Range reading: play the whole range, not the one hand that scares you

The hand-reading lesson teaches you to read the board cold and narrow a betting line into a range. This lesson is the next step: what do you do once you have the range? You hold the whole weighted set 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. 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.