Range Analysis With Alexander “Assassinato” Fitzgerald
Among the many contributors to the recently-published Jonathan Little’s Excelling at No-Limit Hold’em — along with Phil Hellmuth, Liv Boeree, Olivier Busquet, Chris Moneymaker, Matt Affleck, Scott Clements, and a host of others — is poker professional, coach, and occasional PokerNews Strategy contributor Alexander Fitzgerald.
Besides collecting numerous live tournament scores over the last decade on nearly all of the major tours, Fitzgerald has earned more than $3 million playing tournaments online where he’s best known by his username, “Assassinato.” He’s also one of the busiest multi-table tournament coaches around, having worked with more than a thousand clients in over 50 countries.
In one of the book’s lengthier chapters, Fitzgerald discusses the topic of employing “range analysis” as means to identify opponents’ possible hand ranges and use that information to decide how frequently your bets or raises in given spots need to succeed to justify making them.
“Poker is not ‘pure aggression’ and trying to trick people,” explains Fitzgerald when introducing the subject. “It is isolating the variables and working to manipulate them in a way that benefits you. They are easy to learn and make the game more open to interpretation. No ‘seeing into souls’ required.”
Much of the remainder of the chapter then finds Fitzgerald showing how to go about calculating opponents’ hand ranges as a guide to determining the best course of action from street to street. He recommends a piece of software called Flopzilla that can help all players — live and online — work out hand combinations for a variety of situations to become more familiar with them when at the tables.
Our Sarah Herring caught up with Fitzgerald yesterday at the World Series of Poker to discuss the topic of his Excelling at No-Limit Hold’em chapter. Take a look:
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