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One of the biggest mistakes that inexperienced poker players make is failing to understand how a player's range changes during a hand. This can cause them to make massive mistakes in their hands just because they can't understand the difference between a player's range at the start of the hand compared to its end. It is in hold'em that this effect becomes most obvious, and I want to look at a classic player type that illustrates this very well.

One of the most exciting and successful styles of play in hold'em is loose aggressive, which demands players to make more bets, and play more hands than usual, using their superior skills at playing hands to outmaneuver their opponents despite the fact they frequently have the worst hand. However, weak players sometimes believe that loose aggressive players are just always playing a very wide range, when in reality their range tightens considerably during a hand.

Loose aggressive players rely on picking up lots of small pots, with the result that their pre-flop and flop range of hands are very wide. However, the large majority of loose aggressive players slow down a considerable amount when the pots start to grow very big, and as a result their range of possible hands shrinks considerably by the river.

A large number of weaker players seem to think that just because someone is loose in some pots, they will be loose in all of them, which is usually inaccurate. Most winning loose aggressive players are very loose in small pots, but in big pots are actually quite tight, hoping their pre-flop and flop image gives them considerable action on their big bets on the turn and river. Understanding how a player's range changes is crucial to taking on players at the middle and higher limits, where a player's image is usually much more complex than it first appears.

At the lowest stakes, tight players are generally tight all the time, and loose players loose at all stages of the hand. As the stakes increase though, players' ranges change considerably depending on the size of the pot. Always bear in mind that big bets generally need/mean big hands in no limit and pot limit games, and understanding how this affects good players around you is just crucial to staying afloat against them.