Balance is one of the most misunderstood concepts in tournament poker. Many players believe that playing in a balanced way matters only when dealing with players they encounter on a regular basis. In a tournament setting, where they expect to play a few hours at most with a given opponent, they see no reason to worry about balancing their ranges.
This logic gets it backwards. Balance matters more when playing against unknown opponents with unknown tendencies. It is the best way to play when you don't know what to expect. After examining what exactly balanced play means, this article will consider situations in which it is and is not useful.
Balance
Loosely speaking, balanced play means that you whenever you bluff, there are also value hands you would play in the same way. Likewise, whenever you value bet, balance requires that there also be bluffs that you would play in the same way.
The closer that your ratio of bluffs to value bets comes to the pot odds that your bet offers your opponent, the more balanced that bet is. For example, if there is 500 in the pot and you bet 500, your bet offers your opponent 2:1 on a call. To be perfectly balanced, you'd need to choose one hand to bluff for every two hands you would value bet.
Of course, this is all theoretical. You only play one hand at a time, so you have to know your own play well enough to be honest about what other hands you could have played the same way up to this point. From that range of hands you could hold, you must think about which you would bet for value and then choose an appropriate number with which to bluff.
That level of precision is nearly impossible to achieve in real time. In practice, it's generally good enough to recognize whether you will have a wide or a narrow value range in a given spot and then to bluff more or less often.
For a simple example, suppose that you raise from UTG and get called by the BB. The board comes out J
7 2 3
8
. The BB checks and calls bets on the flop and turn and checks again on the river. Again, for simplicity's sake, you decide that against this opponent, you would only value bet the nuts here, and with that hand you would make a pot-sized bet.
Considering your own UTG range, you determine that you would have played A K, AQ, AT, and A9 this way, but would have folded A8s and below pre-flop. This gives you four combos of hands to value bet.
A pot-sized bet offers your opponent 2:1 odds, so you need one bluff for every two value hands in your range. That means you need to identify just two combos with which you would bluff. The best bluffing hands have little showdown value but good blockers to your opponent's calling range, so you might as well bluff when you have the A in your hand but no pair. AQ has marginally less showdown value than AK, so while it doesn't make a big difference, you might as well choose those hands for bluffing. To have two combos, you could bluff with a black queen and but not with the Q.
This would be a balanced river betting range. No matter how often your opponent called or folded (giving him the option to reraise complicates matters a bit, so let's say that your bet is all-in), he couldn't exploit this range.
Exploitation
The argument goes that since you'll probably never be in this spot against this player again, you shouldn't care about being balanced. You should just make the best play with whatever hand you have.
With the nuts, it's easy to see that betting is the best play. But what is the best play with AQ? With AQ? With AQ for that matter? And how do you know?
At this point, the proponents of this argument might say that if you think he'll fold you should bet, and if you think he'll call you should check. I agree. This is exploitive play, and we'll come back to it in a moment.
But what if you don't know what he'll do? To exploit a player, you have to know something, or at least be able to guess something, about how he plays. If you have literally no clue, then betting with a balanced range is the best you can do. Bluffing too much rewards him if he turns out to be a loose caller, and not bluffing enough rewards him with more than his share of pots when he holds a hand that would have folded.
In this situation, balance is useful precisely because you are dealing with an unknown opponent. It has nothing to do with how you will play against him in the future and everything to do with making the best decision in the here and now.
You ought to have some reads on an opponent against whom you play regularly. You can use those reads to craft exploitive ranges that are more profitable than balanced ranges. If you expect him to fold too often in a certain spot, then you widen your bluffing range. If you expect him to call too often, then you can stop bluffing.
Then again, a regular opponent probably has some reads on you as well, and he may even be trying to predict what you expect him to do and how your shared history will influence his play. This dynamic is called the “leveling war”, and your ability to play it better than your opponent is what determines just how exploitive you can be. Against players whom you believe to be better than you, it's usually better to err on the side of balance, as they are more likely to get one step ahead of you in the leveling war.
If you're going to play exploitively, as you should in most situations, then you should be conscious of what exactly you are trying to exploit. You should be able to identify leaks or likely leaks in your opponents' play and say, “He is a calling station so I will not bluff” or something to that effect.
If you can't at least make an educated guess about what a player's leaks are, then you ought to strive for balance. Even if you know you'll never see him again.
