If a fishy player is opening 40-50% range, is it often skewed from std range?

[Transitley]

I'm spending some time getting a feel for hand ranges within %. I'm keen to invest in a hud shortly but don't want to skip understanding what a range may be made up of.

Have others found any evidence of players opening 40-50% of hands skewed towards the bottom left hand corner a bit - so rather than playing suited or connecting cards, maybe playing some Kxo or Qxo - I guess theres not too many hands in that range either but interested if it has any effect.

 

[Phoenix Wright]

Not necessarily. Opening as wide as 50% simply means they are continuing roughly half the time to the flop. For some players it might be more suited connectors and others it might be including more Kx/Qx hands; we really can't say this early.

A bigger thing to look for here is also what percentage of that 50% opening is by open-limping and what percentage is by open-raising. For some players, this is stunningly obvious where they'll see the flop with something crazy wide like 50% (hardly ever "correct"), but only open-raising like 5% of the time. You know what to do in this case!

Just play often against their weaker opening range and when they open-raise, just fold (or be very wary of a strong hand by them) as they likely have a preflop hand within the top 5% such as AA, KK, AK etc.

Against other players opening super wide, the 50% opening range might be more split as 25% of the time they open-raise and 25% of the time they open-limp. This is still useful information which tends to narrow the range of possible holdings, but it isn't as telltale as the first example.

Regardless of how you go about it, I'm sure there are many ways to exploit a player with these statistics as opening 50% is hard to claim not being punishable. The "loosey-goosey" LAGs of good players tend to be closer to 25% to 33% opening and your TAGs would be closer to 15%-20% ish. Only opening 10% ish is usually more Nitty, but anywhere 10%-25% is more within the range of playable based on playstyle and strategy. Opening 50% is WAY out there.

 

[fundiver199]

In my experience when people are playing far to many hands, there is often also an element of randomness to it. So I typically dont even bother trying to put such players on exact ranges. For instance if someone is playing 56/12 and comes in for a min-raise, one might assume, its a fairly strong hand. But sometimes they are just "randomizing" and decided to min-raise J9s or 44 this time instead of limping. Or they limped AK or JJ as a "trap". Or they play 72o or T2o for "LOLs", even its not a top 56% hand.

 

[Recreationalplayer]

It's difficult to answer. But I mostly see their ranges include more offsuit Aces, offsuit Broadway combos. Also they have tendency to play more suited cards irrespective of position.

 

[Zapahlohotrona]

In a situation where a fish opens, you will very often collect multipots into which everyone will climb under the fish and the EV of your calling range will drop below nowhere.