Poker Math That Matters

World of the Unknown
Combinations
Up to this point, we’ve only been looking at situations where our
opponent's cards are face up. Now, while it would certainly be
profitable for us to see our opponent’s cards, we all know that’s
not how poker is played. We do not know our opponent’s cards,
and that’s the unknown part of the game that forces us to make
assumptions. However, we can understand the building blocks
for those two hidden cards. When we’re making assumptions
about our opponent’s holding, we’re building what we call a
range of hands. We’re not just giving him one hand like saying
“I’m putting you on AK.” We build a range by saying “I think
you could have hands like AK, AQ or some small pocket pairs.”
This is a range of hands, and we can understand the probability
distribution of that range to help us make mathematical decisions
based on the assumptions about his range.
Figure 5. PokerStove hand range selector separated to show the
three categories of hands.
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