Balance is one of the most misunderstood concepts in tournament poker. Many players believe that playing in a balanced way matters only when dealing with players they encounter on a regular basis. In a tournament setting, where they expect to play a few hours at most with a given opponent, they see no reason to worry about balancing their ranges.

This logic gets it backwards. Balance matters more when playing against unknown opponents with unknown tendencies. It is the best way to play when you don’t know what to expect. After examining what exactly balanced play means, this article will consider situations in which it is and is not useful.

Hopefully this article helps to clarify a frequent point of misunderstanding. Please let me know what you think!

Being “underrepresented” or “too weak” are not bad things in and of themselves. And before acting on feelings like these, you should articulate exactly how they could end up costing money. In other words, what would your opponent need to do to take advantage of this “mistake” that you are considering?

I’m always curious to know what you think, so please read the full article and leave me a comment!

What sets these tournaments apart is that, unlike the $20 donkament, they also attract some of the best tournament players in the world. This means that if you run bad at table drawing, you could end up with David Baker or Tony Dunst on your left. Understandably, this is a stressful thought for less experienced players considering these events. I have a couple of pieces of advice for these players:

1. Take Advantage of the Opportunity. Presumably part of the reason you are playing this tournament is for the experience of playing at the WSOP. Well, part of that experience is butting heads with the best of the world. Of course you’d rather watch them from afar than from their immediate right, but you can’t control that now. Observe them closely and try to pick up a few things that you can add to your own game. Even if they end up taking your chips, at least you’ll have learned something in the process.

2. Don’t Freak Out. Not even the best pros are gods. Their cards are dealt from the same deck that yours are, and when the action is on them, they have the same three choices: raise, call, or fold. Don’t assume that they are capable of feats of superhuman card skill. In fact, the correct strategy for them is generally to play a relatively straightforward game when stacks are shallowish and the table is full of amateurs. If you make the effort to study them and think through what they are doing, you may be surprised at how much you can figure out.

3. Don’t Be a Hero. Any type of poker play that could be preceded by the adjective “hero”, as in “hero call”, “hero fold”, etc., is generally not going to be a good idea against a player who is better than you. As I understand it, this terms generally refers to making a play with the opposite extreme of your range, so a hero fold means folding one of the best hands you could have in a given spot, where a hero call is calling with one of the worst hands you could have. By definition, these are exploitive plays that seek to take advantage of a perceived glaring imbalance in an opponent’s range, ie that it will be either extremely bluff-heavy or extremely value-heavy. Also by definition, you will have trouble identifying such holes in the game of a superior player, if he even has them in the first place. Better not to get into a leveling war against such a player in the first place.

4. Re-read Rule #1. The bottom line is that you should just relax, play your best, and make the most of the experience no matter what happens.

Consequently, I made the decision to call down based on the fact that the board came out very badly for my range. I think Villain would (correctly) expect me to bet flush draws on the flop, and the check-call probably indicates either a pair of T’s or a pocket pair to him. QT isn’t the absolute top of my range here- that would be something like AT or KdT, but it’s close enough to the top that I think it needs to be in my calling range against a Villain capable of triple barreling on a run-out that’s bad for my perceived range. The fact that draws missed on the river should also increase his bluffing frequency, as he may expect me to be on a pair + draw planning to fold if I don’t improve.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t expect to be good here anywhere near all the time. He would surely play flushes, straights, and probably AJ and AT this way. This isn’t even a particularly good line to take, and it’s not something I planned from the beginning. I just checked, and then he kept betting, and I kept thinking about how unlikely I was to have a good hand and therefore how much he ought to be bluffing me.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, $4 BB (4 handed) Hand History converter Courtesy of PokerZion.com

BB ($456.10)
UTG ($600.80)
Button ($1008.80)
Hero ($2248.35)

Preflop: Hero is SB with Ts, Qs.
1 fold, Button raises to $9.2, Hero raises to $32.8, 1 fold, Button calls $23.60.

Flop: ($70.40) 3c, Td, Jd (2 players)
Hero checks, Button bets $48, Hero calls $48.

Turn: ($166.40) Ad (2 players)
Hero checks, Button bets $126, Hero calls $126.

River: ($418.40) 2c (2 players)
Hero checks, Button bets $288, Hero calls $288.

Final Pot: $994.40

Results in white below:
Hero has Ts Qs (one pair, tens).
Button has 7c 4c (high card, ace).
Outcome: Hero wins $994.40.

One last comment, regarding the 3-bet: Villain actually had pretty high F3B stats, but most of my history with him is from 100BB games. If I knew he would have such a wide calling range, I would not have 3-bet this hand.

One of my students and I were recently discussing a common situation: You open with AQs in the CO and get 3-bet by an aggressive player on the button. Assuming 100 BB stacks, I don’t like any line that results in you folding pre-flop. I think your options are either to 4-bet-call if you think his shoving range will be wide enough or just to call the 3-bet if you think you’d have to fold to a 4-bet.

He then asked me what would be the cut-off, in terms of the BTN’s 3-betting range, for 4-bet-calling vs. just calling the 3-bet and taking a flop. I wasn’t prepared to give an answer off the top of my head, and as I started working it, I figured it would be an interesting blog post.

The answer will change a bit depending on the sizes of the bets, but the method will remain the same. I’m going to use the actual sizes from the example we were discussion. So, Hero opens for $3, BTN re-raises to $10, and Hero is contemplating a 4-bet to $24.

Basically we’re assuming here that BTN will always 5-bet or fold if we 4-bet. We’re also assuming that we have a good guess at his 3-betting range but don’t know what his 5-betting range will be. Thus, the real question is how wide does his 3-betting range need to be before 4-bet-calling AQ is unexploitable?

To solve this, we can pretend we’re playing our hand face up, with the constraints that he must either shove or fold and we will always call. Thus, he will shove AK, AQ, and all pocket pairs but fold everything else. Our equity gets a bit better the more pocket pairs are in his shoving range, but to make the math easier, I’m just going to give him a shoving range of {TT+,AQs+,AQo+}, against which AQs has about 38% equity.

We want to find the point at which 4-bet-calling is break-even, so we need to write an EV equation for this play and set it equal to 0. The EV of 4-bet-calling AQs will be equal to

0= %Fold * $13 + (1-%Fold) * (.38 * $201.50 + .62 * -$97)

(1-F) (-$16.43) = -13F

F = .56

If he never 5-bet shoves a hand that beats AQs, then he would need to fold 56% of the time to make a 4-bet profitable. The shoving range we gave him represents 4.7% of hands, so if he 3-bets at least 11% of the time in this spot, we can profitably 4-bet-call AQs no matter what his true 5-betting range is.

In theory you’d also want to compare the EV of 4-betting to calling, though it’s considerably more difficult to estimate the EV of calling. Against an aggressive 3-better, though, I want to 4-bet pretty much any hand that I can profitably 4-bet just because it’s so annoying to have someone sitting on my left 3-betting me. The more I can do to discourage that, the better, and generally a strategy that involves a lot of 4-betting is a better deterrent to aggressive 3-betting than is a flat-calling strategy.

Cliff’s Notes for the Math-Phobic: What I did here was find the point where, even against a worst-case scenario 5-betting range, it would be profitable to 4-bet-call AQs as a semi-bluff. If his 3-betting range is at least 11%, then there is nothing he can do to make it unprofitable for us to 4-bet-call AQs.