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June 5, 2012
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So I've been doing a lot of game deconstruction lately as I try to move up the buy-in ladder, and obviously balanced ranges become exponentially more important the higher stakes you're playing.
While I understand the general idea of balanced ranges, I don't know what kind of frequencies we need for balance (i.e. how much of our range is value, how much is bluffs). I'm sure it depends on a number of different variables, but I'm not quite sure what those are.
Simple example. Suppose we're in the early stages of a tournament, opened in EP and are now facing a 3B from a strong player from the CO (or BU or whatever, doesn't matter). We want to be able to 4B KK+ for value. But we need to balance our 4B range.
Obviously 12 combos of KK+.
So how many combos of bluff hands should we put in our 4B range?
6? 8? 12?
Something about 60% value/40% bluff feels kind of right to me, but its really a wild guess without any basis in objective analysis.
tl;dr How do we determine frequencies for a balanced range?
October 6, 2010
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Thats a pretty interesting question
firstly, when you say balanced range, i think we are actually talking about a polarised range. I think that is a big more instructive. do you agree? The reason i say this is because sometimes it is great to have a polarised range, and sometimes you want a de-polarised range (or strong range as balugawhale calls it)
my guess is it would have to do more with their fold to 4bet percentages than anything. If they never ever fold, even something like AJ or 99, then you shouldnt have a polarised range at all, but you should widen your value range to include hands that have good equity against that range.
if he is the type of player to be 5betting only his strong hands and folding everything else, then your range should be weighted to his frequencies.
for example, lets say he 3bets top 5.4% of hands, which is AJs+, AQo+, 99+.
Now, if he only 5bets AA, KK, QQ, AKs for instance, then we have
16 combos in his 5bet range
44 combos in his 4bet fold range
therefore we should balance our range so that we have 26% value and 74% bluffs in our range
if he only 3bets QQ+, AKs+, and then 5bets that whole range then we shouldn't have a balanced range at all because we are never getting villain to fold.
am i making sense here?
June 5, 2012
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Yeah, definitely made sense. And yes, I'm talking about polarized ranges, since from a game theory perspective, that's pretty much what n-bets should be. My goal here is to get a rough idea as to what a GTO range would be, and use that as a baseline for making adjustments in-game…I feel like that can't be TOO terrible of an approach.
I could be wrong about this, but I think 'balanced' and 'exploitative' are pretty much mutually exclusive strategies, and I *think* what you're talking about is more an exploitative strategy: a wide 4B bluff range against a villain that folds too much to 4Bs.
My understanding of 'balance' is that we assume villain will always continue with the strongest part of his range (say X), and always fold with the weakest (say Z), but he has a middle range (Y) with a decision. In our polarized range we have our value range that crushes Y, and our bluff range that is way behind Y. In game theory they'd say villain would be 'indifferent' with his Y range, but in the poker world we'd just say that he' in a tough spot with his Y range.
So in the original example, we're assuming both players are super nitty because it makes it easier, but villain's X range would be KK+, his Z range would be like AJ, random 3B bluffs, etc. But we're balancing to attack his Y range of QQ and AK. If we don't bluff enough he can just fold them, and if we bluff to much he can just go with them. The goal, I think, is to make either decision with those hands equally gross.
Am *I* making sense? I felt a little rambly.
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