I thought balancing play on all streets was just an extension of how 15 years ago we balanced our PFR hands to avoid being exploited, and balanced our CB hands and started double barrelling some turns for the same reason, so I guess checking in a balanced way is an extension of that. Poker Tracker made this necessary even with opponents who weren’t paying attention.
No way dude. Pokertracker was a thing during my entire career and I never gave a flying shit about exploitability for 7 or so years. Something else had to have happened (and I would guess that it was the money dried up).
Again, I’ll defer to people actually in the game or whatever for description of today, but that wasn’t how it was.
Ok. I must have started a few years before you because people I was first playing against (only at 50NL though) didn’t know what PT was, and that changed in about 2 or 3 years.
I do agree that trying some gymnastic range balancing tricks when you’ve isolated a 40/6 is stupid.
Basically nobody is actually balanced. People say they are because they don’t want to admit otherwise.
Huds are just a tool for the lazy bad regs.
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Shouldn’t you default to balanced play against unknowns and shift to unbalanced against players where you have enough history to determine what leaks you are trying to exploit?
Even if you don’t play balanced, being pseudo-balanced can be helpful against opponents who are observant but still not good. I’m notably tight to the point that I can scare a LAG into check/call pot control lines once I enter the pot. I did better moving towards a more balanced line where I adopted the smaller flop bet sizing on certain textures so I could c-bet a wider range and take down more pots.
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HUDS are a fabulous tool when you’re grinding 9-16 tables though. Man I hand mine set up beautifully. There was some definite profitability for that approach for a good period of time. You could make 2k-3k per month in rake back alone plus whatever other benefits the site offered as a baseline. You make 2BB/100 at 200 NL putting in 1k hands per day and that’s a nice month for most people.
My default assumption has always been that a player sucks until proven otherwise. No idea if that’s right any more.
Honestly have no idea what pseudo-balanced really means or what you’re trying to say here. If you can scare lags by entering a pot into check/call lines, that doesn’t sound balanced to me.
I’m not anti HUD, had one for most of the last decade but I haven’t used one for a bit and my usual grind is 4-6 zoom tables and 4 regular tables. I pay attention and take notes, it won’t surprise me with any info.
I dont even know if any sites allow you to play a ton of non rush/zoom tables any more.
I’d add to your list that a ton of fish still prefer regular tables over zoom and you miss out a ton by not incorporating them.
Or just play 2/5 live where balancing is what you do with the 2 drinks you ordered while you are taking money from the drunk fish.
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Balance matters more in proportion to the skill of your opponent and # of hands played against him. Totally agree that it is almost irrelevant in anon player pools. On Bovada, I separate my opponents into a few groups based on basic hudstats and I play fully exploitive against the player-pool tendencies of those groups.
There are more competent players now though and if you play with the same people and are super imbalanced against them, they will figure out and destroy you.
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Looks like Bonition started offering PKOs. Gonna fire a few right now. Probably overraked or whatever but gd if they aren’t like crack and full of horrible play
I use pseudo-balanced to describe playing an obviously mixed strategy, but not one with the appropriate percentages. It’s enough to be able to threaten to have the nuts no matter what line I take.
I take somewhat balanced lines against aggressive players. I might trap a bit too much, but I would soul-read LAGs live and bluff catch them to death.
However, my biggest flaw is that I don’t use that ability to bluff-raise often enough. I do it more than most, which is to say a non-zero amount, but nowhere near optimal. And my skills only apply to live play.
This sounds like exactly how I wanted every bit to try to play against me.
I’ve left a long line of aggressive players who thought they could run me over and regretted it because it turned out I wasn’t as predictable as they thought and can show up with unexpected hands.
There are times where I shift into a gear where I never 3bet pre unless effective stacks mean that I am getting it in, or effectively so, but I also have a 4bet bluffing range. I play weird and I think that convinces some players that they would rather play big pots with someone else.
Seriously, exactly what I would pick.
ALERT!!! You guys have to watch this stream right now… Bilbo just called a 30k preflop bet with 87o - shoves 60k on flop and hits a boat. This is going to be an insane table.
On a related note, anyone familiar with the TX poker scene?
That doesn’t resemble any of them NLHE games I play in. I’m used to players who are afraid to 3bet KK.
If it’s anything like these streams lately they are ripe for the picking. Bart Hanson said that Austin is easy softer than Dallas.
I ended up checking the flop with the Q8.
My logic was fairly close to Aofrantics logic in that this is a board I would want to use roughly 1/3rd each of checks/35%/65% sizes. Of all the hands I could have pre, this is one of the best contenders to check, since I do have outs to a strong hand, but don’t have anywhere near enough equity to mindlessly barrel down. I’m also pretty close to the bottom of my range, if I want to not bet this board 100%, this kind of hand is a good contender.
Vs these two guys I likely would have bet if the board was something like 942r instead of T94r.
Anyway we elect to check.
Turn: 125: Jack spades
Woo fucking who it is time to think of Vegas and the Mirage.
SB (the loose cannon with 700ish) bets $75. The BB (2.8k) thinks for a bit and raises to $275. We have 3k+.
We???
Turn decison
- Fold now
- Call turn and call most rivers
- Call turn and fold UI to a standard bet
- Raise to 750 and fold to a shove
- Raise to 750 and call a shove
- Go all in
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