Hand reading narrows your opponent down to a range — the set of holdings consistent with everything they have done. Range reading is what you do with that set once you have it: hold the whole weighted thing in mind and measure your equity against all of it at once, instead of against the single hand your gut keeps pointing at. The narrowing finds the range; the reading prices it.

What a range really is

A range is not a hand. It is a weighted set of hands — every holding that would take this line, each carrying a frequency for how often your opponent actually arrives here with it. The roughly 1,326 starting combinations collapse into 169 classes: thirteen pairs, seventy-eight suited combinations, seventy-eight offsuit. That is exactly the 13×13 grid the puzzle puts in front of you, and learning to read it at a glance is half the skill.

The weighting matters as much as the membership. A hand your opponent jams every time counts full; one they take this line with a third of the time counts a third. A range is a distribution, not a list — and your equity is the average over that distribution, not over the scariest corner of it.

From a betting line to a region of the grid

Reading the line into a shape is the hand-reading half (see the hand-reading lesson for narrowing in full). What is worth fixing here is how a line maps onto the grid:

A tight early-position open lights up the top-left corner only — the big pairs and big broadways — and almost nothing else.
A button steal floods the grid: pairs down the diagonal, suited hands spilling across the upper-right triangle, a wide offsuit skirt in the lower-left.
Bet sizing sorts the shape. A small, merged bet keeps the medium hands; a big, polarised bet splits into the nuts and the air and folds the middle — dark in two corners, pale through the centre.

You are not memorising charts. You are learning to recognise, from the line, how much of the grid is lit and where — because that, not any single holding, is what you have equity against.

The whole range, not the scariest hand

Here is the move that separates range reading from anchoring. Your equity is measured against the entire weighted set. The nut hand sitting at the top of their range is usually a thin slice; the bulk is weaker — second-best value, draws, air. Pricing your decision against the one hand that beats you, rather than against the frequency it actually occurs, is the most expensive habit in poker.

Worked example

A thinking player jams the river on a blank, polarised line. You narrow them to the value they were always betting plus the draws that bricked and turned into bluffs:

Value: AA, KK, AKs, AQs Bluffs: A5s, A4s, 76s, 65s

Count the combinations. AA and KK are six each; the four suited classes are four each. That is 20 value combinations and 16 bluff — 36 in all.

You hold a clean bluff-catcher: a hand like ten of diamonds, ten of clubs that beats every bluff in the range and loses to every value hand. Then your equity is simply the bluff share: 16 of 36, about 44%.

Now price it. A pot-sized shove lays you 2:1 — you need to win one time in three, 33%. You have 44%. Call — not because you beat the top of their range (you beat none of it), but because the range is 44% air, and the pot odds only ask for a third. Strip the bluffs out and the same call is on fire. The whole decision lives in the range's composition.

Reading the 13×13 grid

The grid is the universal solver layout, and the puzzle tints each lit cell by its weight — the more often that class is in the range, the more solid the fill.

Down the diagonal: the pocket pairs, AA in the top-left, 22 in the bottom-right.
Upper-right triangle: suited hands (AKs, KQs, and so on).
Lower-left triangle: the offsuit versions.

Three silhouettes are worth recognising on sight. A small, dark fist in the top-left is tight and strong — you need a real hand to continue. A grid lit nearly corner to corner is wide and weak, and your top pair is gold against it. Dark corners with a pale centre is polarised — bluff-catch by counting the bluffs, exactly as above.

Where people go wrong

Anchoring on the nuts. You see the one hand that crushes you and price the whole decision against it. Weight it by how often it really occurs.
Counting only the value. A range is value and bluffs and bricked draws. Leave the air out and every bluff-catch looks like a fold.
Reading "wide" as "strong". A range that fills half the grid is a lot of hands, but most are weak per combination. Width usually means your decent hand is ahead, not behind.
Forgetting blockers. The cards in your hand remove combinations from theirs. Hold an ace and AA, AKs, and the suited-ace bluffs all get rarer — which can swing a polarised spot from a call to a fold.
Ignoring the weighting. A hand played a third of the time is not a full hand in the range. Treat the grid as a distribution, not a checklist.

A rule of thumb that travels: count the bluffs, weight the value, and price your hand against the whole grid — never against its darkest corner.

How the range-reading puzzle trains this

The puzzle does the narrowing for you. It hands you the range three ways — a plain-English label for the line, the lit 13×13 grid, and the exact notation — and a board, then asks one question: your equity against the whole range. You type a percentage and submit. We simulate tens of thousands of run-outs against every hand in the set, weighted by frequency, and grade your answer inside a tolerance band that tightens as the puzzles get harder. The narrowing is given; what you drill is the weighing — turning a lit grid into a single number — which is the step that actually moves chips at the table.

Go deeper

Hand reading builds the range; range reading prices it. The number you are reaching for is your equity against the whole set, and the price you compare it to is your pot odds — the three lessons are one decision seen from three sides. In a tournament the currency changes: near a pay jump, the same range gets priced in prize-pool dollars, and that is ICM.