Reading opponents’ hands in poker is like reading a book backwards. Go ahead, grab a book and read the last chapter. Now try and figure out how the author got there. Usually it’ll make sense. The same principle applies in poker. You need to work backwards through the streets, putting the ’story of the hand’ in order.

Putting someone on a range of hands is not guesswork. It’s about following the action and knowing your opponents’ tendencies. Let’s say you’re playing in a $2/$4 short-handed cash game. The button raises to $14 and you re-raise from the big blind to $44 with Q♥ Q♦. Your opponent calls.

The flop comes down 8♦-5♦-2♥. You lead out for $90 and your opponent moves all-in for their entire stack. You have to call $266 to win $536. So you are getting roughly 2/1. You require around 33% or more equity to make this call profitable.

Let’s assume that our opponent is a decent, strong opponent who didn’t call pre-flop with utter trash and won’t get too carried away with marginal hands. They aren’t that tricky so we can probably rule out Aces and Kings as they would have re-re-raised pre-flop. So we can thus input the range of hands they have as Jacks, tens, eights, fives, deuces and also the big diamond draws: A♦ K♦, A♦ Q♦, A♦ J♦ and A♦ 10♦.