A few of you will know I've been putting a ton of work into being balanced in all spots as of late. I'm nowhere near there, but the jist of what I'm trying to do when I'm in a spot is to ensure that I could've certainly got to that spot x% of the time with a variety of hands, from pure nuts to missed draws to pure air, etc.
This means sometimes taking a line that may seem imperfect in a vacuum, but as part of an overall gameplan means I end up with unexpected hands in spots where my range would otherwise be 'face up'.
I actually believe that all the work Sauce puts into his game comes down to this. Read some of his old video threads to see what I mean. For example, you hold 33 OOP on J63r, you cbet and turn is a J. In this spot you have to give up your bluffs for the most part, but most regs would just fire again. Given you don't want to be giving up every single time the board pairs, I think there's almost no need to have a betting range at all in this spot.
Check call turn, check raise river and hey you've suddenly found a solution to all those spots where you hold 99 here with no clue what to do as your hand is so 'face up'.
Where I've been falling down in balancing the last 3 days is in my PF looseness. Basically, it's no good me 3betting J8s in the BB, playing it in the exact same manner as AA on a Ten hi board....... when my 3bet in the BB is 11 fucking %. My UTg raises have hit 21% again, and in the last 5000 hands my UTG+1 3bet has hit 20%!
So frequency wise, I'm currently the opposite of balanced. This is just a long winded way of saying that postflop everything is fine right now, but I think my image is the worst it's ever been right now and thus my PF stuff is meaning I always have so many more bluffs than value right now.
Is all.
4 comments:
Good post as always, was missing some lately :)
Im wondering about this part tho :
"Check call turn, check raise river and hey you've suddenly found a solution to all those spots where you hold 99 here with no clue what to do as your hand is so 'face up'."
Do you mean that :
1) you can therefor turn your 99 hand into a bluff by c/calling turn in that spot & c/shoving river
or
2) you can therefor get to showdown easier with 99 because villain would have seen that you can take this line with 33 (bottom set) and so he wont try to bluff you that much
?
Thanks for your insightful posts.
Sort this stuff out. Don't you know that as a Jedi you are supposed to bring balance to the Force???
Hello sedeete:
1) What I mean is, those spots where you hold 99 on j63r J feel horrible because you literally always have 99 there. You know this, you know villain knows this, and you know you're at his mercy given he can do whatever he wants with that information. The answer to the problem is not to play your 99 in a different manner, but rather ensure that in those spots you find difficult that you're capable of showing up with a whole range of hands and thus confounding villain's assumptions. In this spot with 99, you no longer feel horrible as you tell yourself 'well, I'm going to have Jx and sets a lot of the time here, fold and move on'.
2) I don't really believe too much in the 'villain sees one thing and therefore it makes your life easier' thing. Thats the part of balancing that proponents of it rave on about, and I think for the most part it's overrated. What balancing does do is ensure that your range is kept very wide in all spots and this forces far mistakes and thus makes us far more money than otherwise playing our respective bluffs and value in a vacuum will ever do.
Awesome, thanks!
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