There is no need to mix against fish
Mixing strategies is useful against thinking players but you should not do it against weak players, says Dara O'Kearney.
I've written before about when you should mix strategies in poker and an important caveat I should have added was that it's only relevant against smart, thinking, players.
Mixing achieves balance and you need balance against an elite player. What a solver mixing tells us is that against a perfect player, the EV of a hand is the same for two actions.
Against a human player, there will always be a more preferable option. If the player is passive, the more aggressive action is usually preferable. If the player is aggressive, a more passive trappy style might be better. We discussed this with Andrew Brokos in the latest episode of The Chip Race.
When we wrote Beyond GTO: Poker Exploits Simplified, our new book on node locking, one thing that became very clear is that the solver reduced mixing significantly when it had a clear idea of an opponent's leaks. It would take the more exploitative line and it threw balance out of the window.
If a player bluffed too much, the solver would call all its bluff catchers. If the player under bluffed, the solver would muck all its bluff catchers, and so on.
No need for balance
Here is a simple example from GTO Wizard, it's a betting range on an A♠J♠6♣ flop. The first example is the GTO range, and the second example is when we make the opponent a big calling station. Red is a small bet, dark red is an overbet.
There is much less mixing in the second range. Value hands like AKs mix in the GTO version to protect the smaller bet range, but in the second example, it's a pure overbet. Most of the value hands, even very thin value, overbet now.
There is still mixing, but a lot of the hands that mix are doing so because they have a flush draw, rather than mixing every combination. Generally speaking, when a hand mixes 5% of the time, you can practically ignore it anyway.
Likewise, there is no balancing. AA checks 100% of the time in the GTO range so there is a strong hand in the checking range and because it unblocks the calls. In the node locked version it overbets purely for value.
When you have a reliable read on your opponent, you don't need to mix, you don't need to balance, in fact, you can play your hand face up. So next time you decide to mix your strategy, make sure it is against a smart player.
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