[Principles of Poker] A thorough explanation of the importance of balancing!

What is Balancing

Balancing means to balance or to keep balance. It’s one of the essential concepts when playing poker.

Balancing can be succinctly described as ”mixing various hands into a single action.” If your action includes a variety of hands, it becomes difficult for your opponent to infer your hand range from your actions. In other words, balancing is effective only when it’s considered throughout the play and not limited to specific spots.
In this chapter, we will discuss the purpose of balancing and how to do it concretely.

The Purpose of Balancing

The main purpose of balancing is to ”maintain a wide range of possible hands from your actions, making it difficult for your opponent to read your hand.”

This is particularly effective when your opponent is playing while thinking about your hand range. For example, suppose you always bet only with strong hands (value betting). If your opponent realizes this, they can protect their chips by folding many hands against your bet.

Conversely, if you always check and fold with weak hands, your opponent can bluff a lot against your checks to win the pot.

Balancing in such situations makes it difficult for your opponent to read your hand range, forcing them into tough decisions.

Let’s now look at some specific examples.

Specific Examples

Balancing Bets

Pre-flop, you joined in with a raise of 600 from the BTN and got called by the BB. The situation is as follows.

Pre-flop

Flop

Your opponent checked on the flop.
What hands should you C-bet with here? For value bets, overpairs like AA or KK, top hits like AQ or KQ, and sets like 33 are strong enough for value betting.

But what about bluff bets?
Hands like 65 or 54, which can complete a straight with a 4 or 6, or ❤ 9❤8❤, which can make a flush with another ❤, seem suitable for bluff betting.

• Value Hands

Sets (QQ, 77, 33), Two pairs (like Q7s), AA, KK, One pair with Q, etc.

• Bluff Hands

Straight draws (65s, 64s, 54s, etc.), ❤ flush draws

By C-betting with these value and bluff hands in a balanced way, your flop bets become harder for your opponent to categorize as either value or bluff.

If you rarely bet with bluff hands, your betting range becomes strong, allowing your opponent to easily fold to your value bets. This makes it harder to gain value from your bets.

Conversely, if you bet frequently with bluff hands, your betting range becomes weaker, leading opponents to call your bets more often. While this increases the likelihood of getting calls on your value bets, it also means getting called on many bluff bets.

Generally, a balanced hand range for betting is said to be around 60–70% value hands and 30–40% bluff hands.

Balancing Checks

Your opponent called your flop bet, and the turn is as follows.

Flop

Turn

Your opponent checked on the turn. What hands should you check with here? As mentioned earlier, balancing applies not only to betting but also to checking.

If you always bet with hands stronger than marginal ones like a Q hit, your checking range becomes very weak, allowing your opponent to easily bet for value against your checks.

Knowing your check range is weak, they can also easily bluff. Therefore, incorporating strong hands into your check range makes it hard for your opponent to read your range, forcing them into difficult decisions.

If you had a top hit in this situation, what actions and frequencies should you consider?
For example, with a weak kicker like Q6s, you might bet about half the time, while with stronger kickers like KQ or AQ, betting frequencies of about 80–90% are appropriate.

Maintaining this ratio ensures that your check range contains top hits about 10–20% of the time, protecting your check range.

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the purpose and application of balancing.
Balancing is essential from pre-flop to river, fundamental to poker.

When taking action, think about what hands you would have bet with if it were a bluff when value betting, and vice versa when bluff betting.
This approach significantly improves your balancing skills, making it hard for your opponent to make easy decisions. Let’s keep balancing in mind.