The REM Process, Part One: Introduction

This will be the first of a four-part post focused on the REM process. First we’ll look at an introduction to the process. REM stands for:

• Range
• Equity
• Maximize

Many novice players believe that the goal of playing against an opponent is to be able to put that opponent on their exact two cards. Since there are 1,326 possible starting hands in Hold’Em, this can be a daunting task. Instead we want to focus on a particular range of hands that our opponent could be playing. With the action that our opponents takes, we should be able to narrow down their range significantly.

Equity, as we’ve mentioned before, is your stake in the pot or your chances of winning the pot against the range that you have assigned to your opponent. We’ll look at an example shortly.

Finally, we look at maximize. This is the idea of making the best possible play against your opponent given the prior information you have gather (range and equity).

In this article we’ll touch briefly on these three topics and later articles will be dedicated to each process respectively.

Let’s say we’re playing in a $1/$2 cash game with six players. The player who is first to act is a very tight player who only raises to $7 with maybe top 1-2% hands such as AA, KK, QQ, or AK. It folds around to us and we look down at A♦J♦. Knowing our opponent’s range, we can then calculate our perceived equity against their hand which is, at best, around 33%. The pot is $10 and we would have to call $7 to play giving us odds of about 1.4:1 to call. By using the maximum amount of information at hand we know that we are getting bad odds to call, so our best play here is to fold.

While there is much more to the REM process, we’ll touch on that next week.

As always, questions and comments are welcome.