Chapter 3 ended on a promise: from late position you can play more hands. Which ones — that is this chapter. And the answer is never a single hand, always a set of them.
A range is the set of all hands someone plays that way in a given situation.
That sounds laboured until you see what it is for: you never see your opponent's cards. You only see what they do. Someone raising from early position has something strong — but you do not know what, and most of the time you never will.
What you have instead is the list of what they could hold. That is their range. Poker is not played against two cards but against a set of possibilities — and that set can be known, while the two cards cannot.
The same holds for you from the other side: your range is the decision you already made before the cards came. You do not decide whether to play this one hand. You decide which hands you play from this seat at all — and then you read it off.
There are 169 different starting hands. 72o is the worst. Not narrowly — by a distance, and for three reasons at once:
So it has no route to a big hand and no consolation when it makes a small one. That is why it folds — from every seat, in every range, always.
And that is the actual point here: 72o is not a fold because it feels bad. It is a fold because you can say why. That reasoning is exactly what separates a range from a gut feeling — and it holds for every one of the 169 hands, just rarely this clearly.
169 hands are too many for a list. That is why every trainer shows them as a square, 13 by 13 — thirteen ranks across, the same thirteen down. Once you have read it, you read it for good.
Three rules, and no more than that:
So each hand appears once in the square, and where it sits already tells you most of what you need: the closer to the top left corner, the better.
One footnote that matters later: the three areas are not equally heavy. A suited hand can be held four ways, an offsuit one twelve, a pair six. That makes the lower left half the bigger one — which is why a range that looks small by squares can be larger by hands than you would think.
Colour in what gets played and the same shape appears every time: a block in the top left corner, frayed at the edges.
That is no accident, that is the matrix itself: the pairs and the high cards sit top left, and those you play from anywhere. The further right and down you go, the more it depends on your seat.
And this is where chapter 3 is paid off: from a late seat the coloured block is bigger. Not because the cards are different there — it is the same square — but because you already know what the others want. More information, the same 169 hands, more of them playable.
The edge is the real work. In the middle of the block there is nothing to decide; everyone plays AA from anywhere, nobody plays 72o from anywhere. Learning poker means learning the edge.
Six questions, one answer each — tap on the square you mean. After each tap the right square lights up, and a sentence tells you why.
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