hand they started with, and their firing at the pot doesn't mean squadoosh.
But then you have bad tight players, who are predictable, i.e., they don't put any more money in after the flop unless they have something, in which case going back to the board->action->hand line of reasoning works better.
Good points.
_ The video is only available if you're a CardRunners member, but I figured I'd link to it anyway.
_ "Hand Reading" is kind of a fuzzy idea. It seems to me that by hand reading, you're making decisions based on flop textures, match flow and "feel" more than an opponent's difficult-to-define range.
_ I agree with the idea that hand ranges become less effective against loose players and more effective against tight ones. When hand ranges are too wide (especially against opponents who float too often or check-raise bluff with air, for example), they're not nearly so useful.
Both hand reading and hand ranges are just names for trying to figure out what the other guy has. It seems to me that in most common usage, "hand reading" means picking out one hand that you think a guy has, where as "hand ranges" means realizing that it's possible for a guy to have a number of different hands (though not all, obviously, or at least not all equally as likely) and assigning probabilities to each of them. It can't possibly be contraversial that, at least without time or computational constraints, "hand ranges" is more useful than "hand reading" by these definitions.
Right, MasterLJ is using a different definition of "hand reading."
It sounds like it just means using flop texture and game flow to help define his hand range....
Also to greylocks...a player c-betting 75% doesn't mean he's c-betting the top 75% of his range. It probably means he bets good to very good hands, and really terrible hands with no chance of improvement, and checks behind some hands that have some limited showdown value and/or could improve on some turn cards. E.g., on a KT3r board you might bet any king, AA, TT, 33, QJ, 22, 44-99, but check behind KK, JT, A3, QQ-JJ, and AJ.
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