You must be unexploitable… NOT! Part 2: The balancing act.
In my last article I spoke about the advantages of using a generally exploitive strategy to take advantage of your weaker opponents. I adamantly believe that too many poker players are worried too much about giving up some information and not enough about exploiting their opponents.
A lot of players choose their postflop betting lines based on having a balancing strategy. The logic usually goes with something like “I will bet in this spot when I miss, so therefore I have to bet when I hit”, or vice versa.
That is the entire logic behind a play.
Doesn’t this seem a little fuzzy to anyone?
As I stated in my most recent article, you must consider whether or not what you are giving up is worth it. Are you giving up more than you will get back in return? I believe, in general, the answer is yes.
It is important to ask yourself what exactly do you expect to gain by using these balancing strategies. You are hoping to gain an edge(or rather not give an edge) to opponents who will be able to accurately read your hand. The opponents that we should be targeting with this strategy are the ones that are very good hand readers. If they aren’t very good hand readers then they are either reading your hand poorly or they aren’t reading your hand at all. In either case, since they aren’t going to be able to take advantage there is no point in giving up an edge.
Let’s look at some examples from some different player types where you play may change, but your opponent will often make mistakes.
You hold AKo on the button and raise to 4BB. You get called by a very tight, set-miner type in the BB. He is very tight, but he seems to consider your range postflop and doesn’t just give up if he thinks you may be c-betting. He is somewhat aggressive. You put his range on 99-22 with maybe AK/AQ thrown into the mix. The stacks are 100BB.
The flop comes T44. He checks to you.
This player will likely call your flop with most of his range of hands. You have very little fold equity so your semi-bluff is mostly a losing play. A check is the play. You don’t put money in when behind and you get a free card. In addition, if this opponent checks at you again on the turn you have a lot more fold equity and you can then use the delayed c-bet.
Now, imagine that there is a solid tight player that sees this hand go to showdown.
Take this example:
You have JJ in the two off the button and make a raise to 4BB. The solid player mentioned above makes a call. He will make aggressive plays with less than the nuts and will make some bluffs. He is a little bit looser than the player from the first example, but he plays pretty tightly for raises preflop so his range is mostly the same but he may include a few suited-connectors and is more likely to have a big ace. The stacks are again 100BB deep.
The flop comes 774 and he checks.
You probably have the best hand at this point unless he has 77,87s, 76s, or 44. That is a small part of his range so your equity should be pretty good here. However, if you bet and he raises you are probably going to have to lay down your hand even though he may be bluffing or raising with the worse hand. You don’t think he will get all-in with a worse hand so his raise puts you in a tough spot. Also, if you check the turn he is probably going to come out betting thinking that his hand is best because you wouldn’t have bet overcards like in the hand he saw before. Your play here is to check.*
You can see quickly that if you are changing your lines based on your opponent that your play is going to have a randomization to it. Once you add in stack sizes and factor in recent history you can imagine all of the changes that can happen to your lines with similar hands. You won’t be betting when you should check and checking when you should bet. You will be making the right play and your opponent probably won’t pick up on it.
As always, if you start getting the idea that your opponent is you can “always mix it up”. However, you should be sure that a player is able read your hand so well and then act upon it before you stray from optimal strategy. To say it another way, you want to keep one level above your opponent. There is no need to take a sub-optimal lines to make your opponent mess up on the second level if he is going to mess up regardless. If your opponent is thinking well on the second level then it is good to try to use a balancing strategy to invite him to make mistakes and to nullify his hand reading capabilities. Although, generally speaking, it is better to do this when the decision is close so that you are not giving up a lot of value.
It is important to remember that you make money in poker by making your opponents make mistakes. You need to figure out what type of mistakes your opponents and then encourage them to make them. That is the bottom line in deciding what is the correct strategy to deploy.
* Note also that you would probably play these hands the exact hands the exact opposite against these opponents. You would probably bet the JJ hand against our first opponent and bet the AK hand versus our second opponent.
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Good stuff!
I’m starting to get addicted to your blog.
Bot,
Tell me it’s not just the picture in this one is it?
Lol, no. Not just the picture
I wanted to write some reply that would relate to the article, but didn’t really come up with anything interesting what I could say. I am a habitual continuation bettor when the flop is heads-up, but recently I’ve been spending more thought on when to not C-bet. I’ve found myself checking more low flops, since I think my bet is much more likely to be called since the opponent thinks its unlikely that I hit. If I check and the turn is a face card I get a lot more respect with a bet.
I’m not too fond of checking behind when the flop hit me, but I do see your point in inducing a bluff as in hand 2 where the opponent will bet with hands that you don’t think he’d call with.
But the second hand kind of relies on the fact that the board is paired IMO. I’d be much more inclined to bet in case there was a draw or where the opponent could have made a hand that would call but that we are ahead off. So I’m not so sure if checking paired boards with an over pair is enough of a randomization to make our opponents think that my check on a low board is not a sign of weakness.
Bot,
Lots of good thoughts in here. Allow me to clarify a bit.
I agree that the fact that the second hand has a paired board makes the check much better. I constructed this hand because it is just a clear example where I believe a check is the most correct play, but players often rationalize betting. However, my point is not that checking this board here will give you enough randomization to fool an opponent. I am arguing that this flop is a check and that many opponents would bet it as part of a balanced strategy. I hope that clears it up.
Also, I do believe that some occasional checks with good hands, that are often correct, will tend to randomize your play more than you think. For example, when I use a randomizing strategy I often make my ‘incorrect’ randomizing play 10-25% of the time. I would guess some of these correct checks would have you making the check with a good hand percentage somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20%.
I don’t mean to say that we should often be checking the flop when we make a good hand. We should merely consider that sometimes it is the best play and that players who bet in these spots ‘for a balancing strategy’ often have some fuzzy thinking going on.
Let me know if that doesn’t clear it up or if you think I’m leaving something out!
First time posting, don’t crucify me.
At any rate, I think that we need to take a couple more things into consideration here when considering appropriate post-flop action here. I have been going back through Harrington’s book and one of the sections that I found most interesting is the section on your OWN table image. He’s saying that not only is it important to be cognizant of your opponents tendencies and hand ranges but to also consider your table image.
In the first hand, if we are assuming that this person actually has more than a giant piece of poop between their ears and in light of randomization, maybe firing a bullet at this pot to try to clean it up on the spot isn’t a bad thing. If you’re assuming that you have the best of it pre flop and that sorta flop rolls out, ::reluctant Phil Gordon citation:: there’s somewhere between a 30-35% chance that he missed that flop to. How much can it hurt to probe bet/continuation bet to see where you’re at? I’m all for giving up small pots in hopes of molding an image that will allow aggressive-tight play to pay off in future hands.
In the second hand, I’m not sure I understand the rationale here and maybe its because I’m still somewhat enamored with the concept of overpairs. You stated “we probably have the best hand at this point” and present a very narrow range of hands that this person could have. Assuming that we c-bet the previous hand and our every vigilant opponent saw this and thought to himself “that wily bastard is trying to take it down here with two overcards” would it not be a calculated risk then to possibly put this rascal on a stone cold bluff knowing that he is fully capable of raising with complete trash in this spot? I’m quite sure I follow the rationale to cough up what appears to be a pretty decent against a small subset of potential raising hands.
That is all.
squibbs,
I agree that taking your image into consideration is an important thing. I also agree that is important to take this into consideration when it’s close. I constructed these two hand examples because these are situations where the decision is a bit more apparent given the specific read I gave you (which I carefully constructed to work out in my favor – of course
)
In the first hand, given our read that our opponent is pretty much always calling on this flop. If we thought he would fold some hands here than a bet is much better. The 30-35% number you are quoting is the amount of time that he will hit with an unpaired hand. In this case most of his range is paired so that number doesn’t help us much in this particular spot. Look at it this way:
His range is AK/AQ 99-22
There are 9 combos of AK (3 remaining A’s and 3 remaining K’s).
There are 12 combos of AQ.
There are 48 combos of 99-22(6 combos each of the 8 hands).
There is a 30% chance that he has an unpaired hand that will fold. If you bet you will get called well over a majority of the time.
Against this particular player a bet is not nearly as enticing as a check to get a free card since you will never get him to fold a better hand. True, if you change the board and/or the player the entire situation changes. *
You can see that it isn’t very close to bet this flop so. Remember, you aren’t going to get him a mistake and you aren’t going to encourage this opponent to make mistakes in the future by calling with a worse hand (if you AA in this spot he is still calling so he is still making a mistake). It is all about the mistakes. **
On the second hand the point you make is extremely true but there is one more step that you have to take though. The turn action.
Say you bet and your opponent says “Overcards are a part of his range here so I am going to make a bluff(or a semi-bluff) and try to get him off that hand”. Also, say that you know this so you think that a call is profitable. So you bet 6BB and he raises to 18BB and you call. Now the pot is 44BB and there is 78BB behind. He makes a bet of 30BB here. Now what do you do? If you call you probably shouldn’t be folding the river as that suggest you made a mistake somewhere else. Do you feel comfortable getting all of you money in? Sure, he may have been bluffing there, but will he push all of his money in on a bluff? He may. He may not. The chances are he will show up with a big hand more often than not. You can’t just consider whether or not you can profitable call here. You have to also consider whether or not you can profitably get all-in (or at the very least you need to feel confident about being able to fold to one more bet).
As you can see, if you get raised it puts you in a much tougher spot so you want to avoid a raise unless you feel confident about getting it all-in.
If your read is that you opponent is hyper aggressive then it is ok to bet the flop with the HOPE of getting check-raised so that you can then push the turn (this is assuming he is TOO aggressive and he will bluff and/or get all-in with a worse pocket pair often). However, this isn’t the guy that I am describing. He is aggressive enough to bluff but he probably isn’t going to go bet-bet after this and show up with 99 very often because he knows that once you call the flop you probably have an overpair.
* He may fold AK that is tied with you and him folding AQ is not a big gain.
** If you are betting the flop then you need to bet the turn and THEN maybe you can make him make mistakes. However, you need to have a read that your opponent will not get all-in with a pocket-pair in this spot(which a lot of opponents correctly shouldn’t). You can see that betting two streets with unimproved AKo is definitely getting out of line so you have to be sure.
Interesting…more to think about. Wish I’d read this before yesterday as I had a similar hand.
I had KK and open-raised 4xbb. A 20ish/13/1.5 (IIRC) villain called from CO. Flop was 889r. I c-bet 3/4 or so OOP and he raised me decently. Wanted to shove (wouldn’t have been able to raise and then lay it down), but it seems like everytime I do that I’m sorry.
I think A9 is probably possible as is a PP, but 1.5 AF (granted sample size wasn’t huge at < 100) makes this sort of play stand out. Can’t see him making this move with an 8 though, as why blow me out of the water there if he was way ahead? Who knows though…it is 25NL!
I don’t have the hand here at work but I don’t remember him being full but definitely more than 1/2; maybe 4/5ish stack or so? I was full. Anyhow, I decided to call flop raise and re-evaluate turn, hoping he was testing and we could keep the pot from getting huge. On the turn an A hit. I checked to him and he bet. I figured it was likely that even if I had been ahead before, I wasn’t anymore. I folded and felt like I’d completely misplayed my hand. Hate that!
learningcurve2p2,
It is an interesting hand you have here. I think this hand illustrates how important it is to have a “baseline” read on your opponents. Let me tell you what I mean by that.
What hands does a player with these stats call with preflop? How aggressive is a player with a 1.5 aggression factor? You want to have a general assumption you make so that you have some idea how you want to go forward with the hand.
Most players have done this with preflop, but with postflop aggression(which is often a more important consideration) they seem to leave it out. At least this is what I often see on twoplustwo.
I assume that this player would have 3-bet AA-JJ so those are a discounted part of his range. I assume that a player with a 1.5 AF still plays pretty straightforwardly. If he raises he probably has you beat. He probably doesn’t raise draws and prefers to call them. He probably plays one-pair type hands fairly cautiously.
So, if you go with that as a read then your play on the flop is probably to bet/fold. He may sit by and call with any PP or TP that is in his range but he will probably rarely raise without a better hand(keep your eye on him though as many players will often play overly aggressive on paired boards).
The size of the stacks are very important here though. If he has an 80BB stack then his raise puts you to a commitment decision. You would have bet 6 into a pot of 8(so you have put 10 which is more than 1/10 of the starting stacks0) If he raised to 26(a pot-sized raise) then you shouldn’t call and then fold. You don’t want to be putting in 1/3 of your stack and then folding. You have to make your decision on whether or not you want to get all-in on the flop. I don’t imagine you want to get all-in so the play is to fold.
Look at it another way. Say the turn is a brick and you check and he bets 3/4’s the pot(assuming he raise to 26 then that is a bet of 30BB with him having 20BB behind). Are you calling here? If you are calling here you certainly are calling the river.
I find it is important to think about what my reasoning should be for calling. What I mean by that is if you call the flop you have to be thinking your opponent has a worse PP or TP often enough to call. If the turn is a brick then nothing has changed(unless you think your opponent won’t bet twice with a worse PP) and you should call because you called the flop. If you call the turn you are certainly calling the river getting those odds. You can see how quickly you get yourself locked in here.
So as far as the specifics of your hand, it really depends more on the stack size, but you probably will need to just fold the flop here. Most of the time an A isn’t coming on the turn and you will have to fold anyways which means that your flop call was probably a mistake(depending on the raise size and the stack size).
One other thing:
This hand also illustrates how powerful a committing raise can be to an observant opponent. If you pick up on an opponent that plays reasonably well you can probably pick a spot like this to run a bluff on them by raising the flop and betting the turn. They have to fold almost anything less than trips in a spot like this. Conversely, if they are willing to get all-in here(thus committing too easily) you have quite of bit of implied odds and you should play accordingly.
Paired boards are good to pay attention to because many players play them incorrectly.
[...] 1 talks about the misconceptions about being unexploitable and explains some common misconceptions. Part 2 involves that it can be an error in justifying your plays for balancing [...]