One afternoon, I was playing on CoinPoker, and made a comment about my opponent's range. "legendary_spree" asked:
"What's a range? People play the cards they're dealt. Who started this range talk?"
I'm so glad you asked. To get a good perspective on this, I needed somebody old and geeky. Fortunately, we have just the person on staff – Lee Jones. So I threw the question over to Lee. He replied with this...
So what is range?
Hi Tiffany, thanks for asking. The term "range" first appeared in the early-mid 2000's. Before that, you would routinely hear people say, "Yes, I put him on ace-king," or "It really felt like pocket nines." But as we've come to understand the game better, we've realized that makes no sense. After all, a poker hand has relatively few steps (2-5 streets of betting), and a reasonably restricted range of actions a player may take. Contrast that with chess, where there are effectively an infinite number of possible branches of the tree, once the players get past the first few moves. We finally realized that, in a poker hand, a player might well take identical actions with AK, AQ, and pocket jacks throughout a hand, and it was silly to pick one of those perfectly plausible hands and say, "Okay, I think they have AQ this time."
Who started using the term?
The first mainstream author to discuss this was Dan Harrington, with his Harrington on Hold'em series, which sold approximately 1.34 bazillion copies, making both Dan and his publisher, Two Plus Two, very happy. Around the same time, Tri Nguyen and Cole South, both online crushers, published a book called "Let There Be Range" in 2009. It sold for the very reasonable price of $1,850. Which is not a typo. If I recall correctly, they made a limited publishing run, to ensure their buyers that not everybody would get the keys to the kingdom. What's amusing is that, in 2009, if you understand the concept of range, $1,850 was a bargain for the amount of money it could make you.
Pretty soon, the word "range" was being splashed all over poker discussions, not least on the legendary 2+2 forums. Commentators who said things such as, "That raise feels like ten-nine suited" would be looked askance.
Now, "range" is as much a part of the poker vocabulary as "check" and "jam" – we really couldn't have meaningful conversations about the game without it.
It gets wackier
Not only do we talk about our opponent's range, we even talk about our own range. That is, from a theoretical perspective, we need to think about what our range looks like to our opponent. Because we don't want them to be able to narrow our hand down too accurately – then it's much easier to play against us. So top players think not only about the range they assign to their opponent, but the range they assign to themselves – that is, the set of hands that would play the way they have played the hand so far.
If this sounds wonky, don't panic. Thinking about your own range (as opposed to your specific hand) is more advanced than most players get. And there's actually an argument for ignoring your own range, and playing solely according to the motivations of the exact hand you're looking at. But that's a lecture for a different time and day.
Thanks for bringing this up, Tiffany – great question and a fun trip down memory lane.
Best, Lee
