Disguising Your Range

I’ve been going through some of the bigger pots I played last month, particularly those I lost, and have been trying to discern if I have any major leaks I can fix. In regards to my preflop play, I found I had quite a few suboptimal preflop stack-offs which were not that terrible but which I think could have been avoided if I was paying more attention to the players and the game flow. One stack-off for example involved me cold 4-betting two LAGS with AK. While this is usually a fine play, if I had simply taken the time to look at the 3-bettor’s 3-bet stat, I would have seen that his 3-bet was only 3.6% overall and just 2% from the button! In other words, I could have had an easy muck, but instead ran AK into AA. For the most part though, I think my preflop leaks will be fairly easy to fix. They mainly involved lapses of concentration, usually from playing too many tables, rather than some fundamental misunderstanding of preflop play.

In regards to my postflop play though, I did discover one thing which significantly piqued my interest. Before I talk about it though, I’ll firstly walk through one hand in which the concept arose. I think this is a fairly interesting hand in and of itself and it also constitutes the biggest pot I’ve ever played in terms of big blinds – 700BB!

Party Poker, $3/$6 NL Hold'em Cash Game, 6 Players
LeggoPoker.com - Hand History Converter


Hero (CO): $2,075.65

BTN: $2,938.20

SB: $1,304.10

BB: $1,203

UTG: $1,164.65

MP: $1,075.80

Pre-Flop: K 9 dealt to Hero (CO)

UTG folds, MP calls $6, Hero raises to $30, BTN calls $30, 2 folds, MP calls $24

Preflop is super standard. I isolate a 45/9/1.6 fish and get called by the button and the fish.

Flop: ($99) A T 2 (3 Players)

MP checks, Hero bets $74, BTN calls $74, MP folds

The flop is also pretty standard. I flop the NFD on an Ace high flop and make a continuation bet of 3/4 pot. Nothing untoward yet.

Turn: ($247) 6 (2 Players)

The turn is where it starts getting a little bit interesting. When my opponent peels the flop, I’m putting him on a pretty wide range of hands; flush draws, pairs and flush draws, a pair of aces, a pair of tens, maybe jacks as well. Being as deep as we are, there is almost no chance he slowplays a big hand such as a set or two pair on the flop; he’d want to build up the pot and get the money in, especially with the fish in the pot who is liable to stack off with any Ace. On the turn therefore, I’m in a fairly nice situation; I know my opponent is weak. However, despite this, I don’t think I can profitably double barrel (whether I can triple barrel profitably is another question altogether). The reason for this is that, being this deep, my opponent can almost peel anything that he peeled the flop with. This means that to win the pot I’ll have to fire a third barrel into an unknown range on the river. This is problematic for obvious reasons. If, for example, the river comes a Jack, I’d want to fire if I knew he had a ten or a flush draw (or both) but I wouldn’t want to fire if I knew he had a hand like AJ, TJ or even just Ax. Since there is no way of knowing which category of hand he has, I’d be put into a very ugly river spot.

So I go ahead and check.

Hero checks, BTN bets $222

Now, while I said I don’t think a turn bet is profitable, I said nothing about a turn check-raise! To see why this is, we need to think about what information his turn bet gives us and how we can use that information to narrow down his range. When my opponent peels the flop, his hand falls into one of two categories: a one pair hand that wants to get to showdown, or a draw. When I check on the turn, it makes little sense for my opponent to now come out betting his one pair hands. He faces the prospect of a check-raise that will blow him off his hand and he is only really protecting against a flush draw anyway, which I rarely have. In short, it is very unlikely when my opponent makes this bet that he is doing this with Ax or Tx or JJ; people who pot control the flop usually continue doing so by checking back the turn. What this means is that when my opponent does bet the turn his range consists almost entirely of draws now looking to take the pot away. After all, a draw doesn’t want to check through the turn, miss the river and face an easy check-call by me since their line will look exactly like their hand. Thus, while a turn barrel on my part followed by a call by our opponent doesn’t narrow down their range at all, a check by me followed by a bet by our opponent does! And it narrows it down almost exclusively to naked flush draws.

So I decide to go for a check-raise. While I think a check-call is an option (since we have a better flush draw), I think a check-raise is clearly the best play because we still don’t particularly want to face a big river bet nor be outdrawn. And there’s always the off-chance we fold out a one pair type hand trying to protect itself.

Hero raises to $655 BTN calls $433

When my opponent just calls I’m a) pretty shocked but b) pretty sure that I can profitably fire this river. If I was wrong about a set or top two on the flop, there is almost no way that he doesn’t now shove the turn over my check-raise. He most likely figures to have a draw getting stubborn (perhaps because he thinks he has 200BB in implied odds remaining) or a one pair hand getting REALLY stubborn (after all my line does look full of it). Either way, I think a river shove will be profitable, and my bet sizing on the turn is such that I will have a nice pot size river shove behind. It’s not so small that he’ll make some crying call but not so big that it looks suspicious. All in all, I decide then and there to shove any river.

River: ($1,557) T (2 Players)

I hit! I’m not particularly worried about the full house as, for the reasons stated, if he doesn’t fastplay the flop with 22, TT or AT, he almost certainly shoves the turn. I actually consider checking here and turning my hand into a bluff-catcher but decide that if I’m going to shove any river on a bluff I need to balance here by shoving with the nut flush. I don’t really expect him to call with the one pair hands so I’m just praying he does have the draw I put him on.

Hero bets $1,316.65 and is All-In, BTN calls $1,316.65

Results: $4,190.30 Pot ($3 Rake)
Hero showed K 9 and LOST (-$2,075.65 NET)
BTN showed 2 2and WON $4,187.30 (+$2,111.65 NET)

HUH??? So I pretty much got completely owned.

All in all though, I think this hand was really interesting and educational because it taught me two things.

First, I realised I needed to rework my assumptions about my opponents’ ranges in this spot. I stacked off in two other similar spots last month where my opponents peeled wet flops and then bet the turn when I checked. In both I check-raised with really marginal hands figuring them to have equally marginal hands and lost when I ran into a set. At 200NL, I’d never ever expect my opponent to turn up with such a hand with this line. 200NL players have just learnt to fastplay big hands on wet flops and will almost always have the range I prescribed my opponent in this hand.

More interestingly though, I learnt from this hand just how far reaching the consequences of misjudging a range can be. In this hand, due to a completely mistaken assumption about my opponent’s range, I stacked off 300+BBs, betting 200+ of them for value, into a full house. You always hear in training videos that you want to induce your opponents into making as many mistakes as possible but I don’t think I really ever understood how. Do I make a weird bet here, an odd check-raise there?

Now though, I think I understand the key to getting your opponents to make mistakes; make them misassign your range! How I go about doing this will probably be the subject of my poker investigations for the next month or so. Taking an unconventional line as my opponent did here is probably the main way, so I’ll definitely be looking at ways of better disguising my hand. I’ve always noted how easy it can be to disguise your preflop range. My own preflop range for example is super tight UTG and UTG+1, tighter than most in the cutoff, but insanely loose on the button. As a result, I actually run at something like 24/20, despite really being a 20/17 at heart. My opponents of course just see this 24/20 number staring back at them and give me lots of action preflop as a result; action which is completely uncalled for but which arises due to them mistakenly assigning my range. What I need to do now then is learn how to translate these preflop principles to postflop. There, instead of using preflop image and HUD numbers to induce mistakes, I’ll need to rely on postflop image, using different lines and unconventional plays to disguise my range and confuse my opponents.

I think I’ve got the theory down pat; it’ll be putting it all into practice that will be the difficult part. Wish me luck!