On Balancing: Chill Out, People

The purpose of this post is to encourage players to think a little more broadly about limit holdem fundamentals and exactly how important – or unimportant – balancing is in certain spots. Before I go off on what is sure to be considered an anti-balancing screed, let me first argue in favor of it.

Last weekend I played a hand at the Commerce 40 that, for me, speaks to exactly why it's necessary to have a balanced range in many spots, and why you'll make more money when balanced than when unbalanced. An older white gentleman, who plays on the tight/not-bluffy side, opened UTG+1. It folded around to me in the big blind and I had two aces. I just called, as I almost always do*. Already, I have a much wider range than villain. He only opens from EP with premium hands. I defend tighter vs. him than I do vs. others, but I still can have anything from 98s to AA, because I don't 3-bet anything here. Furthermore, he may not even know this. He probably thinks I would 3-bet JJ+ and AK/AQs, so in his mind my range is narrower than it actually is.

(* I say “almost” always because there are few things I like to do 100% of the time, and also because there is a rare breed of player who loves to shovel chips in preflop like they're going out of style. If you flat AA against him, you miss the chance to 3-, 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-bet him PF before a scary flop comes and he shuts down. But yes, in general I have the policy of never 3-betting HU OOP).

The flop came 973 rainbow and I check-raised. He 3-bet. Now again, I am fairly well balanced here. I would checkraise a lot of hands: A9, K9 (though I sometimes just call with these hands), 33, AA/KK/QQ/etc, and sometimes T8 (if I have enough fold equity vs. a given opponent to profitably barrel an OESD). And I also mix it up by taking a k/c, k/r line with these same hands.

He, on the other hand, is imbalanced. This particular player never 3-bets AK or any big overs, unlike some LAGfish at Commerce who love to 3-bet AK here and take a free card on the turn. When this player 3-bets, he has TT-KK almost all the time. The only hand I lose to is 99 (he wouldn't open 77 so early), and there's only one combo of AA with which I chop. So I know very well where I stand, and he has no clue where he stands.

So I just called his 3-bet. (I would just call his 3-bet with all the weaker-than-AA hands with which I k/r the flop). The turn brought a 5. I check-raised again, and now I see the look of “oh **** what did I get myself into” cloud over his face. He sighs and shrugs into the demeanor of so many cry-calldowns we've seen before. I fire the river Q and he calls, sees my hand, chuckles, and mucks.

Had we reversed spots, he 3-bets PF and I probably just call down from there, or I call down from the flop k/r. Either way, he makes less than I do when our spots are reversed. That's good ol' Tommy Angelo reciprocality. And it's because I'm more balanced.

But now let me discuss the dangers of being overly obsessed with balance. To do that we need to explore the reasons for being balanced in the first place. Primarily, it's to make our range wide enough to confuse opponents and make their decisions more difficult. Obviously, the narrower our range, the easier it is to know what we have, and the more perfectly our opponents can play against us.

Let me start with an exaggerated example. You're in a NL tournament, in position in a heads up pot, and on the river the board is QT742 with four spades. Your opponent who covers you (by a lot) bets half your remaining stack. What do you do with the As? Well obviously you shove. In fact, if you don't, you'll get a penalty for not raising the nuts on the river. But with what other hands would you shove? None. Even with the Ks you can only really just call here.** So should you start raising in that spot with more hands than the As? Bluffs? No, because you have no fold equity. Should you raise with the Js for value? No, because you'll run into the A or K too often.

(** I may be incorrect in some of my NL analysis, but the point of this example isn't to break down complicated tournament theory; it's merely to point out that there are times where you'd take a certain line with only one hand. If you don't like this example, pick another).

Now I realize I'm stating the obvious when I say there are times when you can't be balanced. So let's move away from river decisions in NL tournaments, and get back to limit holdem, and more common situations like flop plays.

But before we get into that, let's talk about the ability of our opponents to determine our range. In this post I'm speaking of live full ring poker games. Of course for online players, determining your opponents' ranges is easier – you have thousands of hands with which to compile large PT or HEM databases, and can break down how often a particular villain 3-bets, check-folds a flop after defending his BB, and other specific lines. And after playing with someone – say HU for a million hands – you'll know exactly what their tendencies are with almost every hand in every situation. Here, if you're not balanced, you'll be at a significant disadvantage. But this is an extreme case as well. And now, after Black Friday, all too rare, sadly.

For the most part, it's going to be very difficult for live opponents to compile any sort of reasonable amount of data with which they can ascertain your range in many spots. Say you bluff in a given spot 10% of the time. You're in that spot in a live game and this is one of the 10% of the times you bluff. You get called and villain sees it. For the next 5 hours, that spot never comes up again (because you're only playing 200 hands in that time), so for all villain knows you bluff 100% in that spot.

That doesn't mean 10% isn't right. All it means is that your opponent hasn't acquired enough information to know much about your tendencies. And what if you bluffed and didn't get called? You might as well have been value betting (and it could appear you never bluff). As we see, information in poker is acquired very slowly. And, because of the lack of showdowns so often, it's incomplete (it wouldn't be the game it is if the info were complete). Because of that, unexploitable balance isn't necessary.

Not that it isn't advantageous – just that it isn't always necessary. Because when it conflicts with optimal play, we should take optimal over balanced. Many times a balanced strategy yields the optimal play. But when it doesn't, we need to remember this old maxim: Shaun Deeb has said it before and I'll say it again: the goal in poker is not to see who can surprise their opponent the most at showdown. It's to win the most money. And we do that by extracting as much value as we can.

Say that in a given spot, play A has a long-term EV of .7BBs. Play B has an EV of .3BBs. And play C has an EV of .1BBs. Which play would you make? A, of course. But would you make it all the time? Yes, unless it was in a spot where it turned your hand face up – but if it was face up, then it wouldn't make so much money in the long run, right? So now what if in your quest to be slavishly balanced, you performed play A 40% of the time, B 30% of the time, and C 30% of the time. Yay, you're more balanced. Yay, you're poorer.

Now I know what you're thinking – the point of being balanced is that making that variety of plays in the long run will be the most positive EV, because you will be tougher to play against with a fuzzier range and the increased number of mistakes your opponents make is what will earn you the most dollars. True. But what I'm talking about is when people think they're balancing when in fact they're just being sub-optimal.

Let's say you're in the small blind with A5 of spades in a 6-way pot. The button is the preflop aggressor and plays aggressively post-flop The board comes J73 with two spades. The field are loose-passive fish. The optimal play here is to bet out and collect calls before the button goes nuts. If you check-raise, you'll shut out the passive fish and be heads up out of position with a draw against an aggressive player who won't be folding a pair.

But yet there will be people who think, “I should k/r this flop because I would k/r with JT.” But you don't have JT! How about betting with A5 of spades (and a set, and two pair, etc.) and check-raising when you want to narrow the field with a made hand that benefits from fewer opponents? “Oh no! Then the fish will know what I have!” No they won't. These are loose-passive fish in a live limit holdem game. They're worried about their own hand, the amount of money they'll come home with (or not come home with, and the **** they'll get from their wife if they go broke), and what to order from the specials menu if the food is comped. They aren't assessing your continuation bet percentage. They aren't analyzing data. They're gambling. They're avoiding their jobs and their bitchy teenage daughter. They're staying away from the strip club or the happy hour bar. They just want to play poker and talk about football and have a few laughs.

And they'll fold to a check-raise but peel a single bet. So make the optimal play here. Don't be so worried that you play other hands differently. You should play other hands differently.

Now I don't mean to imply that all live players aren't paying attention. Many of them are. And against the most attentive ones, you should mix it up. But even those players won't have a large enough sample size to really know how balanced you truly are.

And I also don't mean to imply the concepts of balance aren't valuable. Of course they are, and it's important to remember the old maxims like “you should be bluffing with the very bottom of your range and value betting with the top of your range, but check-calling with the middle of it.” You should know your own range, and be aware whether you have the top of it, the middle of it, or the bottom of it, and know what you're doing with each end of it. Because if we're talking about fundamentals, it's usually not fundamentally sound to be check-folding the top of our range and bet/calling the bottom of it.

But don't let the obsession with balance prevent you from making the best play. Don't say to yourself “I'm not going to bet/3-bet the nuts on the turn because that's not what I would do with air.” If you have the nuts, bet it. If you have air, think about folding. Just make sure you have enough strong hands and enough air in your range so that you aren't being ridiculous. Balance is important so that you don't fall off the ledge. But if his money is on one end of the scale and yours is on the other, you don't want that scale to be balanced. You need to tip it in your direction. For good.

tl; dr

I believe it will be soon possible to pin down live players ranges with reasonable expectations of accuracy. But I can't say why I think this.

Outstanding, thanks PJ.

since moving from online poker to live poker after Black Friday I've been thinking most of these things exactly. Without PT and HEM it's impossible for our opponents to get complete balance-reads on us, and the fish (some of whom actually DO use PT/HEM online) have no chance.

Optimal > Balance except when primary villain is an expert with extensive history.

good read

nice post pj

+1

also important to note is that balancing is only useful vs other thinking players. Vs everyone else just win the most money

Joker is polarized, I call.

All kidding aside, I agree with a lot of what you're saying, tho I think balance becomes necessarily more important the smaller your regular live playing pool is. Even not-so good players notice things upon lots of repetition

I would agree with this, and generally because smaller live playing pools tend to correspond with pools with a greater percentage of winning/thinking opponents. That is to say, the 100/200 game at your local casino will have a small group of regulars that will think about the game on a higher level than those who populate the 20/40 game -- who are greater in both number and obliviousness.

Ja, but I also meant that it may vary from place-to-place at the same stakes even with a comparable level of obliviousness, strictly as a function of population size.

In small populations the mean number of hands played between any two random players drawn from the pool is likely to be higher for any given period of time, and probably significantly so.

I agree wholeheartedly with this post. I do have an entertaining story about the ONLY time in recent memory that I encountered (and took advantage of) someone's limited range.

TAG but very ABC prop raised UTG+1 after a weak limper, we're 7 handed, I defend my BB, limper calls. Flop is J62r, it gets checked around. Turn is offsuit T, I bet, limper folds, prop raises.

He now has exactly 1 hand in his entire range, with 99% certainty. He just doesn't play around if he'd flopped big, c-bets all 2-overcard hands, and only raises with a real hand here. Given his preflop range, there's virtually nothing left. So I 3-bet.

He reluctantly calls, calls a J river, and I declare "We chop" the instant his chips touch the table before we both turn over AT. His range was so narrow it let me take a stab at taking the whole pot, and he told me later without the Jack river cutting my number of hands that beat him significantly that it would have worked.

why did he raise the turn?

My Internet beration post is another example of the small player pool immediately chiming in with 100% accuracy what my turn check range is.

But if I leave town to play I would focus more on exploitive play than balanced play.