So how do you go about balancing your hand range? Pre-flop is a great place to start. When you have a wide range for opening the pot in a lot of positions, it makes it harder for your opponents to exploit you. Generally you should opt for exploitation over exploitability and that means taking the most optimal line most of the time and not overly concerning yourself with the fact that you might be exploited by better players if you take the same line all the time.
Say that on a tough aggressive table playing a line up of solid players who you play a lot. In this type of situation, you might decide to open 56s utg around 10% of the time at this type of table, knowing full well it is probably going to be a losing proposition the times you play it but by doing so you are protecting the balance of your utg range.
This means that when the flop comes 4-5-6 and you make a continuation bet, your opponents cannot automatically think, “That’s ok, that board never hit his range hard, I’ll just float this nit and take it off his hand on the turn or river.” Instead what they are forced to think is, “Does that c-bet mean I have he has Ace King or is he enticing me to raise?” This means that you can protect your future c-bets and become a trickier player. Opponents cannot exploit so easily because you have a relatively balanced range (if 10% of 56s dealt you are open raising).
Flatting big pairs
Flat calling a raise with a big pocket pair and check-raising dry boards is a great way of balancing your play. This protects the times that you decide to bluff raise flops. In these situations you can balance your actions, even though calling may be the best play with AA on a 943 board, you might decide to check-raise just to balance against a particular player. When your opponent has to guess whether you have a big hand or a bluff, it makes him much more likely to make mistakes. If you only ever check-raised the flop with a huge hand, then your opponent would know his hand is toast, right? Well obviously the reverse is also true. Similar thought should go into when you check back flops, your opponent knows he cannot just bet the turn whenever you don’t c-bet because sometimes you will have something.
Floating should also be part of a balanced post-flop strategy. If you never called the flop lightly, your opponent could continually fire one continuation bet with air then give up on the turn if you call. Floating lets you have a range where you might be on a draw, you might have air (i.e. floating) or you might be trapping with a monster. Playing each of these hands the same way in different situations makes you harder to play in the long term.
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