The myth of balancing your range in poker

One of the most common critiques of hand histories is that players may be polarizing their range, and they need to make sure they are balancing their ranges, especially against regular opponents. While there is definitely something to this, in my estimation, balancing your range is one of the most overused excuses for poor play in today’s poker world.

For anyone unfamiliar with polarized and balanced ranges let me give a brief explanation: A Polarized range is when your holding is one of two things, really strong or really weak. Contrast this with a balanced range, which means you could have virtually anything, from the nuts, to a medium strength hand, to absolute air. With that in mind it’s pretty apparent that you want to strive towards balancing your range, but in many instances the work, and lost equity, you put into balancing your range will never pay-off in the long-run.

Here is one example: Suppose you are playing in a WSOP tournament, it’s your first trip to Las Vegas, and you plan on entering this same event every year in the future. What are the chances that you will be squaring off against the same opponent enough times that he will have a good read on your tendencies? Unless it’s the $50k Players Championship or some Lowball event that attracts about 100 players the chances are really slim. In these cases you should play your hand for maximum value virtually every hand since it’s unlikely an opponent is going to have enough of a read on your play.

For instance, suppose you plan on opening only KQs+, AQ+, and TT+ from Under the Gun in the early stages of the event. In your regular cash game or tournament this would be a terrible long-term strategy since your range is very polarized, and any flop sans a face-card is the perfect opportunity for your opponents to push you out of the put. But in the early stages of a WSOP tournament your opponents won’t really have this experience with you to know that a 458 could not have improved your hand. In these cases you can play your super-nitty UTG game unless you have to showdown a few hands (at this point you may want to start widening your range for a number of reasons, including balancing your range).

Now this isn’t to say you should take the same line with every hand (doing the same thing every time you pair an Ace on the flop, or the same thing when you don’t flop an Ace) but you shouldn’t be going out of your way to try to balance your range against players you are likely to never play with again.