Your opponents’ range
Let’s be honest, poker online is sometimes a game of guessing and gut feeling. When you’re in the heart of that no-limit tournament, faced with a huge decision, we can preach all we want about the mathematics and statistics and probabilities until we’ve lost our voices, but after studying your opponent, it’s the gut feeling that’s going to make the call some of the time. There’s no avoiding it.
Poker experts understand this, and accept it, and that’s why they’re also using another tactic to their advantage during play – trying to put your opponents on a specific hand, or more reasonably, a “range” of hands – and then working through in their head how they would play if they had the same hand. Since you obviously don’t know your opponents’ down cards, some of this is inevitably guesswork.
At the beginning of a hand, the range is going to be wider. This is because there are more unknown cards, and more possibilities. As the hand progresses, the range narrows to a manageable number of hands. However, as this range narrows, so does your time to act accordingly. A truly great poker player not only knows the odds, and not only can read their PokerStars opponents for tells and weaknesses, but also has a talent for assigning an accurate range.
Of course, when I say guesswork, you’re not throwing darts in the dark here. There’s a process of educated guessing that goes into an assigned range. It’s not as easy as you might think, but it’s not that difficult to get the basics down, either. It’s not only the cards that help determine a range, specifically the flop. It’s also the players reaction to the cards and earlier bets. If a player limps in, and only calls after the flop, you can probably eliminate over pairs from the players’ range. The range narrows to low pairs and a possible flush or straight draw, depending on the flop. This is just one example of how a player can use his knowledge to assign a range. Once you make that assignment, you compare the range against your own hand, assess how you’d play both, and you have a much better idea of what position you’re in to win the hand and/or make as much money off pipe-dream calls as you can before they fold.