Poker Basics - Range Balancing

A lesson for newbies for when they start facing better players and don't want to be easily exploited.

Today we introduce a concept that, once you understand it, really moves you from the basics to the more advanced regions of poker strategy. 

Range Balancing is a very important GTO concept that makes you hard to exploit. It refers to having the right ratio of good hands and bad hands in similar situations, so that your opponent cannot easily put you on a range. 

Before we give an example, it is perhaps important to say that you should not worry too much about range balancing at the very low stakes and/or against very weak opponents. It only applies against good players who are paying attention to how you play. 

Range balancing is hard to exploit

If you only continuation bet on the flop when you hit a big hand, you have no bluffs. This is a very unbalanced range, which a thinking opponent will easily be able to exploit. They can simply get out of your way when you bet and bluff you when you don't.

If you continuation bet 100% of the time on the flop you have the opposite problem. It will become clear to a thinking opponent you cannot have value hands most of the time (most hands miss the flop 2/3rds of the time) so they can float, slow play, bluff catch and bluff raise you a lot. 

Continuation betting around 70% of the time would be the sweet spot. Your opponent will know that you have some bluffs in there but also plenty of value hands, so coming up with a strategy to counter you will be tougher. 

Range balancing also comes down to the size of your bets. If you bet pot on the river then typically you need to have the best hand 66% of the time to break even, which means to be hard to exploit you need to bluff there 33% of the time. 

Good players will actually consider these things while they play. They are not just thinking about whether the hand they are holding right now is a bluff/value bet/give up but also which hands in their range make good bluffs/value bets/give ups. And yes there are better hands to bluff with, usually ones with blockers to the hands that would call you. 

How to construct a bluff to value range is a lesson for another time. Until then, start to think about not only what your hand right now should do, but what other hands in your range would do in the spot you are in. Finally, a reminder that against bad players you don't need to think about this as much. 

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