ITH Poker Forum

[Bren_Osoro]

What exactly does it mean to balance your play? If you defend your blind against a button raise, then check/raise the flop, should you try to have the same amount of drawing combos as value combos? Slightly more value combos? Does how much equity you have on your draws affect the desired ratio between value combos and draw combos? The topic of balance is often refered to, and I think most people have a general idea of what it is but I havn't seen it thoroughly explained. On dry boards, something like K82 rainbow theres probably not enough draws you can check/raise to achieve balance. What do you do in that situation. Probably c/r some of the air hands at the bottom of your distribution but how do you know how much to add?

[ardilladeneys]

Don't worry about balance unless you are playing someone who is really good and paying attention to you.

[nsidestrate]

This is actually a very good question, but the answer is a bit complicated. It comes down to this: If your opponent has a mathematically profitable strategy to use against you because of your actions, you are unbalanced. For instance, let's imagine that you only 3 bet pre-flop with AA-QQ and AK. This would create a very unbalanced range for you that would allow your opponent to fold most hands to you and prevent you from realizing the profit that you should be entitled to.

The same concept applies in a wide variety of situations. For instance if you check-raise flops out of position only with strong made hands, then your opponent can profitably fold anytime you do that, so you need to mix in bluffs and semi-bluffs to keep your range balanced. As you point out, when you check-raise on dry boards, the only way to balance is to include pure bluffs in your check-raising range. You should probably be aware of your opponent's range as well and try to check-raise more on K82r boards more than say A82r or AT6r, because K82r will miss his open-raising range more often -- Q82r would be even better.

The actual math of how to calculate the proper balance is fairly complex. The best source I know of is Bill Chen's mathematics of poker. There were also some extremely detailed posts on the notion of balance on this forum a few years ago from Willem (who I'm almost sure was working in collaboration with another player, but I forget who right now). I don't have time to search right now for them.