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.
First principles
So how do you go about balancing your hand range? Preflop hand selection is a great place to start. Having a wide range for opening the pot in a lot of positions makes it harder for your opponents to exploit you.
Before you get carried away though, you should generally opt for offence over defence – for trying to exploit your foes rather than worrying about being exploited by them. That means you should follow the most optimal line most of the time and not overly concern yourself with the fact that you might be preyed upon by better players if you make the same play all the time. Only occasionally should you depart from this for the sake of balance.
Say you're on a tough aggressive table against a line-up of solid players who you play a lot. In this situation, you might decide to open 5-6 suited under the gun around 10% of the time, knowing full well it is probably going to be a losing proposition the times you play it. By doing so, however, you are protecting the balance of your under-the-gun betting range. This means that when the flop comes 4-5-6 and you make a continuation bet, your opponents cannot automatically think, 'That’s okay, that board never hit his range hard - I’ll just float and take it off him on the turn or river.' Instead what they are forced to think is, 'Does that c-bet mean he has A-K or is he enticing me to raise?' This means you can protect your future continuation bets and become a trickier player.
If 10% of the times you are dealt 5-6 suited you are open-raising with it, opponents cannot exploit you so easily. You have a relatively balanced range and are no longer predictable.
Flatting big pairs
One great way of balancing your play is flat-calling a raise with a big pocket pair and then check-raising a dry flop. This protects the times you decide to bluff-raise on the flop. Even though calling may be the best play with A-A on a 9-4-3 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, your opponent would always know his hand is toast, right? Well obviously the reverse is also true. Similar thought should go into when you check behind an opponent on the flop. Your opponent knows he cannot just bet the turn whenever you don’t continuation-bet because sometimes you will have something.
Floating should also be part of a balanced post-flop strategy. If you never call the flop lightly, your opponent can 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 against in the long term.
Mixing it up on the river
Fifth street is such a complex beast that you should have a super read on your opponent before trying something funky on the river. So for the most part if you’re check-raise bluffing or bluff-raising on the river you need to ask yourself if you’re suffering from Fancy Play Syndrome. That does not mean it is always bad, but you should have good reasons for making such a volatile move and that means using logical thought rather than just shoving and hoping.
Good players to check-raise bluff are reasonable grinders who are often weak-tight and lack the fortitude to trust their reads and would rather pick easier spots than gifting someone a big pot with top pair. You should always think two things before trying these high-octane moves on the river, “Will that player be able to read this play as I’m trying to tell it?” and “Will they be able to lay their hand down?” If you come up with two positive answers, it is usually fine to go ahead and pull the trigger. Players often feel you are pulling moves on them but lack the heart and courage of conviction to follow through with these reads. Bad players to check-raise bluff are idiotic fish and very good thinking players, instead pick on the good but not great players that can pass hands on dangerous boards.
Story telling
If you do elect to check-raise bluff a player, make sure your story actually makes sense. Let’s say you have Kh-Qh on a Jc-Ts-7s board, you bet against a very good player when you are both 200 big blinds deep. Your opponent calls. The turn is a 4d. You bet and they call again. The river is a 4s and you check-raise the river now, making a large raise over their half pot bet. These are the sort of spots where, provided your opponent is a solid thinking player, he will be forced to fold a lot of the time. Make sure that your opponent is capable of folding a flush and your image is clean enough to represent that you have a monster hand. If your opponent thinks that you are a crazy player this is not necessarily the time to pull a move; your opponent has shown a lot of strength calling you down and then betting the river. Pulling these moves requires great hand-reading ability and understanding of your opponent.