[jaykay25]

Originally Posted by RedJoker

Why equal combinations? In almost all situations an equal combination of value and bluff hands would leave you unbalanced. You've also forgotten semi-bluffs.

I dont think OP means to speak literally that balancing means 50% bluffs, but rather understands that balancing means choosing one action X% of the time and doing something else Y% of the time in the same situation. Or whatever he meant, i'm sure people are evaluating the post based on a solid understanding of how balancing is defined.


A river call may be an exploitative mistake but the turn and flop calls would become significantly better since villain is checking down the river with a huge portion of his range. You can't just analyze one strategy point in isolation without considering the overall effect.

To phrase his example a different way, if youre playing someone who would never bluff right after being caught bluffing, itd be a bad idea to keep calling just because its the GTO play given villain's HEM stats. He calls it "horrid"; you wouldnt go that far, but who cares about these semantics. Suffice to say that deviating from GTO to account for game flow/table dynamics/villain tendancies in that spot for example, is the play that makes more money than staying with GTO.


The GTO play can never be horrid and balancing your range will never be catastrophic. Almost by definition you have positive expectation by balancing your range. What is catastrophic however, is 4bet/folding 100% of your range when your opponent has decided to never 3bet bluff. What is horrid is folding 100% of your bluff catching range when your opponent is always bluffing. These are massive mistakes and just because you sometimes make more when you guess correctly, it doesn't make balancing bad. In fact, unless you have some special ability to guess better than your opponent, balancing your range will always net you a higher expectation than essentially clicking buttons.

This is kind of the opposite of what OP is talking about. All youre proving is that if you're WRONG with your exploitative plays, then youd lose more than if you had just played GTO to begin with. I'm sure thats true, but then the issue is developing the skills to make good reads, which is what this post was all about. You make it sound like these kinds of reads are just "guessing," and therefore poker is a math game and not a psychology game. I think most would disagree with you here.


You've pretty much just summed up the entire problem with your approach. How can you even know WHERE your opponent is imbalanced if you don't know where balanced is to begin with? Sure, it's obvious against the 62/30 maniac or the 17/14 nit but against anybody remotely competent you have absolutely nothing to benchmark their play to if you don't know what an optimal strategy is. How can you say that somebody is, for example, cbetting too much if you don't know where too little ends and too much begins?

Knowing how to balance would definitely help but obv its not a prerequisite to developing an exploitative strategy (such as when its 'obvious' or whatever)


It seems strange that you'd dismiss game theory and balancing when you haven't even worked out when people are adjusting to an exploitable strategy, that's like the whole point of that approach right, you have some sick soul reading ability that allows you to know when your opponent is exploitable?

Rather than trying to master the WHEN, why not make it irrelevant?

lol i just realized ur the guy who made the (awesome) math videos for leggo. Trus me brah theres something to this psychology thing too : D )

I think a word that isnt used enough to describe Ivey is 'math genius,' but the reason other math geniuses are not Ivey is that hes also extremely perceptive and likely recognizes behavior patterns that no one would ever find in HEM.

note to self learn to multiquote