Best Way to Improve Hand Range Reading/Application

[czGLoRy]

Post is self-explanatory. What are good ways to increase your ability to read hands and base players actions based on their likely range of hands, excluding playing thousands and thousands of hands?

[ev_slave]

The best I know of is to watch the action while not in the hand. When someone gets to showdown, you can check your range. As you improve you'll get confidence to make the decisions you just get a feeling you should make.

[czGLoRy]

after watching in the dark, do you run poker stove with their ranges? (28/8 raises button, say 15% of hands, then try to narrow it on flop?)

[Boise123]

Practice

[startrak]

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Practice

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yeah, I was gonna say experience. I really think that's the only way to get better at asessing hand ranges. Observing basically every hand that goes to showdown helps.

[drzen]

It helps to focus on one player, rather than trying to keep ranges straight for everybody and play at the same time. Take the player to your left, and put him on a range at every point in every hand he plays. Begin by noting how often he limps, raises, folds. This will give you a rough idea of his looseness and aggressiveness. I mean literally make a note too. This should give you a rough baseline for a range. Narrow it down with his action on the flop, turn and river. You should have a fairly narrow range at showdown, if he shows down. Sometimes you will see whether you were right. You can do this analysis away from the table too, by replaying hands in Pokertracker, where you will have the advantage of stats that will help you make your ab initio range. TBH though, I think leaning on PT will hurt more than help.

[Gonso]

For the "application" end of it:

You should definitely review some hands with PokerStove, it will help give you a better feel for estimating your equity against ranges. Putting an opponent on a range has a lot less value when you don't know how much equity you have against that range. Also, look up Holdem Ranger, which is similar to PokerStove but allows you to weight hands.

Even after a couple hundred hands, you'll notice that you'll be better at equity estimates.