Hand Review and Ranges

How the hand review window in BluffLog works: four questions for every decision, where the opponent's range comes from and how it is narrowed, what the equity bar and the outs mean, and what the Ranges page is for.

The profit and analytics screens tell you that money leaks; this window tells you where in a hand. It opens from any hand in your database and answers four questions about the decision you are looking at, with the opponent’s range built from a chart and narrowed by what he actually did. The screenshots are from version 0.16.0; click one to see it full size.

Opening a hand

1. The plaque under the board names your hand at this street. Click it, and the review window opens for this exact decision.
2. The equity of the player whose cards are known is shown next to the cards. Here it is 100% against 0% on the river: the hand is already decided.
3. Your equity at the same moment. Compare the two numbers street by street to see where the hand was lost.
4. Street buttons move the whole table to the flop, the turn or the river; the review follows the street you are on.
5. The list on the right is the hand list you came from, with the result of each hand in big blinds; the arrows at the bottom step through it without going back.

Any hand from the Hands page or a session opens here; a star marks it for later.

The review window

1. Showdown with equity by street. The left half is the hand as it went, your actions in green. The showdown block is the most useful line in it: preflop 57.6%, flop 7.8%, turn 0.0% means that the hand was decided on the flop, not on the turn where the money went in. Read this line first; it says which street to review.
2. The equity bar splits the opponent’s range into three: hands that beat you, hands that chop, hands you are ahead of. “Show the range” opens the grid behind the bar; “Combo breakdown” lists which hands those are. The takeaway line under it says which side you are on and with what equity.

The right half asks four questions, numbered by the window itself.

• What kind of board. Dry, semi-dry, wet or very wet, judged from the board alone: suits, how close the ranks sit, whether a straight is already possible. The wetter the board, the more it costs to let the opponent see the next card and the less being ahead right now is worth.
• What do I have. Not the name of the combination but its class in this spot: overpair, top pair, bluff-catcher, draw, strong made hand, air. Each class comes with the question that actually matters for it; for a strong made hand that is not “call or fold” but “how to get the most out of it”.
• What can the opponent have. The range starts from the chart for this format and position on the Ranges page, then each action narrows it: a raise leaves a strong made hand or a draw, a call leaves hands with something and removes the ones with neither a pair nor a draw. The combo count is stated after the hands blocked by your cards and the board are removed, which is why the percentage is lower than the same chart shows on the Ranges page. Every narrowing is labelled as an estimate, not a calculation: a live player plays the same spot differently.
• What does it cost to continue. The call, the pot after it and the equity you need for the call to profit; SPR and the effective stack next to it. SPR below 4 means the hand will almost certainly go all-in, so the decision is about the whole hand, not this street.

The analysis starts on the flop. Preflop the window shows pot odds and the number of combos like yours out of 1,326, and nothing more, because there is no board to judge.

If you are behind: outs

On the flop and turn the window has one more section, on how you improve, and it does not count outs the way a chart on the wall does.

• Real outs are cards that lift your equity against the hands currently beating you. Dirty outs bump your hand category without changing anything against those hands: JJ on 2-9-6 turning a 9 makes two pair, but AA, KK and QQ make the same two pair and sets become full houses. The window counts only the real ones.
• Tainted outs improve you and complete the board’s flush draw at the same time; count them as about half an out. Cards that make the board’s own hand for everyone are not outs at all.
• The next-card map sorts every possible turn or river into improvements, scares and neutral cards, and gives a rough implied and reverse-implied figure: what a hit is worth and what a scare card costs on average. Both are heuristics, and the window says so.

The Ranges page: where the range comes from

1. These are not recommended ranges. The line at the top is not a disclaimer for lawyers: the built-in strategy is a rough model of how the micro-stakes field actually plays, and it exists so that the review can compute equity against a realistic opponent. Playing it yourself is not the idea.
2. The tree is every spot the review can narrow through: each position opening, defending against an open, facing a 3-bet, with the share of hands in each. Click a node to see its grid.
3. Use for analysis pins a strategy as the source the review window reads from. There is one built-in strategy per table size; the review takes the one that is pinned.
4. Clone, edit and import are part of BluffLog Pro. Clone the built-in strategy, adjust a few spots to your pool, pin the copy, and every review from then on narrows from your model. Inside the review, Pro also lets you edit the opponent’s range by hand for one hand: click a cell to drop or add it, and the equity, the verdict and the next-card map recompute from your read.

Two things the range deliberately does not do. It does not model this specific opponent’s postflop habits; it is a preflop chart narrowed by actions. And in a multiway pot it belongs to the player whose bet you are paying; the others are accounted for by the extra margin a call has to clear, not by a second range.

What to do with it

Do not start with the hands you lost the most on; start with the hands where the showdown line drops sharply on one street. Open the review at that street, read the range and the price, and decide whether the action there was a mistake or a cooler. A dozen hands like that per session is more than most players review in a month.

→ See also: Cash Game Analysis for finding the spots, and the Trainer for turning the widest deviation into a task.