Range Balancing

I think this is quite a misunderstood concept so I just felt like posting something on it. This should be quite simple and hopefully alot of ppl already understand it but i think should help and if nothing else hopefully it will decrease the "you have to have a balanced range" posts.

First point is that any sort of range balancing is only ever necessary vs. good thinking players. If villain does not think well at all about poker and is playing sub-optimally then you can play completely skewed and very exploitable because villain can't counteract your play. It does become important when players have the ability to 1. adjust and 2. read hands.

Second point is that there is a distinction between your actual range at any moment and what villain perceives your range to be at that moment. So say you just got caught running a big 3 street bluff and villain snapped you off really light. This indicates 2 things - 1. in order for villain to call you down light he clearly had to believe you had a high bluffing freqency in the past and 2. he now has clear proof that you were bluffing and probably have been bluffing a fair amount previously. So now you clearly have to adjust your range to reflect how villain views you. So say 5 hands after this you run another 3 street hand. Now this is key - you want a very very polarized range here. In general, you should never be bluffing in this situation since your image is terrible and villain is just looking for any reason to call you. So your actual range is value (can be very thin, but is value nonetheless) but your perceived range in villain's eyes includes alot of bluffs, since he probably views you as an aggro donkey. The important thing is that villain knows we are capable of running a big bluff, even tho there are actually no bluffs in our range at that point given metagame considerations.

Now to merge these two points. When you have really good thinking players, they aren't going to see you bluffing once and then call you down light all day (if they are they are terrible). So in the above example, villain might very well lay down his hand coz he knows you know he saw your bluff and he knows it would be a terrible time for you to try to run a bluff given your image in his eyes and therefore you probably have something.

When we have a leveling situation like this, you then do have to shift the % bluffs % value part of your range or villain will catch on. So if we were to only start vbetting the top part of our range, our frequency goes way down and villain can pick up on our adjustment and readjust his range to play more optimally vs. our new range. And so we might have to keep value betting thin and bluffing some of the time, so villain isn't able to correctly adjust to our range (if we stop bluffing, villain can pretty easily take away alot of the pots for example). So even tho we take a loss on these bluffs when called, we make up for it in that villain fails to correctly adjust his range to the fact that most of our range is still very value-based. We want villain to make bad calls vs our overall range, but we still want him to be thinking we are bluffing more than we are so that he will continue to make these bad calls vs our range.

To summarize this entire paragraph - basically, we don't want villain's perceived range of us to match up with our actual range. But we don't want to polarize our range to the point that thinking players will pick up on it and readjust their perceived range to match our actual range.

Now again, for shitty players this doesn't matter at all. They'll see you bluffing and they just can't get that out of their head. So vs these players you can absolutely have the most skewed range on earth and they won't adjust because they caught you bluffing and therefore you are a crazy maniac who should be called down super light. So you just respond by going for thin value and they get absolutely owned coz they keep calling you down with complete trash.

Last thing i want to go through is essentially what is meant by range balancing. Lets use check/raising a flop cbet as an example since i think it illustrates it well.

You open villain flats. Say flop comes T56ss. You cbet with 9T and villain check raises. Now what range does this villain have when he c/r the flop? Does he always 3B TT+ pre (or do you have any reason to suspect otherwise)? Is he capable of raising any T other than maybe AT? How does he play his draws?

Vs. a player with a badly skewed range on this flop, his range might very well be limited to his value part of 2 sets, 56 + his semi bluff part of 45, 87 and flush draws + their total junk. Alot of players will just flat with Tx, but they will raise 100% of their draws. Depending on how loose villain is and the board texture, there might only be 2 combos of 56 (if he'd only play 56s and the 5 and 6 on board are different suits), and there are 6 combos of 55 and 66. There are more combos of 45 and 87 than these combined and there are also likely many flush draw combos as well (if he loves suited cards then it could be more than all the other parts of his range together). And then add the % of junk in his range. So vs this range 9T is almost the nuts. 9T is every bit as good as AA in this situation, since we know villain can't raise Tx and doesn't have TT+ in his preflop range. So there are many ways to play the hand after this knowledge; however, the fact that villain's range is so horribly polarized makes playing optimally vs. his range very very easy. And if villain does something like lead 100% of turns after c/ring, then he is going to get absolutely and completely owned.

So in order for villain to improve this he should maybe consider mixing up his preflop range (say flatting some TT hands instead of 3Bing), start to check/raise lighter (so maybe raise JT here for value) and stop raising 100% of his draws and instead c/c with some of them. This would then make it much harder for us to read his hand range.

And to try and tie all this together - your actual c/ring flop range will want to be skewed towards countering villain's perception of your c/ring flop range. So if you have been raising alot of flops and villain has started to either play back at you or call down (ie. villain has adjusted to the high % of bluffs in your c/ring range) then you will want to start to raise light (so you can raise 98 on a 278 board) but remove the bluffs and poor equity semi bluffs from your range. But again, vs a thinking player we can't just repolarize our range or villain can easily adapt. And so it becomes a constant state of readjusting and trying to stay one head of what villain is currently thinking of us.

Anyways, didn't end up as simple as i was planning but hopefully you get something out of it.

Great article, the perceived vs. actual range is a very good point.

tl;dr

In all seriousness, I think you hit a key point (that might've been lost in the length) in that we don't want to balance our range by doing X with a hand like Y and a hand like Z. We want to balance our range by taking a balanced line, where bluffs, thin value, and monsters can be in our range. Thus we have a wide range, and its difficult to play against us.

Lemme see if I can make an example, to make sure I'm getting what you're saying.

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HU NLHE, $1/$2
100bb stacks

Hero is BB with K♠ A♠

SB raises to 3xbb's
Hero 3-bets to 13xbb's
SB calls.
Potsize = 26bb's

Flop: 10♠ 2♠ 8♦

Hero...
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A balanced line in this example would be c-betting the flop. When we c-bet, we have bluffs, semi-bluffs, and all of our big value hands in our range. When we CRAI on a flop like this however, our line contains more bluffs and less vulnerable value hands like JJ or QQ. Our range becomes polarized, narrower, and easier to play against.

So I guess against decent hand readers, you kinda want to take a line that keeps your range as wide as possible if you want to induce a mistake. Is that what you were getting at with the flop check/raise example in your post? Because I kinda agree, that you'd have to play with someone a very long time and see a lot of showdowns for mixing up your play to have a big effect on how they play against you.

I'm not sure if that was a question or just me saying stuff, but I think it belongs in this thread (which could be a good one ).

@ c9 Not quite but i think i know what you are saying.

If we only ever cbet that flop with made hands and air and we only crai with draws, then yes our range is very unbalanced and it makes us quite easy to play against.

But it is very important to consider metagame aspects, ie. villain's image and our image. When we bet that flop (or crai) what does villain see our range as? If villain thinks we only crai with sets and flush draws, then it would be good to add in Tx hands and overpairs, etc because villain is going to call us down alot lighter as our range in villain's eyes is skewed towards flush draws.

I don't think you have to worry about it as much in a cbet type of situation, since your range is normally wide and non-polarized in such a situation (unless you are constantly getting c/red and are only cbetting junk and hands that can stand a raise). But in situations like c/ring flops, or donk betting, players will often have very skewed hand ranges that make it very easy to play against. Similar concept to why you don't just raise AQ+ and TT+ from UTG or your range is just too well defined and it is just too easy to see which boards are good or bad for you.

Well from a HU perspective you really don't have to play all that long to start adjusting. It isn't even that you need a wide range per se. It is more about the whole making sure your acutal range is a good counter for villain's adjustments based on his perception of your range. So if villain thinks you are bluff raising flops, you can completely skew your range towards thin value + and having no bluffs. But in doing so you have to realise that vs a good player you can't just keep this polarized range. It might work perfectly fine for a certain period of the game, but when villain readjusts to your new range you also have to readjust. And by not having a completely polarized range you make it much harder for villain to readjust. ie. maybe your range is 25% bluffs and 75% value when villain will call you down 80% of the time with a hand that beats your bluffs and loses to your value. It would be more +EV in the short term to make that 100% value (and to a certain degree you can do this);however, then villain will realise your bluffing frequency is way down and will readjust and stop trying to bluff catch. So you take a hit in that 25% bluff part of your range in order to keep villain making the mistake of calling 80% vs a 75% value range. But throw this out the window vs a bad player.

Lets use your example. If villain thinks you are 3Bing very light and probably don't have anything on this board when you cbet and is likely to make plays at you, then you want your preflop 3Bing range to be value based and you probably want to c/f some hands that don't connect with the flop. In that way we match our actual range (value based) to villains perception of our range (total junk, and we are full of it).

A perfectly balanced range doesn't even exist and if it did it would be totally useless since villain would know exactly what % of your hands are what. The main point was that you want to skew your range in such a way that it counters the way villain perceives your range, without skewing it so much that villain is able to realise your adjustments and readjust towards you.

But the important thing to keep in mind is our actual range should still be exploiting our villain based on how he plays against our perceived range.

I brought this example up in another thread somewhere, but Bryce from Stox used this example and it helps a lot imo. You're playing Rock Paper Scissors against someone and you know they use rock 50%, paper 25% and scissors 25%. The best strategy to exploit this would be 100% paper. But obviously our opponent will catch on and this wouldn't work long. But if we do something like 40% paper, 40% rock, and 20% scissors, it's a lot harder for him to catch on. Furthermore note that using a random completely balanced strategy we win 33.3%, chop 33.3%, and lose 33.3%. In this example we end up winning 35%, lose 30%, and chop 35%.

It is going to take a long time before our opponent realizes he's being exploited and even then he will use some excuse as to variance and running so bad and justify it with ev-graphs or setometer stats or w/e. Meanwhile we're exploiting this small edge for a long time until he decides to do something about it.

It's pretty obvious how this translates to poker. We want to take the line that still exploits our opponent, but makes him incorrectly estimate our range. If he is folding to too many 3-bets, we still want to balance our light 3-bets with monsters and we will only want to barely 3-bet a bit more than is necessary to profit off his mistake.

So although we do want to balance by keeping our range wide, I think ensuring that our overall range is still exploiting his overall range is a very important concept that is often lost in discussions of balancing ranges.

Just to further clarify what i was saying in regards to c9's post, coz again it probably got lost as i unfortunately i just write on and on in forums it seems.

The concept of a "balanced line" as you put it doesn't actually exist. It is simply a function of frequency. Because ppl often cbet alot, it becomes "balanced" in the sense that it is extremely wide. But this has nothing to do with cbetting - if somebody has a 25% cbet then their range isn't all that wide. They are probably cbetting really good hands and total junk or cbetting everytime they hit and giving up with junk, etc.

So I didn't use the check/raise example for any other reason than i thought it was easy to illustrate a point. c/ring is in no way less balanced than cbetting, it is just that in general ppl tend to cbet with a wide range and c/r with a much narrow range (but you can still c/r with a perfectly balanced or wide range).

Haven't seen this example before but it perfectly illustrates the part of the post that dealt with adjusting to good players, but not so much that they can catch on and readjust.

vs bad players it is optimal to use 100% paper. They are too bad to ever catch on. The worse that ppl read metagame the more you can skew your range towards countering them. But obviously vs a good player you can still have a relatively skewed range based on their perception of your range because it does take a while to pick up on things like changes in frequencies (getting a hot/cold run of cards often have a large effect) and you don't see showdown everytime like you do in R P S.

See, I think this is where it just becomes hard to apply this in your standard NLHE 6-max game. Generally you don't play a lot of pots with regs, so at a 6-handed table, unless you see a telling showdown or have abusing them with button steals or something, its hard to know what they think of you.

I think this should've been titled "manipulating our range in the eyes of villains", since we're not really balancing. We're just adjusting to them.

The main mistakes I see people making when it comes to having a balanced range in the eyes of their opponents is that they make bets that (for example) could never be a bluff against a player who would realize this.

So if we're on the river, and we have AT on an A8992r board, and we bet like 1/5th pot on the river, that's almost never a bluff. Or we put ourselves in a situation where we've got $10 behind and the pot is $30. If we shove in a situation like this, our bet HAS to be for value (since we have no fold equity). Situations like these where players take an unbalanced line are more what I see playing 50$NL.

Idk, I just think the situations that you're bringing up (reg battles where you know what villain likely thinks of your range) is gonna be tough for a microstakes player to apply.

But that doesn't matter, because our villain will perceive our X/R as being polarizing. Unless you play a ton with villain and give them reason to think otherwise, the standard thought when you CRAI on the river is like "Oh, he has the nuts, or total air". What we're trying to achieve is to get villain to respond to our actions in the way that we want. So if villain makes hero calls, and we want him to make a hero call, we should take a bluffy/polarizing line. We shouldn't try to get villain to realize that our range is balanced when we CRAI the river by doing it with a variety of hands, because we'll never see enough showdowns or be in that situation often enough for it to matter.

I guess I'm saying the range of hands you take an action with doesn't matter when addressing what villain thinks of our range. I can check/raise my whole range of hands on a flop, but it will still be percieved as a polarizing move from villain until we have history to tell him otherwise.

Are we saying the same thing back at each other over & over? Cuz I'm all confused now >_X. I think we're arguing semantics... but I'm not 100% sure.

You don't have to take it to that level, however. Yea it is less applicable in 6 max without decent history, but bear in mind that I wouldn't expect the average 50nl player to be thinking on a level even remotely close to this and they would be classified as a non-thinking player where you can greatly skew your range without worrying about them adjusting. That was actually one of the main points of the post - that you shouldn't worry about adjusting your range at all vs non-thinking players. You should focus on identifying their leaks and exploiting them. I'm not going to lie it has been a while since i have played anything but HU and in HU metagame is HUGE.

So while I do agree that most of this is way over the head that any low/microstakes player needs to know i think the basic concepts are important and in any case it is important to be able to understand this sort of stuff and actually be able to think about poker. Most of the threads that i see here just cover incredibly basic poker concepts, and i think it is good to have some discussion on some more complex (although still fairly simple) concepts. But back to 6max, sost somewhat competent villains think something about you and this will affect how he will play hands vs you. Simple image awareness is something pretty basic. In the case that villain is just 100% playing his cards then you just identify leaks and skew your range to counter - simple as that. And for most ppl this is as far as it will go. Although i think understanding how villain's range is distributed when it comes to certain lines/plays and how we can best exploit it, is very important for all stakes/game types.

But yea i don't expect anybody to go out and use this in nl25, but by the same token if anybody wants to be successfull at midstakes and above you'll need to understand metagame and hand reading concepts such as these.

All i was saying by this is that there is no such thing as a more balanced line, or a line that has a wider range. It is just a function of how villain or hero uses that particular line. So in regards to your cbet or crai line example - there is nothing inherently wider about your range in either line. If you crai more than you cbet then your crai line would be wider. It just so happens that ppl tend to cbet alot more often and therefore their range is wider.

But yea i don't disagree with anything you are saying here.

Might as well take a shot at this in a separate post to try and clarify. I think it probably is semantics now, but what you are saying here wasn't waht you were saying in your first post, which is sort of the only thing i really responded to (playing post tag ).

So in regards to this post, i wasn't saying that anybody actually check/raises with a perfectly balanced range coz obv nobody does. I was just saying that the fact taht it is a check raise doesn't make it a polarized line in an inherent sense - it just so happens that that is how we apply it.

Now the reason i brought this up was because you brought up the point of playing a balanced line that had all sorts of hand types in it so that our hand is disguised. But the point was that there really wasn't any need to take a balanced line whereby we can have lots of different types of hands, but to have a range that countered how villain perceives our range.

So yea everything here is perfectly fine. In regards to the bolded part. You'd never want a balanced range while crai the river. You'd simply want to skew your range towards villain's likely action based on how he views you. So if he is likely to call then only do it with very strong hands and no bluffs. Trying to balance in a situation like this where you will never encounter it enough to matter is pointless.

Hopefully i'm not confusing you with the whole "you can't completely polarize your range or villain will catch on part". When i say that i mean in situations that are encountered frequently. So cbetting, double barreling, check raising flop etc. These actions have frequencies (in order to have a useful frequency you obviously need alot of occurences). If we adjust to the fact that villain is calling almost all of our cbets by dropping our cbet % to 40, then villain can easily adjust by folding alot more when we cbet - this is where you have to be careful about polarizing your range vs a thinking player. CRAI on the river is not something you would ever bother balancing. You would just make the most +EV play and then adjust to the metagame afterwards.

I think you are just reading a little too much into certain sentences i am using as examples (the check raising comment for instance wasn't meant to say anything about the rest of the post - just that c/ring isn't inherently polarized).

But see, you can't change your range, you can only change how you present it to villain. You have JJ or AK or 27o, but to villain we have TT+, AQs+, 27o-AA. And when your opponent just plays his cards, you don't have a range to him either. He ain't on that level, or at least not very often. So who cares what your hand looks like to him, just play in a way that exploits his range. Throw paper 100% of the time.

Idk, I guess I just take offense when you say "Change your range" when you're really just changing how you present it by choosing between what line you take. No one goes "well, I have JJ here, and since he's likely to call down light, I'd v-bet all the way down to 66". We just have JJ and act accordingly.

K, so yeah, semantics. :P I say the line is unbalanced because it makes villains think our range is unbalanced. You say no line is balanced or unbalanced because we can do it with any range of hands we want.

So however you want to say it, if you CRAI on the flop in my example, a good villain who reads hands who is unknown to us may assume that 99 is just as good as QQ. So if he thinks we're capable of bluffing, he may make a herocall with 99 he woudn't otherwise make, if instead we barreled 3 streets or something.

****, we're saying the same crap over and over again. If we agree on something and write this much, I'd hate to see when we disagree.

Of course we can change our range. I may be much more inclined to bluff a river after turn has gone check/check, but when villain shows me that he can call down lighter, i adjust my range from x% value and x% bluffs to more value and less bluffs. So because villain has shown that he can call down lighter, i bluff less and i value bet thinner. That is absolutely changing my range when it comes to betting a river after teh turn goes check/check.

Well that is just restating exactly what i said as in indentify leaks and skew your range to counter.

This is actually really wrong. It really doesn't have anything to do with changing what line we are taking.

Villain opens, i call in BB. Flop is TQ2, villain cbets, i call. Turn is a 5 and goes c/c. River is a K. If villain has shown he is willing to call down light, i might value bet T9+. If villain hasn't shown that he is willing to call down light (most probably coz he doesn't see me as bluffing the river alot) then i would check behind a hand like JT and maybe even a weak Q. So my range is absolutely changed depending on the circumstances. I don't just "have JJ here" i have whatever range i would call preflop, flat flop, check turn and bet river. It doesn't matter what we do with our individual hand, it matters what villain does vs our call preflop, flat flop, check turn and bet river range and how to best skew this range vs how villain will play his hand vs our range (if we check river, then obviously we are repping a completely different range which might be where you are getting confused).

That is actually exactly what you should be doing. The fact that you have JJ this time just means that you are *probably* near the top of your value betting range. But if villain's river calling range is worse than 66, then if you have 66 in this situation you bet the river, only this time you are at the bottom of your value betting range.

So if you define it that way, you're just saying "Value bet more when they think you're bluffing"....

Somehow, I feel underwhelmed.

I thought this article was (or should've been) about how your betting actions changes how a competent villain sees your hand range. But now its just "if villain thinks you have a bluffy image, value bet more hands & bluff less". I think you could've made the point a bit clearer if you left out all this balancing/ranges stuff.

God this thread sucks now... sorry for mucking it up... I'm gonna go do a powerpoint.

Well clearly by saying x% bluffs x% value i am overly simplifying it; however, you clearly were not following what i was trying to say so i was trying to say it as simple as possible.

Completely taken out of context. You take one sentence whereby i am just refuting your statement that "you can't change your range" and you try to spin it so that that one little statement becomes the entire summary of my original post?? Sorry but i have no idea how you come to some of the conclusions you do. If you understand what i am trying to say there is alot more to it than this but take from it what you will. You really need to respond to the point of an entire post rather than take one sentence out of context and take it as if that was the only thing i was saying.

The "article" is about clarifying when and when you don't have to worry about balancing your range (almost nobody here will have to worry about it -still good thing to understand). And by balancing your range I DO NOT MEAN that you have a balanced range - i mean that vs good players you cannot have a completely polarized range or villain will quickly catch on. ie. you can't do paper 100%
Secondly, it is highlighting the difference between how villain perceives your range and what your actual range is.
Thirdly, it is about how to distribute your range when playing a good player so that they don't catch on right away and outadjust you.
Fourthly, it is about making sure that in certain situations you analyze what sort of hands you and villain are playing in a certain way/lines, because it helps greatly in hand reading as well as making yourself harder to read.

Hopefully that clears it up a little.

Excellent post Feitr, and some great debate. These type of posts get me thinking more about my own lack of poker knowledge (or perceived lack of ability in being able to articulate such thoughts). There's some great discussion here, even if it got a little bogged down in semantics towards the end.

But what I think this thread will highlight to some of our more inexperienced/lower stakes players is that poker is so much more complex that just playing your 2 cards against certain villains. You have to take into consideration wide range of situations as you progress up the limits and a lot of them are conatained in this thread like , image, metagame, balancing, multi level thinking etc.

Again thanks for this and I look forward to your next one

Feitr, great post. And I am enjoying the discussion. Totally not applicable in Microstakes as 1. I don't see regulars enough to apply this, 2. they aren't good enough to worry about it. But it is still great knowledge to have in my bag, for instance when I do play CC games.

Great stuff Feitr, it really highlights the game behind the game. I will apply this more towards my live cash games as I`m never at an online table long enough to get/give accurate reads or make multiple adjustments. At live tables it always becomes a challenge to stay one step ahead of the good players as far as range is concerned. Being too predictable is like letting a guy attach a shop vac to your chip stack. Thanks again.

Feitr, c9, and Zach - this is a really interesting thread, and I appreciate the time and thought that went into it. I agree it's important for us microstakes players to understand these things, even if 100% paper is the right way to go in microstakes.

Going to have to re-read this a few times (I'll actually have to print the $%#@ thing out because it's so long ) - but I hope you guys feel your time invested in this thread wasn't wasted, it's very thought provoking.