[ama0330]

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Thanks for doing this! What kind of thought process do you go through when putting a player on a hand? I play too loosely postflop because I tend to put people on too wide a range of hands - how do you combat that kind of thing?

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This is an interesting question. I think that over time I have developed a sort of "feel", where I dont really put someone on a hand, but rather I decide where I stand in the hand. This is basically what it is like to put someone on a range - you dont really say "well he has TT here" you say "well I'm in decent shape, or in really poor shape". If I feel like I'm in excellent shape and my opponent wants to play, I raise, or I'll just call if I feel a bit iffy, or I'll fold if I feel like I could never be ahead.

The process of actually putting someone on a hand for me is dependant on:

a) what I know of villain (pt stats, notes, general observations)
b) what villain knows of me (have I been bullying him? have we been tangling? what reason does he have to think he is ahead of me?

and therefore

c) what is villain most logically able to have here?

If someone with .85 AF shoves on you on the river, theres almost no chance he's bluffing. Putting someone on a hand is basically an educated guess, encompassing all the things I've listed above.

There's no real "formula" if thats what you mean, but sometimes you can say "he simply cannot be bluffing here" or somesuch, just because of what you know about how he plays. Of course there are lots of typical lines, like someone who checks two streets probably has nothing and you can take it on the river, someone who checks the turn through is marginal etc etc