Range Advantage and Nut Advantage in Poker Explained

In this poker strategy article poker coach John “WhatA298” explains the difference between Range Advantage and Nut Advantage and how to leverage them for maximum gains.

Knowing your opponents’ range of possible holdings in poker is very important and so too is knowing your own.

When your range has an advantage over your opponent’s range, you can leverage this fact to win more pots.

Range Advantage

Range Advantage describes a situation where your range of hands, which you take a particular series of actions with, has a higher overall equity (chance of winning) than your opponents.

You will usually have a Range Advantage, on the flop, after raising preflop and getting called from the blinds.

Your raising range contains a smaller number of hands, and they are the best hands available.

The blinds’ ranges will usually not contain the best hands (they would have 3bet) and they tend to contain a larger number of hands, due to getting a discounted price preflop.

You can see this type of advantage, most prominently, when the flop connects with hands which the raiser has in their range, but the caller does not.

One such example would be AKK rainbow. The image below is taken from a solver, and it shows how the raiser (BTN) has nearly 60% equity, compared to the caller (Big Blind).

You can also see here, that BTN has substantially more ‘Best hands’ and ‘Good hands’, while BB has more ‘Weak hands’ and a lot more ‘Trash hands’.

The Button has a clear Range Advantage here and should therefore leverage this by playing very aggressively.

They should bet very often, and solver does suggest betting close to 100% of it’s range in this spot, for a small sizing.

Nut Advantage

A Nut Advantage, is an advantage, which your range has with regards the best possible holdings.

If you are more likely to have the strongest available hands, then you have a nut advantage, irregardless of whether you have a range advantage.

In the above example, BTN has a nut advantage as well as a range advantage. On AKK, BTN can have AA, KK and AK in its range, while BB cannot.

BTN is also more likely to have AQ, as BB would 3bet a lot of AQ preflop.

When you have a Nut Advantage, you are incentivized to build large pots, because you are the only player who has the requisite holdings to warrant that size of a pot.

Therefore, you see solvers choosing larger sizes, check-raising instead of check-calling etc, when a player has a nut advantage.

In the UTG vs BB on a 322 board below, you can see that UTG has an overwhelming range advantage (62.8% equity), but has very few 2s in it’s range.

BB does, however, and thus solver chooses to check-raise nearly 20% of the time, despite usually having the worst hand.

Once a lot of chips go into this pot, one pair is not going to cut it and BB’s 2x advantage will start to pay dividends.

Leverage and Advantage

No matter what actions you take, it is worth thinking about how to leverage what has just occurred. Even mistakes can be leveraged.

For example, if you are tilted while playing, this is not ideal, but you can use it to your advantage.

Say you are tilted and just want to win a pot, so you overbet bluff a spot which makes no sense, and get called.

You could chastise yourself for this, or you could see it as an opportunity. Next time you pick up a big hand, you could now overbet it, and get more value than you would have done, had you not made the initial mistake.

Range Advantage, Nut Advantage and any other type of advantage is the same concept.

When you raise preflop, you often have good hands, and therefore, when you have trash hands, you should pretend you have those good hands, because you usually do.

Range Advantage and Nut Advantage Summary

Identifying when you have a Range Advantage, Nut Advantage, or any other type of advantage in poker, is very important.

You can then leverage your position, as much as possible, to maximise your profits in poker.

Having a Range Advantage, calls for an approach of betting often, for a small size.

Having a Nut Advantage, calls for a lot of large sizing choices, which grow the pot to a size where your advantage is most relevant.

Be positive, always look for the advantages in your current position, and then leverage those positions to the maximum.

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