Balance in live poker

One topic that has interested me recently is the idea of playing a balanced strategy. While I’ve always known balance is an important part of poker I have always kind of dismissed it by saying stuff like, “I don’t need to worry about that now, that’s for people playing high stakes.” While it is true that balance is most important at higher stakes, you still need to maintain balance in your everyday 1/2 NL game at the casino.

This is a statement that a lot of people disagree with. It seems like the main school of thought is that there is absolutely no need for balance in live poker because almost none of your opponents are good enough, or paying enough attention to your play, to be exploiting you for being unbalanced. It is true that we don’t need to be worried about people trying to exploit us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we can be unbalanced. The confusion here is that people think playing a balanced strategy is the same as trying to play a game theory optimal (GTO) strategy. GTO is a strategy that makes you unexploitable no matter how your opponents play. When I say play a balanced strategy, I basically just mean never doing anything 100% of the time. The reason this is important is that in live poker we often make a lot of assumptions about our opponents and adjust our strategy accordingly. While this is a very good practice and you should always adjust in some way to your opponents, many people over adjust. Here is an example:

You sit down at a normal 1/2 table and there is a crazy drunk guy playing almost every hand preflop. You watch him play two hands, where in both hands he called someone down to the river with a very weak hand when it seemed obvious that the other guy had the nuts. Many people’s adjustment to this guy is to say, “Ok, I’m not going to bluff the drunk guy.” In general this is a very good assumption, but even seeing this guy play as crazily as he is, we don’t have enough information to say that we should never try to bluff him. For all we know, he just doesn’t like the guy that he called down. Maybe he views us differently than that player. Maybe he will call down all day on low boards but when an Ace hits the flop and he is against the preflop raiser he thinks they always have it and he just folds. These are just some of the many factors that we have to take into play in a poker hand. While I agree that the first thing I would do when I saw how this guy was playing would be to start bluffing him way less, I would still maintain some bluffing frequency against him, although probably a low frequency. This is the reason we always need to maintain some form of balance at the poker table. Not to stop other players from exploiting us, but to protect ourselves from our incorrect or overzealous assumptions and the fact that we don’t always have all the information.

In short, poker, especially live poker, is all about adjusting to your opponents and that is where almost all of your of your money will be made. However, until you have played hundreds, if not thousands, of hours with someone and are sure you know their game inside and out, you need to be careful to not over adjust to them and always maintain some balance in your game.

#balance #GTO #guestpost