Constructing balanced hand ranges
Posted by A11
Posted by
A11
posted in
Gen. Poker
Constructing balanced hand ranges
Hello,
I am a 10NL player with only about 10k hands of experience at this level. Currently I am winning at a decent bb/100 rate and most of the winnings come from exploiting the fish in the game. This fact I am sure remains true in all levels of poker whether it be exploiting a completely recreational player or a regular with an exploitable leak. However, from my understanding, GTO poker is an essential tool to understand how one can prevent him/herself from being exploited by other knowledgeable players. This isn't to say that I am unaware of the fact that a widely-accepted recommendation in beating microstakes is to fully focus on exploiting rather than playing balance. However I am hoping to move up to 25NL and eventually 50NL next year and want to start thinking more about GTO. From what I gather it seems that winning players at these levels do have some knowledge about GTO and how to be less exploitable while exploiting others. I am extremely ignorant on this topic but I figured the first step is make sure your ranges are balance in various situations. At the moment I have only very limited number of spots where I know my range is balanced - like for example c/r oop on the flop after a call pre - but I would like to start developing my ranges elsewhere in the game. The problem is I don't know where to begin and how to go about this effectively and efficiently... I would like to get any recommendations with this problem! Thank you!
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The obvious thing to do is post hands and watch videos.
Play only one or two tables and talk out loud in every spot. Think about how you would play all of your hands in that spot, and balance them with bluffs, semi-bluffs and value hands etc.
CO opens 2.5x and you're BB.Flop is 589ss and Villian bets.
Now you start splitting hands into your c/f, c/c and c/r.
For instance:
c/r 99/88/55/98s/TT and pair + spade for value
No showdown spades, naked spades, A7/A6/65/J7s/QT as semi-bluffs
KQ/KJ with BDFD, 7x/6x no BDFD, AJo
Example 2:
You open the SB and Villian defends
Flop is K95hh
Bet-fold JTo/87o/86o/A2o/Q8o, 5x, weak 9x
Bet-call most Kx, strong 9x, TT-QQ and AA, FDs
bet 3-bet JT/QJ/87 with BDFD, 55, 99, pair + big hearts, K9, K5s
C/f Hands that have no equity when called: 34s, J8s etc.
C/c strong 9x, Kx with a heart and maybe a gutshot blocker to make sure you have good hands to c/c with, occasionally AA, occasionally Ahigh hearts, TT-QQ, some gutshots so you have enough bluffs in your river betting range, which you don't have if you only c/c made hands
C/r K9/K5, AA, pair + FD, SD + FD.
These are just two quick examples of how you can split your ranges. I may have added way too many or few combos is some spots, but the point is that you have to think about how you play certain hands. Make sure you have weak and strong made hands, as well as bluffs and semi-bluffs in every spot.
Notice that you should take different lines with the same hand sometimes. For balance, and deception. Reads are very important when taking a line that would be non-standard.
You already mentioned that you should exploit your opponents whenever possible, so I'd try to learn about GTO to improve your ability to think about the game, which allows you to exploit your opponents even more.
If you do try to play balanced at low stakes, make sure you're balanced mostly when you're on defence.
wow thank you for such a comprehensive clear response!
hm the more I think about it, these range constructions are very similar to how I would have played these hands. But how do I learn to extrapolate such information to other types of boards on the flop, or maybe on the turn now, on the river etc... I am sorry if this is just too ignorant of a question... but I understand the basic idea of how to construct a range whether it be linear, or polarized but how do we determine whether or not the specific combos we put into our categories of c/c c/f or c/r are actually correct (ie. +ev)? Sure of course this is very villain dependent and our ranges should be dynamic but in terms of defensive poker is there a way of determining profitability? Is this done with propokertools or flopzilla or the likes of? I am not too familiar with using these programs maybe I need to be learning to use them?
Thanks again.
Nice topic. Can you tell more about exploiting fish? What are you doing, is it based on their stats and reads? If so please give some examples. If it is something else please desciribe as well :)
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