January 30, 2011
On Balance and Visualizing your entire range
Balance and Visualize your Range
- BALANCE
- Playing balanced is a strategy that nets you no money. Playing unbalanced is a calculated strategy to give you a better expectation
- We need to have more clue about balance these days, because people are better than ever
- What does balance mean then? It doesnt mean randomly doing things with different parts of your range. Balance means that you are taking an action with a precise frequency with your overall range.
- Say we want to 3b/5b JJ-AA and all AK combos preflop to an open/4bet. How much do we need to be 3betting air here to be balanced?
- Heres some math:
- Villain opens MP to 3BB, we are BB
- We can call, fold or raise. We would like to construct a balanced raising range. To simplify lets say our 3bet is 10BB.
- We are risking 9BB to win 4BB; thus, we need MP to fold 9/(4+13) of the time, or 69% of the time.
- Value combos: JJ-AA (6x4) AK (16) (total 40 combos)
- Bluff combos: we need to get BALANCED bluffing/value range 69% bluff combos of the 40 value combos to reach a break even point, thus a balanced net zero profit strategy.
- Bluff range math:
- ????=X combos
- 40/(40+X)=.69
- (40+X/40) - 1/.69
- 40+X = 1/.69 * 40
- 40+X = 58
- X = 18
- Therefore we need 18 combos in our bluffing range to make our 3betting balanced with our value range. Remember this just means that you are making net zero profit on the play.
- The next step is then to CONSTRUCT an optimal bluffing range
- The possibilities are endless, you can use the simple math above to work out a balanced value/bluffing range ratio in all situations. Then, the rabbit hole goes further.. check out the terp video series for more
- VISUALIZING YOUR ENTIRE RANGE
- The 'Ah-ha' moment many uNL players moving to small stakes make is realizing they need to view their hand as just part of an entire distribution of hands.
- Your entire range determines what line you should best take
- Often good players disagree about what is the best line to take in a certain spot, for example, you and another good player may take different turn lines, and that may lead you to believe you have discovered a leak on the turn. Yet in reality the problem lies with what happened on an earlier street and how that play affects how your range is perceived and thus you can both be making different plays on the turn based upon how you are perceievd from the flop.
- In short, when disagreeing one specific spot in a specific hand, look at an earlier street
- The best players are not the players who play 'Theoretically Optimal' or 'Perfectly Balanced', The best players are those who know about a combination of theory coupled with a good understanding of villains playing tendencies and maximise this to exploit them in each specific spot.
- Therefore there is no 'Perfect Play' with one hand on any single board. You must take into account the villain you are playing and tailor your play to exploit that villain as much as possible. That is why it is often dangerous to mass-robot multi-table, as while you will not be giving away much of an edge, you will not gain a significant edge either.
- Thus, table selection becomes way way way more important, finding fish (any player that you can exploit) and exploiting them is the way to increase your winrate
- Final Note for Visualizing: It's all about equity, randomizing your bluffing hands well makes you a harder player to player against, especially vs other good players.
- For example, do not randomize with pocketpairs (2outs when called) when you can randomize with the gutshots (4outs) in your range
- Further, don't randomize with a single overcard and a BDSD when you could randomize with two overcards and a BDSD in your range.
- In Short, Randomization as a bluff is all about the equity
6 Comments:
Enso posted on January 30, 2011 at 11:58 AM
Really nice post. I found studying/playing LHE helped a ton in range visualization that I then applied back to my NL game.
JohneDrama1 posted on February 07, 2011 at 01:22 AM
Could you explain to the math handicapped how you came up with opp needs to fold 69%of the time? ty great blog btw
Tackleberry posted on June 08, 2011 at 07:11 AM
The first part makes essentially no sense and is plain wrong.
The second part is taken from "Visualize your Ranges" from Matthew Janda, right? No big fan of copying content from other people and then not mentioning it. :(
onehundred47 posted on June 08, 2011 at 14:04 PM
wrong
Acombfosho posted on June 08, 2011 at 19:59 PM
tackleberry the first part is from terps balance series
Tackleberry posted on June 08, 2011 at 21:18 PM
The ratio between our value- and our bluff-hands doesn´t compute by the pot in relation to our bet. Neither does fold equity. The fold equity simply derives from the ratio of combos that Villain is folding / 4betting.
And if we want to balance our range, we have to look at the odds Villain is getting for his 4bet. Say you make it 10bb and Villain contemplates 4betting to 25bb. NOW you can calculate how often you have to defend against the 4bet to make his bluffs unprofitable. But not the other way round ...
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