Balancing Ranges

A term you'll see thrown around a lot by good players playing medium to high stakes (typically probably $400NL and higher) is "range balancing". What this means is that in order to not become easily exploited by good opponents who are paying attention to our tedencies, we must take the same action with roughly the same percent of our strongest hands as we do with our weakest hands.

Lets consider a typical ABC TAG player who c-bets 100% of the time in HU pots on the flop. However, on the turn he only fires a second barrel with TPTK or better, and checks everything else (including his draws). Once a good player has figured out how the typical ABC TAG bets his hands on the turn, it becomes trivial to play near perfect poker against him. We'll call or raise his turn bet if we can beat TPTK, and fold if we cannot (and do not have enough outs + implied odds to make a call +EV). If the good player is IP and is checked to by the TAG on the turn, he will bet every time. It also becomes much more desirable for the good player to float the TAG's flop c-bets, because he knows that he's never going to be bluffed off the best hand on the turn. Thus, against very good players we must balance our betting ranges with bluffs so that they cannot play near perfectly against us. If all of a sudden our ABC TAG begins to bet the top 25% of his range as well as the 25% of the bottom, the good player will now be folding the best hand on the turn some of the time. As he eventually adjusts to calling down lighter on the turn, the TAG's big hands will also get paid off more easily.

It's worth noting that when we choose to bet our near worthless hands (we get to choose because >25% of our range is made up of these hands, and we're only betting 25% to balance the betting of the top 25%) it is important that we pick good spots. We want to pick spots where our opponent is more likely to fold based on his tendencies. If we know he likes to raise his draws on the flop and a draw completes on the turn when he merely called our flop bet, this is a good spot to bluff. Following a low flop, a turn ace or king is often a good card to fire a second barrel, as it is more likely to have hit our range than that of our opponent (as they are likely have folded missed large cards on the flop).

Hopefully from the above you can see how having balanced ranges is very important when appropriate. However, unless you're playing mid/high stakes perhaps the most important lesson is that you do not need to balance ranges against players whom are not considering your range and associated betting patterns. This includes the fish and the majority of the regulars at micro/small stakes. For instance, assume we isolate a fish that we know is a calling station. He only very rarely can find the fold button, and is calling a flop bet with any pair, missed overcards, any draw, etc. Against a good player, only betting our made hands and checking our air would be extremely exploitable and bad. However, against this fish it is absolutely optimal, and we should play this way because he's not going to adjust and try to exploit us. The same goes for the majority of the ABC TAG regulars at micro/small stakes. These players eventually build a roll and move up, but if they don't learn to balance their own ranges and exploit the unbalanced ranges of other players, they become "TAGfish" whom are feasted on by the better players.