Balacing your hand range 1: How it works

Balancing your hand range can be one of the more difficult skills in cash poker, but at its core lies a very simple concept. In essence, it's a way of adding a layer of unpredictability to your play, to prevent your opponents from accurately putting you on a hand based on your actions and thus protect yourself from being exploited. However, knowing when and how you should you balance your hand range - and how this changes according to the level you're playing - is another question entirely.

The first thing to note is that if your normal game is anything below $1/$2 you don’t need to worry about balancing your range too much. Range balancing is a defence against thinking, observant players, and at the lower levels your opponents simply won't (for the most part) be savvy enough to bother.

As you move up the stakes further and play in a smaller and smaller player pool, however, having a balanced range, and occasionally merging your range, will become increasingly vital to your profit margin. It’s a key part of metagame strategy. When you are playing the same solid, thinking regulars every day and you need to find out how to increase your edge against them, it is then you should be looking at balancing your range. Against players that are intelligent and are trying to think on a higher level it is super important, but if you’re facing more ABC players you can continue to play standard solid poker.

Balancing hands and battling sharks

Good players that you’re coming up against regularly will build a huge database of information on you and over time will know what you are going to do with a certain part of your range before you do. This leaves you wide open to exploitation and you’ll find yourself getting bluffed off too many hands. This is not good, but you can prevent your betting patterns being mapped by playing hands in a variety of ways and having a wider range with which you make specific bets/plays.

Most of the time you should make a specific choice, be it bet, raise, call or shove, based on what you think the optimal play is given a specific situation versus a specific opponent. Occasionally, however, it's necessary to deviate from the most profitable line in order to balance your hands - effectively throwing a curveball at your foes to keep them guessing. Make sure they are paying attention though. Even at the higher levels opponents are not always focusing on what you are doing and some never get past a certain level of thinking and will never adjust/exploit you anyhow. In this case your sub-optimal play will be wasted.

Put simply, making sub-optimal plays against thinking players will make you more money in the long run, but only if you know which players are paying real attention to your play.

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