It’s a simple idea. On the final betting round you have an okay hand. It’s the sort of ho-hum hand you get a dozen or more times in a session. But given the way this particular pot has played out, you think it’s likely better than whatever your opponent has. You bet the hand, your opponent calls, and you win.

Even though the idea is simple, the gap between players who consistently find thin value and those who don’t is massive. Finding thin value doesn’t just mean making a few extra bucks with your so-so hands. It also means being able to bluff more frequently and more profitably. It also means making your bets on earlier streets carry more leverage. Players who consistently find thin value will find that nearly every action they take in a hand beginning with their decision to enter the pot is more profitable.

How can this one little aspect of the game be so important? Let’s look at an example in no-limit hold’em.

It’s a $2-$5 game with $500 stacks. You open for $20 from three off the button with A T . The button calls, and so does the big blind.

The flop comes T 8 6 . The big blind checks, you bet $50 into the $62 pot, the button folds, and the big blind calls.

The turn is the 2 . The big blind checks, you bet $120 into the $162 pot, and he calls.

The river is the K . The big blind checks, and you bet $180 into the $402 pot.

If you’re like most no-limit players, you are likely saying to yourself, “I would never bet that river. What does he call me with?” And it is indeed possible, given the way you play today and what your regular opponents know about you, that they won’t call you with anything you beat. However, I would argue that if you make a habit of betting more rivers – a lot more rivers – you will find that this is a great river to bet for value against many opponents.

When the flop comes with three cards to a straight, players frequently make pair-and-draw hands. On this flop, such hands include T-9, T-7, 9-8, 9-7, 9-6, 7-6, 9-9, 7-7, and other pair and flush draw combinations. Pair-and-draw hands are likely candidates to call (and just call, not raise) flop and turn bets. The turn and river cards brick all of these possible draws out. So if your opponent holds one of these hands, on the river he holds a single pair bluff-catcher. Your hand beats nearly all of the single-pair possibilities. The only likely hands that now beat you are a somewhat weakly played Q-Q or J-J, a sandbagged K-T, or a hand like K 9 that both contains a king and had sufficient value to call the turn.

Say I were the big blind and I held 8-7 and faced a river bet of $180 into the $402 pot. Against most no-limit players, I’d fold without too much thought. But that’s because most no-limit players do not bet the river nearly often enough, either for value or as a bluff. If I were to call this bet against most players, I’d expect to principally see strong hands such as K-T, T-T, 8-8, 6-6, 9-7, and so forth. Most players would check the river back even with a hand as strong as K 9 . (If you see that I advocate betting A-T, you can hopefully guess how I’d suggest playing with K-9.)

Most players also don’t bluff the river often enough. When they bust their draws, they check the river, shrug, and say, “I missed.” So I can safely fold my one-pair hands like 8-7 to a bet, knowing that the bet will usually indicate a legitimately strong hand.

Now say I were up against a player who bets strong hands, bets missed draws as bluffs, but checks back “thin value” hands like K-9 and A-T. Against this player I would now nearly automatically call the $180 into $402 river bet with 8-7. Why? Because by calling I’m risking $180 to win $582 giving me about 3.2-to-1 odds. With these odds, my call will be profitable if I win just 25 percent of the time. Because of the way my opponent plays, I can expect to win far more frequently than that. He bets his strong hands like top two pair, a set, or a straight. But strong hands like these don’t grow on trees. Busted drawing hands like Q-J and A 4 , however, are always plentiful. So if I can expect my betting opponent to have either a big hand or nothing, and I need him to have nothing only 25 percent of the time to make calling profitable, I’m usually going to have an easy call.

Now say I were up against a player who bets strong hands, sometimes bets missed draws as bluffs, and also bets hands like K-9 and A-T for thin value. Holding 8-7, I’m officially in a pickle. Even though I know my opponent could be bluffing, I also know that I’m usually going to lose if I call. Good opponents will hone their betting frequencies with these various hand types to make my decision as close as possible. Either I can fold and lose pots to bluffs, or I can pay off all the K-9 and A-T hands. It’s no-win for me.

This is why I consider thin value the core to a strong poker strategy. When you correctly go for thin value, three good things happen. You make more money off your medium-strength hands by winning an extra bet occasionally with them. You also get to bluff credibly at more pots because your opponent won’t know if his bluff-catcher pair is slightly better than your hand, or slightly worse. And you also make more money off your big hands, because your opponents will now sometimes be tempted to call those big river bets with not-so-strong hands.

This is the area I think most players I encounter can use the most work on. They are habitual river checkers, and that fact stunts their ability to get paid on good hands and bluff with bad ones. So if your reaction to my initial example was to check, next time you play, try to find more rivers to bet. If you do it well, you will become a much more fearsome player.

[This article appeared in the January 13, 2010 issue (Vol. 23, No. 1) of Card Player.]

You’re off to a good start if you can come up with relatively accurate hand ranges for your opponents as you play. But it’s also important to use these ranges to make the best playing decisions. The first step to doing that is to consider how hand ranges interact with board textures.

A board texture is classification of board type based on what hands the board makes probable. For instance, a board of K 8 6 2 makes flushes probable, but full houses and straights impossible and two pair hands relatively improbable. Given the sorts of hands people generally play, a board of K J T makes straights, two pairs, pairs, and straight draws relatively probable, while flushes and full houses are impossible. These are two very different board textures.

Different board textures interact with players’ hand ranges in different ways. Some textures paired with some ranges will produce a lot of strong and medium-strength hands. We saw an example of this in the last article. Our opponent in that hand raised preflop with a range of 22+, A7+, KT+, QT+, JT, T9s-54s. The flop came Q T 7 . Most of the hands in our opponent’s range flopped either a pair or better or a straight or flush draw on this flop. Usually you shouldn’t bluff when an opponent’s range fits so well with the board texture. With a bad hand in this situation, you should typically just give up.

Other board textures will produce mostly weak hands. For instance, our opponent raises preflop with the same hand range as before. The flop comes 6 4 3 . How does our opponent’s range fit with this board?

He makes strong hands with 6-6, 4-4, 3-3, and the big pocket pairs A-A, K-K, Q-Q, and perhaps J-J. He makes medium-strength hands with T-T, 9-9, 8-8, 7-7, 5-5, 7-6 suited, 6-5 suited, and 5-4 suited. These pairs are only medium-strength because so many scary cards can come on the turn and river that will make it difficult to call large bets with them. The rest of his hands, the majority of all hands in the range, have missed the flop almost entirely. Our opponent’s range on this flop is, overall, quite weak. This is a reasonable flop to consider bluffing.

An ace on board will have a significant effect on the board texture. This is because hand ranges often contain a lot of hands that have an ace in them. It’s also because a pair of aces is hard to beat and also because it’s hard to bluff someone with a pair of aces.

For instance, consider the flop A 8 3 . Our opponent makes a strong hand with A-A, 8-8, 3-3, A-8, and most of the other A-x combinations. Our opponent makes a medium-strength hand with the middle pocket pairs K-K, Q-Q, J-J, T-T, and 9-9. Also reasonably strong are the flush draws with all hands that are suited diamonds. Most of the other hands in our opponent’s range are fairly weak on this flop.

Our opponent can have a fair number of strong hands, some medium-strength ones, and some weak ones. But we don’t yet really know exactly how likely each strength category is. To get a feel for the overall strength of a hand range, we have to count the number of hands in each strength category. When you’re counting hands, it’s important to remember that there are twelve ways to make an offsuit hand (i.e., A K , A K , A K ,…), six ways to make a pocket pair, and four ways to make a suited hand. Also remember that if a card appears on the board, it cannot also appear in our opponent’s hand.

Let’s briefly count up the hands in our opponent’s range. The flop is A 8 3 . He can have any of 13 pocket pairs, 10 of which can be made six ways and 3 of which only three ways (since the cards on board cannot appear in our opponent’s hand). So that’s 69 possible hands. We called 9 of these combinations strong, 30 medium-strength, and 30 weak.

He can hold A-K any of 12 ways. Likewise for all the other A-x hands except A-8 which he can hold one of nine ways. That makes 81 ways to have an ace, all of which are fairly strong. Our opponent can have K-Q, K-J, K-T, Q-J, Q-T, and J-T any of 16 ways each, making 96 total board-missing combinations. But 6 of these combinations (one for each hand) are suited diamonds, so we have 6 medium-strength hands and 90 weak ones. T-9, 7-6, 6-5, and 5-4 are all weak hands, except when suited diamonds. So that makes 4 medium-strength combos and 12 weak ones. 9-8 and 8-7 are strong hands (a pair and flush draw) when suited diamonds and medium-strength one-pair hands otherwise.

Adding everything up, we have 92 strong hands, 46 medium-strength hands, and 132 weak hands. Whew, that was a lot of math, but by doing it we’ve come to an important conclusion. Our opponent is roughly as likely to have a strong or medium-strength hand as he is a weak one, and the vast majority of his strong hands involve him holding an ace. From this observation we can develop a general strategy. We can bluff once with perhaps a half-pot or two-thirds pot bet. This bluff will hopefully get our opponent to fold his hand those times he has one of the weak hands in his range. If he doesn’t fold, however, then we will give up because he is quite likely to have a strong hand with an ace in it.

The first bluff is profitable since we can expect our opponent to fold roughly half the time while we’re getting more than even money on our bet (by making a smaller-than-pot-sized bet). But subsequent bluffs are likely to be unprofitable since his remaining hand range will be too strong.

You may look at all that math and say, “No way can I do that at the table. Are you crazy?” But you don’t have to do it at the table. You can do it away from the table and just remember the answer while you’re playing. For instance, the lesson from this example is that it’s often profitable to bluff once with an ace on board, but not to follow up if called with a second or third bluff.

If you think in terms of hand ranges and correctly compare ranges to board textures, your play will become much sharper.

[This article appeared in the December 30, 2009 issue (Vol. 22, No. 26) of Card Player.]

But not all hand reading processes are equally good. Many of them are hit-or-miss, leading the practitioners to make occasional brilliant plays, but perhaps even more often leading them astray. These hit-or-miss systems often have something in common: They focus quickly on one (or a few) possible holding to the exclusion of other possibilities. You may have heard someone relate a hand story to you that sounds like this:

“Well, he raised preflop and I called with 6-6. The flop was Q-T-7, but I put him on A-K so I decided to call him down unless another big card came.”

The problem with this thinking is the narrow focus on one hand, in this case A-K. Sure, most players raise preflop when they get A-K, but they also raise with A-A, K-K, Q-Q, J-J, and often many other hands. Many players would fire a continuation bet on a Q-T-7 flop with many of those holdings, not just A-K. It’s misleading to focus so narrowly on just a single possible holding so early in the hand. Instead, when you’re reading hands, you should think in terms of hand ranges.

Thinking in terms of hand ranges acknowledges that we can’t have perfect knowledge using just the small bits of information we get during a poker hand. A preflop raise doesn’t indicate specifically A-K or J-J or any other hand. The most we can know is that, typically, when our opponent raises he’ll have, to use an example for a hypothetical opponent, one of the following hands: any pocket pair, an ace with a seven or better, two cards ten or higher, or maybe a suited connector. (When discussing hand ranges, writers generally use a shorthand notation. The preceding hand range could be written in a short hand as 22+, A7+, KT+, QT+, JT, T9s-54s.)

We refine the hand ranges we put our opponents on as the hand progresses. Say an opponent has raised preflop (with the likely hand range described above), and we call. The flop comes Q T 7 . He bets. He’s an aggressive player, so we expect that he might bet with every hand in his range. We therefore can’t narrow our opponent’s hand range yet.

Does he likely have a strong hand, a weak hand, or something in between? Each of these options is possible given the hands we think our opponent could have. He could have a very strong hand like Q-Q, T-T, or Q-T. He could have a very weak hand like 3-3 or A-8. And he could have a middling hand like Q-J, J-J, or K-T.

We can do better, however, than simply concluding, “He could have anything.” We can count the number of hands that fall into each strength category. The more hands in the range that fit into a strength category, the more likely it is that he holds a hand of that strength. Relatively few hands in our opponent’s range are truly strong. We can count Q-Q, T-T, 7-7, Q-T, A-A, K-K, A-Q, K J , and any hand that includes the Q and another spade among these strong holdings. On this flop also relatively few hands are truly weak. Only the small pocket pairs, 6-5 suited, 5-4 suited, A-9, and A-8 really fit into this category.

Most of our opponent’s hands have medium strength. He likely either flopped a pair with a hand like K-T, flopped a straight draw with a hand like K-J or 9-8 suited, or flopped a gutshot and overcards with A-K.

Comparing our opponent’s hand range to the board and determining how many strong, medium, and weak hands (along with determining types like drawing hands, two-pair hands, one-pair hands, and so forth) is the essence of hand reading. If we held a weak hand such as 4-4 in this situation, we would be wise to fold. Our opponent’s range is much stronger, on average, than our hand, and his range is also likely too strong to run a successful bluff against.

Say, however, that we held K Q . This hand is certainly strong enough compared to our opponent’s range to justify calling. After we call the flop, the 7 comes on the turn, and our opponent checks. Now what does his hand range look like?

This new information allows us to refine our opponent’s range. He may have decided to bet the turn with the strongest hands in his original range and also with A-7, 8-7 suited, and 7-6 suited. He likely would have given up with the weak hands, given that none of them have improved. And he may have checked with many of his medium strength hands, not wanting to build a big pot with them.

Therefore, it’s just as likely as before that he holds 2-2 and A-8, but significantly less likely than before that he holds Q-Q or A-A. The turn check tells us that the weaker hands in the original range have become more likely relative to the stronger ones. We can never discount the strong hands entirely, because our opponent might be trying to trap us. But we can fairly assume that they are less likely after the turn check than before.

Say we check it back with K Q . This is a reasonable play. The river is the 3 , and our opponent checks again.

Now we can almost completely discount the strong holdings. Few opponents would check a strong hand twice in this situation. Weak hands are again as likely as before, as are many of the medium strength hands. We can fairly safely narrow our opponent’s range to busted draws, two-pair hands roughly K-Q and weaker, and very weak hands like ace-high and 2-2. Our hand, K-Q, is very strong against this range. Furthermore, our opponent may feel many of the hands in his range are too strong to fold. Therefore, our hand reading indicates that we have a clearly profitable value bet.

Thinking in terms of hand ranges is the best way to read hands. The hand range model best represents the imperfect information we gather, and it allows us to make the most informed decisions. If reading hands this way is new to you, try it out. It’s difficult to get the hang of, but it’s well worth it, so practice, practice, practice.

[This article appeared in the December 16, 2009 issue (Vol. 22, No. 25) of Card Player.]

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