"Balancing Your Range"

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formertroll

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i've read about the concept a few times but perhaps i'm not grasping something, what's the point of adding lower quality hands to situations where you would normally play premium cards with a certain betting pattern? is it simply to add an element of randomness so an opponent cannot guess what % of cards you're playing or whether you hit a wet board?
 
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509fio

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All about deception. In a game of incomplete information would you rather predictable or unpredictable? I will say though if you are playing micros don't worry about it. Your opponents definitely arent.
 
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Supmargy

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The point of it is indeed to deceive your opponents. When you raise they won't know whether you've got something good or bad. That being said, you should only do it at stakes where you're villains are paying attention at what you play in certain positions. There's no point in trying to deceive someone that's not paying attention. Just go for value hands at micro stakes
 
This Fish Chums

This Fish Chums

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Manipulating Opponents by Playing Poor Cards

When throwing poor hands into your playing style as an attempt to deceive other players into thinking you play weak hands as well as strong ones, the first thing to consider is definitely whether or not your opponents are good enough to catch on to what you are doing. If they are good enough to catch on, you may be able to lure them into calling or re-raising later on when you have a really good hand because they think you're once again raising with poor cards.
However, there is another extremely important aspect to this deception and manipulation technique. Raising with poor cards does absolutely no good if the other players never see the poor cards you are playing. No matter how good your opponents are at tracking playing styles, if they don't know you play poor cards they'll never think you play poor cards. This leaves numerous things to consider:

  1. If you win the hand and muck your hand they will never know you played with poor cards.
  2. If you lose the hand in a showdown and muck the hand they will never know you played with poor cards.
  3. If you fold while other players are still in the hand, you will have to muck the cards automatically and can never show the poor cards you played.
Now, one situation where you can definitely use this is when playing heads up. Almost anyone can catch on to your playing style when playing heads up and you're allowed to show any hand you want regardless of whether you win or lose. So manipulating a player heads up can be profitable in the long run, but still requires you playing against an opponent who actually cares about your table image. There are players who are bad enough that even if they know you mix in poor cards they will never treat you that way because they only consider the cards they have in their hand.



So playing poor cards not only relies on your opponents being good enough to catch on to your playing style, but also relies on having a chance to show the poor cards you are playing. Otherwise you are just throwing good chips away.
 
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JustSoPro

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i've read about the concept a few times but perhaps i'm not grasping something, what's the point of adding lower quality hands to situations where you would normally play premium cards with a certain betting pattern? is it simply to add an element of randomness so an opponent cannot guess what % of cards you're playing or whether you hit a wet board?

I don't know whether you are talking about cash or tournament games, but in my opinion this strategy works better in cash games as it loses value in tournaments as the game goes on and the blinds increase. When you are playing cash games(ESPECIALLY Live), you can often identify player who ONLY play premium hands(Generally older gentlemen when playing live, they will be really quiet and tend to play very few hands) and they tend to have a hard time laying down their hands especially when they hit anything on the board or have an over pair. When the stacks behind are right(60BB+), the price to call is right(3-7% of the lower of the two of yours stacks), and action has already passed the player you identified, you can sneak in with two lower suited connectors knowing that if you hit you have a high chance of doubling up. However, if they realize that this is a part of your game it will drastically drop in EV so use it very sparingly.
 
johnny tigre

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I agree. Poker is a game of deception, its a mind game. You can always win with garbage cards as long as you play the situation right. But luck is always there to decide your fate.
 
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