Range

What Is a Range in Poker?

A range is the entire collection of hands a player could hold in a specific situation. Instead of guessing that an opponent has one exact hand, strong players assign them a range of possible holdings based on position, preflop action, and betting patterns, then reason about that whole group at once. Thinking in ranges is the most important conceptual shift separating recreational players from serious students of the game, and it is the unit that every solver output is expressed in.

How Ranges Are Constructed

Your range is shaped by the actions you have taken. An under-the-gun open represents a tighter range than a button open, because there are more players still to act. As the hand progresses, each bet, call, check, or raise narrows the set of hands you could logically hold. By the river, a player who raised preflop, bet the flop, and barrelled the turn has a much narrower range than they started with, and a good opponent has been tracking that narrowing on every street.

Reading a Range Grid

Ranges are usually shown on a 13 by 13 grid of the 169 starting-hand classes. Pocket pairs run down the diagonal, suited hands sit above it, and offsuit hands sit below it. Each cell is coloured by the action the hand takes, and in solved ranges many cells are mixed: a hand might raise 60% of the time and call 40%. Two numbers matter when you read a grid. The first is the share of hands in the range, which sets how wide it is. The second is the number of combinations, because suited hands have four combos, offsuit hands twelve, and pairs six. A range that looks wide on the grid can be narrow in combos if it is mostly suited hands.

Range Shapes

Ranges take on different shapes, and the shape determines how they play. A polarised range contains very strong hands and bluffs with little in between; it bets big and folds or raises rather than calling. A condensed range is weighted toward medium-strength hands; it calls a lot and rarely raises. A capped range has had its strongest hands removed by earlier action, such as a big blind who only called preflop and therefore rarely holds aces or kings. Recognising which shape your opponent's range takes is the basis for choosing a bet size and for deciding whether a bluff can work.

Practical Example

You open from the cutoff and the big blind calls. The flop comes K-9-4 rainbow. Your range includes pocket pairs, broadway hands, suited connectors, and suited aces. Your opponent's calling range is wide but lacks the premium hands they would have 3-bet. That asymmetry gives you a range advantage on king-high boards: you have more top pairs, overpairs, and sets, so you can bet a large share of your range profitably. Move the same two ranges to a 7-6-5 board and the advantage flips toward the caller, whose range is full of the connected hands that hit it.

Range Analysis and GTO Strategy

In GTO strategy every decision is evaluated at the range level. The question is not "what should I do with this hand?" but "what should my entire range do on this board?" Each action then holds the hands that benefit from it: value hands and bluffs in the betting range, medium hands and traps in the checking range. Understanding how equity is distributed across two ranges on a board is the foundation of modern poker, and it is why the same hand can be a bet on one board and a check on another with nothing about the hand itself having changed.

Common Mistakes

• Putting an opponent on one hand. You will be wrong most of the time. Assign a range and narrow it as the action unfolds.
• Forgetting to narrow. A range on the river is not the range that called preflop. Remove the hands that would have acted differently.
• Ignoring your own range. Your opponent is doing this too. If your betting range on a board is only value, they fold; if it is only bluffs, they call.

Learn More

The beginner explainer what is a range in poker? introduces range thinking with examples. Preflop Ranges: Building Your Opening Strategy is the comprehensive breakdown of range construction by position. Build and compare ranges yourself with the Poker Range Calculator, see how two ranges interact on a board with the Range vs Board tool, and drill solved ranges for every preflop scenario in GTO Ranges+.