Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy
RE Marshall: "the cards you're holding aren't of any real significance unless there is a showdown."

You're forgetting the probability of showing down the best hand based on pre-showdown equity.

It seems that you advocate polarizing ranges other than merging ranges. Why when it seems the elite players now are advocating balanced as being better than polarized? I agree with you on why polarizing range (at least how you describe it here) is good, but I also don't understand a lot of the rationale behind merging.
Maybe its cuz I just dropped 12 buy ins in less than an hour, downed a a few beers, took 2mg of Xanax and 4 mg of Klonopin, but what you are saying here isn't really making any sense to me at all.

"the probability of showing down the best hand based on pre-showdown equity" ????? what does this mean? like the flop comes super low and innocuous and u end up checking down all 3 streets? if this is what you're alluding to, it's highly unlikely considering by the time you get to the river you'll either know you can bluff out opponent or you'll know he's never bluffing when valuing his pr of 7s on 88643 board. Maybe i'm way off, still not quite sure.....

it seems i advocate polarizing ranges rather than merging ranges? .... as far as I know those are two different terms for the same idea.

polarizing means you are playing your hand in a way that it appears you have a monster hand or a pure bluff when in fact you have a med. strength type hand trying to get a call from a very marginal hand hoping you're bluffing and dont have the nuts.....

merging means you are taking the same line you would take w/ a strong hand and take it w/ a weaker type hand in hopes to get a light call down .... are these not the same definitions? i guess i could be wrong but i never heard of merging ranges until after i discovered what i termed "polarizing my range" and kind of just assumed they meant the same thing.

another thing is im not an elite player, but i was talking w/ northface aka peachy_keen just yesterday about elite players and how they play. peachy seems to always want to make sure his ranges are balanced, whereas somene like mezmerizeplz tends to want to merge/polarize more and hammer down on people ... like i said, im not an elite player, but i think it's just a personal style preference. u can play whatever way works best for u, there are many different ways to play well, and one isnt necessarily better than any other.