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Poker Challenges

Levelling

Reasoning in circles about what an opponent thinks you think they have, until the read stops being grounded in what their actual range would do.

A small amount of levelling is normal: a good hand-reader does ask what an opponent believes about their own range. It becomes a leak when it replaces the underlying question entirely, inventing an exotic bluff or a creative slow-play to justify a call or fold that was already wanted, rather than weighting hands by how often they genuinely occur. The fix is the same discipline that runs through all of hand reading: name the range a player would actually hold given their actions, and resist the urge to reason several levels past what the evidence supports.

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