Balancing Your Play

Balancing your play is the key to playing better no-limit hold’em. Many skills in the game — value-betting, bluffing, snapping off bluffs, getting away from second-best hands, and so forth — are components of the larger skill of play-balancing. If you focus on balancing your play, you’ll get better at all of these things almost automatically.

What does it mean to balance your play? Your play is balanced if, from your opponents’ perspective, you are a credible threat to have both strong and weak hands. Here’s a simple example: You’ve just pushed all in on the river. What do you have? Is it always a strong hand, or is it frequently a bluff? If it’s nearly always a strong hand, your play is unbalanced.

Most live-action no-limit hold’em players play severely unbalanced strategies. Hand after hand, they find themselves in situations where an observant opponent can reliably narrow their hand strength. You are exploitable whenever you are unbalanced. If I know that you will move all in only with a strong hand, I’ll never pay you off. If I have you paying me off but I’m never paying you off, you will lose against me.

Devote a session to balancing your play. Look for situations where you almost always have strong hands, or almost always have weak ones, and pledge to even things up in the future. Here are a few unbalanced examples, with suggested fixes:

The Flop Raise

Raising the flop is an indication of a strong hand. It places a lot of money at risk, and it also usually acts as an invitation to your opponent to play for stacks. In a $2-$5 game with $800 stacks, for instance, an opponent opens for $20, the button calls, and you call from the big blind. You check the flop, your opponent bets $50, the button folds, and you make it $150 to go. A good chunk of your stack is already in the middle, and you also can’t be too surprised if your opponent reraises all in.

Because raising the flop is an indication of a strong hand, you should usually have a strong hand when you do it; but, not always. If you always (or nearly always) have a strong hand, your opponent can safely fold hands like top pair to your raise.

You want your opponents to have enough doubts when you raise the flop that they at least consider playing for stacks with top pair. The fix is to mix in some bluffs. Here are some bluffs to try. Assume that the action is the same as above, and you’re raising to $150 on the flop.

You have the J 10, and the flop comes K Q 4. You can expect hands like A-Q and 10-10 to fold to your raise. You scare your opponent if he has A-K or A-A, and there’s enough money remaining that you may be able to convince him to fold later in the hand if a spade comes (or to pay you off if an ace comes). Bluffing is important so that your opponent can’t just read you for having K-Q or 4-4 when you raise.

You have the J 10, and the flop comes Q Q 3. This flop is so difficult to connect with that many players will look down, see that they don’t have a queen, and fold to your raise. Because it’s so hard to hit and because many players would slow-play a queen, they also may suspect that you’re bluffing. But they’ll often fold anyway.

Do not overuse these bluffs. If you do, you become unbalanced in the opposite direction — too weak to support the strong flop raise. The goal is to mix it up just enough that your sets get paid off a little more often by top pair, while also winning an occasional pot with nothing.

The Large Out-of-Position Bet

When an out-of-position player — particularly one who has already called a significant bet on a previous round — fires a large bet, it often signifies an unbalanced range. For example, in a $2-$5 game with $800 stacks, you open to $20 with the A A, and three players call, including both blinds. The flop comes Q 10 5. Everyone checks to you, you bet $80, and the small blind calls. The turn is the 9, and the small blind bets $200.

For most players, this bet will nearly always signify a hand that beats A-A. It could be K-J for the straight, a turned two pair, or even a flopped set or two pair. It’s only rarely a bluff.

There’s no reason that a player should avoid bluffing in situations like this one, but in practice, many players rarely think of trying it. There are two easy ways to fix this unbalanced line: sometimes check a made hand instead of betting out, and sometimes bluff.

Final Thoughts

If this column piques your curiosity and you ask a question about balancing your play in an online discussion forum, someone will inevitably respond negatively to you: “Don’t worry about balancing your play. Your opponents are too stupid to notice.”

For a few reasons, I believe that you should focus on balancing your play no matter how stupid your opponents may or may not be. Balancing your play helps you to find advantageous plays that you may have been missing before. For instance, I have a lot of success in occasionally launching large out-of-position bluffs on the turn or river. If I were content to leave that line unbalanced, I’d miss out on all of those extra pots. Also, the fact that I have success with my bluffs suggests that my opponents are perhaps not that stupid after all. I get folds because my opponents know that most players rarely bluff like that.

Finally, if you refuse to balance your lines, you’ll never become a really good no-limit hold’em player. At the higher levels, the players with unbalanced play get slaughtered. So, no matter what games you play, you should look to add a little more balance to your strategy.

Ed’s latest book, Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em, is available for purchase at smallstakesnolimitholdem.com. He is a featured coach at cardrunners.com, and you can also check out his online poker advice column, notedpokerauthority.com.