You make it seem like some secret recipe. I'm not looking for the magic range that's gonna double my winrate. Just a general guidance of, these are the hands you should think about defending otherwise you're too tight.

If you think this is something simple you probably never spent enough time studying it. There are endless factors to consider when building defense ranges. To name a few: villain RFI, villain F3B, open raise size, villain postflop tendencies, rake, and so on. "The hands you should think about defending" is a very general statement. Ranges in poker are not static. I recommend watching "Constructing BB defense ranges" from Cameron Couch.

I recommend micro players avoid that video. It's one of the videos that have lead to most confusion and waste of time for micro players. There has been at least three threads in this forum with players trying to do it in a way that will give crap conclusions because they think they can use one R value for all hands.

A year ago I tried to use equity realization with an independent value for every single hand for some shortstacked HU preflop sims, and the method didn't give any useful results without a lot of work on interpretation.

Saulo, have you found any meaningful BB defense ranges using equity realization?

Now I'm gonna catch some flak, but I'm feeling feisty today so here goes:

Mapping out the region of hands to defend vs someone's RFI is a trivial exercise with preflop solvers, once you have a good grasp of that RFI. The fact that a problem can be solved with little effort should have consequences for how we as a community think about it when we discuss it.

For example, the standard CO RFI is ~25%. The way to build a 25%'ish range is fairly obvious with small variations in the amount and type of the most speculative hands people put in it. So pick whatever 25% chart range you can find, build a defence against that, and it will be fine against any 25% range. You don't want perfect you want good and robust. If you want the best map (as in, near-unexploitable if that's what you're after), compute it with a solver.

I'm not saying that this is something you must do with expensive software. What I am saying to you and everyone else is that the problem of finding good near-unexploitable BB defence ranges is solvable to a high degree of accuracy through computation, and that it's pointless to exchange hand-waving arguments about it when a very good solution can be found for those who invest in the tools (or buy a pack of computed solutions). Once you have the map of playable hands, build pre and post flop strategies based on it with proper exploitative adjustments where you can find them.

Since these results are somewhat expensive and time-consuming to arrive at, don't expect anyone to post them for you. What you can do is accept that the problem is hard-but-solvable, and that anyone who pulls some advice out of a hat, advising you to play to this-or-that based on their experience or feel for whatever small stakes player pool they are a part of, can be assumed to be wrong in a lot of things (and biased by variance, small samples and the character of the games they play), and therefore they are best ignored.

Don't waste time on listening to small stakes consensus talk, because a lot of it is so mind-blowingly wrong and/or irrelevant that it will do you more harm than good. Pay attention when someone shows you numbers (calculations or strong empirical evidence from a database), but ignore speculations. As much as you can, do something on your own, whether you do it by hand-calculations, use your own database results, or grit your teeth and buy a solver and learn to use it.

Here's a recent thread that illustrates my point:

160bb, defend ATo v UTG

Here we are starting with a good question (can we defend ATo BB vs UTG?) that was triggered by OP questioning someone's strong claim that it was a trivial defence. We ended up comparing computed results (Pio pre flop simulations) with a mid-stakes player's 2016 database results for that particular fringe hand.

You're trying to dance around the fact to make what you know seem special. Let's start really far down then, shall we?

In a general sense, should I be folding 90% from the blinds? Answer = no, because then BTN can open 72o profitably vs me. OK great. So what kind of range should we be defending theoretically? I think the number was ~62% but let's just say we should only be folding 70% of the time to make things easy.

How do we fill up this 30% defence range? Let's put AA inside, that sound good to you? I spent a lot of time studying and building to know that AA are a good defence. I say we do the same for KK and QQ and JJ. Alright, now I've done 4! Now you help.

Were you replying to me? The point I'm pushing is that there is a method to this thing and that you don't have to guess.

Do you want simple cookie-cutter advice? It's all around you, so grab some (if nit-tight is suitable for your games, download Alan Jackson's "No Bullshit 6-Max" charts for free, just google it). Do you want to do better? Do some work.

Some hands are obvious folds, some are obvious plays. Then there's all the hands in between, which happens to be plenty. How do you decide which of them can be played? I told you one way and linked you a thread to some relevant discussion. Now move forth and fill in the gaps in whatever way you deem fit. :-)

Sorry Zen, wasn't replying to you. I don't know how to reply to a person here. I liked your post. That's exactly what I was after, just simple cookie cutter stuff to give myself a foundation to work on, but everyone seemed to overcomplicate it and htink I was asking for their top secret ranges

My database isn't big enough to be useful here

Then get playing hands ASAP. It really doesn't take long if you put the hours in.

All the guys I've seen using DB method ends up with way too tight ranges because they remove the bottom 15% of the hands that are profitable if they run bad with them over a 80k hand sample. There might be other things going on, but if you just play reasonably OK post flop all the hands Snowie defends should easily be +EV even with 10NL rake.

The trouble with Snowies' ranges is that they assume Snowie opponents ie that all play exactly like Snowie all the time, every single hand, every opponent. Contrast this with Saulo Ribeiro's post above beginning, "If you think this is something simple..."

Snowie ranges are solid for BB defense, but on the tighter side in preflop advisor app. They probably use 25NL rake or something like that in preflop advisor.

It's highly unlikely that he will be able to find stronger ranges than what Snowie uses. Most players play quite similar RFI strategies to what Snowie is using and the ones in preflop advisor seems to be tight enough for high high rake environments for players without a huge skill edge post flop.

Contrast this with Saulo Ribeiro's post above beginning, "If you think this is something simple..."

It isn't exactly rocket science. The main factors ranked are raise size/pot odds, raising range, flop Cbet strategy and fold to turn probe. Fold to 3bet and 4bet is relevant for how to structure 3betting range. You can add in other things as well, but they're small enough that they aren't much of a concern before you're playing very much tougher opponents.

I would still start with Snowie as a baseline and adjust from there.