The range balancing misconception

I was reading a thread on 2p2 about how someone didn't understand why we would make the same line with the nuts and air. Our opponents are mostly either calling or not calling, and staying balanced with both seems to do the least exploiting. Responses were not so helpful.

I then posted in that thread that people were missing the point.

To my surprise, as i am not a respected poster in 2p2, someone pmed me asking for a hint on why people were missing the point.

This was my responses:

Yes i do have an idea of what they are missing.

john kane, like it seems a lot of posters do, doesn't understand why we would want to balance our range essentially. Why would we do the same thing with bluffs and good hands if the same result will happen much of the time?

Well all you have to look at is why we even balance our range in the first place. The reason we do it is the reason we do most everything, we try to force our opponent to make mistakes. Range balancing can make it incredibly hard for our opponent to put us on our correct range, and because of that he is making a mistake. We essentially make money because of this mistake.

Lets say we make it to the river and we shove a pot sized bet all in. Lets say our opponent has seen us bluff pure air here and has also seen us have the nuts/value bet. Well if he has seen us bluff is he going to act like a station? In that case we begin to bluff very rarely because he will make a mistake on the call side. If we think he's a pussy than we start showing up with air a ton more and punish him for folding so much. That's why range balancing can be so powerful. It's often tough to switch between doing something 100% of the time to doing the opposite 100% of the time while all together staying a level ahead of our opponent. Secondly if we were to do the ladder our range would become more liquid in opponents eyes. Even though we're always bluffing or always vbetting our opponent still puts us on a balanced range just because we are capable of doing both, and it becomes really hard to tell what our opponent is going to do.



My question is did I really get the point?

I think you're making things too complicated. Sometimes a bluff and a value-bet are both optimal in the same spot. For example if you think he calls a pot-sized shove 40% of the time, and a half-pot bet 70% of the time, you should shove no matter what you have. And this doesn't even have anything to do with metagame. The metagame benefits of playing the same way with bluffs and value-bets are also considerable and you mentioned some of them in your post.

Originally Posted by mcatdog

I think you're making things too complicated. Sometimes a bluff and a value-bet are both optimal in the same spot. For example if you think he calls a pot-sized shove 40% of the time, and a half-pot bet 70% of the time, you should shove no matter what you have.

... no

thats just silly, you are assuming our hand/range/whatever has 0 value if we check

Good catch I meant to say you should shove with nuts or air, I wasn't talking about medium-strength hands with showdown value.

ISF read this thread it talks about the same things but it's about 100x better than the one you linked to

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...0&fpart=1&vc=1

Originally Posted by mcatdog

Good catch I meant to say you should shove with nuts or air, I wasn't talking about medium-strength hands with showdown value.

you're still wrong though

c/r all-in might still be better as a bluff (v. unlikely with only a psb behind).

c/c or c/r might be better with a good non-nut hand.

c/r might be better with nuts (or c/c shove).

you have to be careful not to assume that a play is good just b/c it is +EV.

I think your post makes a lot of sense, but only against people we play regularly or sit with for a long session