Quote:
Originally Posted by cassurai
It is not ludicrous at all once you get your head around it.
End results, yes. After you witness villain calling with 1 pair, then yes, of course he was calling if he had 2 pair.
For the one pair to be a better candidate as a calling hand than two pairs, I think it needs the other card to have significant blocking effects. (e.g. it's the nut flush blocker).
I think it's also blocking effects that can lead to a betting range to appear to be less polarized (or more "merged" if you want to use that term) than usual.
Sometimes, it's apparently better to bet 2nd/3rd pair with a blocker to the nuts, than bet total air that has no blockers, since the total airball bluff is more likely to get snapped off. (Sometimes the bottom of your range literally does best by giving up).
I think Shamway kind of explained it earlier, but the following is my understanding of how 'merging' happens in theory:
Hero arrives on the river with a range that could be arbitrarily grouped into 3 hand strengths: X, Y, Z, with X being nutted, Y being mid-strength, and Z being air.
Villain's range is mostly Y (bluffcatchers) + Z (air, including missed draws).
If hero is
totally polarized, he bets X for value and balances by betting some Z hands (the bottom of his range) as bluffs. Villain usually calls with Y (bluff-catchers) and folds his air (Z).
In
some spots, however, hero should balance his value hands (X) by betting some mid-strength hands (Y), and just give up with most of his total air (Z), and the reason for betting the Y hands is that they contain blockers to villain's calling range (although they do indeed
sometimes get called by worse hands in villain's Y group).
Merging isn't really a "strategy" as such. It's just something that happens when you try and work out which hands do best as bets instead of checks. It turns out that
on rare occasions betting a weak made hand (as a merged "value-bluff" or whatever you want to call it) has higher EV than betting the absolute bottom of your range, so your betting range won't be entirely polarized.