Constructing Preflop Ranges in Poker

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One of the earliest potential sources of confusion for poker beginners is hand selection. In No Limit Hold’em in particular, it can be easy for a hand to look a lot stronger or weaker than it really is depending on the situation, and the dangers of making mistakes in hand selection are amplified preflop, when there are still many decisions left in the hand and a lot of chips left to win or lose.

With a view to simplifying your preflop decisions and summarizing the key factors we should be considering when it comes to preflop hand selection, let’s take a look at how to approach each stage of the preflop game.

Open-raising and open-shoving

It almost goes without saying that your preflop opening range should start with the strongest hands in the deck, and begin including weaker ones as it expands in later position. However, many people expand their ranges in the wrong directions. In deep stacked situations, it may make a lot more sense to include hands that can make the nuts more easily – suited Aces and Kings, strong suited connectors – rather than hands which rarely win large pots, such as any offsuit connectors or small pocket pairs that can only make bottom set or bottom full house.

In shorter stacked situations, this dynamic is reversed – you no longer need a hand of great absolute strength to win a pot, so making top pair is very valuable, which means offsuit broadways become stronger. Those hands, as well as Ace-x hands, also have a great deal of blocker value that makes it easier to get your raises through undefended.

Once you get really short and into push-fold territory (could be as deep as 20bb, depending on positions), it stands to reason that your all-in shoving range should simply be composed of the top X% of hands, as defined by their equity versus your opponents’ calling ranges. There is some blocker value in certain hands here, but it decreases as the number of players left to act decreases.

Cold-calling and defending the blinds

Cold-calling preflop is something that most players do too much of, particularly in middle position versus early position raises. When you consider that a spot with five or six players left to act will probably mean you’re getting 3-bet by one of them roughly 20% of the time even if they’re all quite tight, and when you do see a flop it’s likely to be multiway more than 50% of the time. This means your cold-calling range in most positions besides the button, cutoff or blinds should be very tight indeed, and composed only of hands that play comfortably postflop.

However, when it comes to the button, you have a lot more opportunities to flat-call comfortably. You’re guaranteed postflop position, and if the blinds are tight players then you can be very confident of seeing a flop heads-up at least a good portion of the time. Here, it becomes a lot more acceptable to call with a few more speculative hands, particularly if you think you have a postflop edge on your opponent, the preflop raiser.

Defending the blinds has become a key part of tournament poker strategy over the past two years – people have woken up to the extent to which it is necessary for them to protect their big blind, and to a lesser extent their small blind. In these spots, you’ll usually be getting good odds to call a raise, so your calling range needs to expand to include most hands that you believe you can play even somewhat profitably postflop against your opponent’s range. If your opponent is raising from late position, your defending range needs to be extremely wide.

3-betting and flat-calling 3-bets

Much like open-shoving, 3-bet shoving at short stacks is relatively straightforward – your range should more or less just start at pocket Aces and end at a certain cutoff point, depending on how wide you want your range to be. But when stacks are deeper and postflop play is a consideration, things get a lot more complex.

Generally when choosing your 3-betting ranges, you should consider how wide your flatting range is in a certain spot – if you have a very narrow or non-existent flatting range, then your 3-betting range should be very linear, in order to ensure you can defend it effectively against 4-bets and to give you as much equity as possible when you get flatted. If your flatting range is wide, such as when defending the big blind, then your 3-betting range needs to be more polarized in order to avoid wasting good flat-calling hands.

Where you’re facing a 3-bet and trying to choose a calling range, the size of the bet should be a primary consideration – with smaller 3-bets, you obviously need to call more frequently. However, a big factor in your decision should be your opponent’s 3-betting range – many people lose a lot of chips calling 3-bets in the early stages of tournaments when their opponents are more or less only 3-betting premium pairs. There’s a big difference between those spots, and the later spots where people have wide 3-bet bluffing ranges.

4-betting and 5-betting

Finally, we come to discuss 4-betting, 5-betting, and however many other bets you can get in the pot. The last bet is fairly self-explanatory – as with other all-in spots, your range should be composed of all the hands that play best against your opponent’s calling range. This can lead to some interesting spots at deep stacks – if you think your opponent is only calling it off with KK+ but that they do have some 6-bet bluffs in their range, you’re better off 7-bet shoving with A5s than QQ (you have better equity versus KK and a blocker to AA).

Most spots in MTTs, though, will only be a maximum of five bets deep. With that in mind, you can actually think about 4-betting in the same way as 3-betting – if you don’t have a flatting range in a certain spot versus a 3-bet, then your 4-betting range should be quite linear. If you do have a flatting range, such as when you’re on the button facing a 3-bet from the blinds, you’ll want to polarize your 4-betting range (perhaps using your best Ace or King blocker hands) to avoid negatively impacting your flat-calling range.

With these principles in mind, I hope your preflop decision-making will get a little easier. Obviously there are times to deviate from this blueprint, but once you’ve spent some time developing your instincts and working on your ability to think through spots in detail, those opportunities will start showing themselves more willingly in time.