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Poker Strategy: Balancing your Play

The best poker strategy is to make fewer mistakes than your opponent. If you can manage this over a sustained period, then you will make a profit. 

One way of contributing to this picture is to make your opponents make mistakes, and you do this by remaining balanced in your approach. 

Example: a player that is new to the game picks up pocket aces and raises 6x the big blind, and everyone folds. Then, for the next five orbits, the same player raises 3x the big blind with his mediocre hands. During the sixth orbit, the same player picks up pocket kings and raises 6x the big blind and everyone folds.

The above example demonstrates a very unbalanced way of playing. The mistake the beginner is making, by varying his bet sizing so wildly, is allowing his players to create a very narrow range, once he raises so high. In short, they know he has a very strong hand and can fold everything except the nuts.

Now, imagine the beginner understood their mistake. In the next seven orbits, they receive the same card combinations but this time they only raise 3x the big blind on each occasion. Can you see how difficult it is for their opponent to know which hands are weak, medium, or strong?

This methodology of bringing balance into your game also pays dividends during post flop play in Omaha poker. 

An example of unbalanced play would be to only check-raise the flop with strong hands. Whereas an example of balanced play would be to check-raise with the same amount of strong hands and semi-bluffs.

A great poker player is a balanced poker player.