Quote:
Originally Posted by DonkeyCopter
Are you really arguing for not folding to balance our folding range when this is 1/2 and villain wouldn't be seeing our cards and we could have lots of hands as played that fold to a raise here, or are you just arguing for a call based on villain's range here? I'm not saying I hate a call here, I would just be interested in more about how balance has a place in this decision.
Ultimately, all unbalanced lines are either exploitive plays or leaks. If you make a play that's wildly unbalanced (as a fold here is), you ought to be able to articulate the opponent tendency that you're working to exploit. If you can't, you either have a leak, or you lucked into a profitable play.
Now of course, if you knew the villain's range for making this raise, it would be relatively simple to determine your EV against that range and select a strategy accordingly. In this case, we know almost nothing about how the villain plays other than that he sat in a 1/2 game. That means that constructing a range for him is going to be subject to a huge amount of uncertainty. Really he has a range of ranges depending on what strategy he's employing. As a practical matter, it's impossible to evaluate his range with any level of precision.
Sometimes, you can safely assume that LLSNL unknowns will have certain predictable patterns (like making big bets with ranges that are heavily unbalanced in favor of strong hands) and respond accordingly. But I don't have any population reads that say, for example, that a LLSNL player won't make a small raise with a flush draw or a weak made hand here.
So in the absence of any justification to the contrary, you should take the balanced line here, which is to GII given stack sizes.
As you say, you can arrive at the same conclusion by just figuring out that the opponent is likely to have a lot of hands that you beat. "Figure out what villain has and maximize EV against that range" always works. But while that approach is conceptually simple, it's actually quite difficult to apply in practice. Thinking about balance is more complicated conceptually, but it's frequently an easier approach to apply in practice:
-What am I calling with here?
-Answer: almost nothing.
-Is that balanced?
-Answer: definitely not.
-What am I trying to exploit with this line?
-Answer: I don't know.
-Maybe we have a problem here.