Balancing frequencies/ranges

[daire]

I remember listening to a 2-7 podcast with Deathdonkey where he mentioned how he kept his snowing (standing pat with a non-pat hand and bluffing) frequency in line by only attempting to snow when he had a low pair in his hand such as 223TJQ, this had the benefit of card removal too.

Just wondering if anyone uses similar techniques to keep their ranges balanced in HE/PLO or do you generally just estimate?

[TommyGunne]

In HE or PLO, doing something similar to snowing is terrible. In HE or PLO, you should try and maximise the equity of your bluffs. Good times to bluff are when you have a decent bit of equity even when called. You should basically never be bluffing something like 22 on a 37K board or 34s on a KT8r board. Even your floats should have decent equity.

The first thing you look at if you are considering a bluff is the equity your hand has when called, the next thing is how often your opponent will fold/call/raise, not the other way around. There are no tricks really to balancing frequencies. Making sure you have ok equity will ensure you don't do it too much, and its up to you to figure out which guys you can bluff, and how often.

I dunno whether its better to think about balancing or exploitation in these situations, but it is definitely better to have a good knowledge of what would be balanced first, and then try and fine tune it for exploitation, rather than jumping straight to exploitation and bluffing some guys loads and never bluffing others. Just try figure out how often you need to be bluffing in spots, play around with numbers and ranges and see what sort of %s you need to be bluffing very common spots. For that its easiest to start with either river ranges, or preflop 4/5b scenarios, as calculations are immeasurably easier.

[danutpeddler]

The only thing I'd compare to snowing in live NLH and PLO is angleshooting

[daire]

I'm not talking about applying snowing to HE or PLO at all, I'm just seeing if anyone uses specific triggers (i.e. the paired deuce in the 2-7 example).

For example in a HU game you might crai a flop, if he's been cbetting maniacally, with a gutter, 2 overs and a bd flushdraw or something similar but you might not want to do this everytime you have a similar hand. Maybe having something like the board being red when you decide to do this might help you not to lose the rag and become spewy.

Another example is in a bluefire poker video where OMG flats in the BB with 77. The board comes AcJ8cKx and he c/calls every street. His reasoning was that the guy (LAGasaurus I think his name was) barrels with hands as weak as gutters and bd flushdraws on boards like this enough to make this profitable. Obviously barrelling every gutter+bd fd is not going to be profitable longterm so he has to be regulating how often he does this. Using some sort of random trigger could help him do this.

I'm not really looking to apply this sort of stuff to my own game as it's a bit sophisticated but I'm just curious as to how HSNL or even MSNL players view this sort of thing.

[danutpeddler]

[QUOTE=daire;19877]

Another example is in a bluefire poker video where OMG flats in the BB with 77. The board comes AcJ8cKx and he c/calls every street. His reasoning was that the guy (LAGasaurus I think his name was) barrels with hands as weak as gutters and bd flushdraws on boards like this enough to make this profitable. Obviously barrelling every gutter+bd fd is not going to be profitable longterm so he has to be regulating how often he does this. Using some sort of random trigger could help him do this.

QUOTE]

Think I saw this video and a bit more went into this call.
I know what you mean by your ramdom trigger though. I think it all stems from the flow of the session combined with the psychological profile you have of your opponent and the profile you are conveying.

Basically just feel the flow, feel it, it's circular. Its like a carousel. You pay the quarter, you get on the horse, and you go up and down and around...in a circular circle with the music, the flow, all good things