Does Your Game Have Balance?

Frequently, students ask me what they should look for at the table. Which opponent should they focus on? Should they look for tells or tendencies? How can all the stuff they are trying to observe?



As a general rule, you should pay attention to the loose players first, and look for tendencies before looking for tells. If you can isolate the tendencies of your opponents, you can read their hands much more easily and play more effectively against them.


However, while you are studying your opponents, some of them are busy studying you. They observe and analyze your play, your style, and your specific plays. As a result, you have yet another player to keep close tabs on at the table: Yourself! In fact, almost all top players watch and review their own play with as much energy as they spend on their opponents. What they are striving for is balance, that happy state in which their opponents are unsure of their reads and must guess what to do rather than respond with confidence. In other words, when a player achieves balance in his game, his opponents are off balance and uncomfortable.


You would think monitoring your own game would be a lot easier than trying to decipher your opponents' patterns. But for some reason, many players who watch their opponents like a hawk play their own cards almost routinely, making the same plays in the same situations over and over again.

In this column, we will take a look at:

• What is balance?
• When is balance important?

How do you develop balance?

WHAT IS BALANCE?

Most of the time, we play poker straightforwardly. If we have nothing, we fold; if we like our hand, we bet or raise. To keep our play from becoming easily readable, we must occasionally make a different play with the same hand.


For example, you have bet the flop and gotten called. You have missed your hand on the turn, so you correctly decide to check and fold. So far, so good. But your opponent becomes happily conditioned to the fact that when you check the turn, he will bet and you will fold. To keep him out of this comfort zone, you must sometimes check the turn when you have a real hand, planning to either check-raise the turn or allow your opponent to continue a bluff on the river. When he discovers that you are balancing your game by checking good hands as well as bad ones, he will be far less comfortable in simply betting when you check.


Keeping your opponent guessing (off balance) causes him to make errors, and we all know that your opponent's errors result in your profits.


WHEN IS BALANCE IMPORTANT?

Let me start this answer with an example. Assume that you are heads up and out of position when you get to the turn. You have called to the river with a straight draw, but there was also a flush draw on the flop. You decide that if a flush card hits, you will bet out, hoping to represent the flush and get your opponent to fold. That plan sounds good to me.


But what if you are the type of player who, when he makes a flush on the river, always checks, hoping to get in a check-raise? Your attempt to represent a flush by betting out will lack credibility to any opponent who has been carefully studying your play, and he will simply call.



In that last sentence, we see when you need to really worry about balance:

1. The more aware your opponents are, the more you need to play a very balanced game. Some opponents at every table are pretty oblivious, but many are not.

By watching yourself play, you can get a very clear idea of what your trends are. Do you lead on the flop with one pair and always check-raise with two pair? Or, do you always lead with two pair, hoping to get three bets? Do you raise on the flop when you want a free card, but call on the flop with a big hand and wait to raise on the turn when the bets double? If you play no-limit, do you always make small raises when you have a huge hand and larger raises when you have a more vulnerable holding?

The easiest and most profitable opponents to play against are predictable. We spend most of our energy trying to find specific areas of predictability in our opponents' games. When we find them, we exploit them to the limit.