Poker Math That Matters

Balanced Play
The concept of balance is a hot topic in poker discussions today.
It’s often called optimal play or, what is probably more clearly
termed, game theory optimal play. My preference is to call it
balanced play. The topic has been so hot that I’d consider this
book incomplete without at least giving a few thoughts on it.
Instead of elaborating on the mechanics of balanced poker, I’d
like to offer some perspective to help players discover what
paths to take in learning to play poker.
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Before we get to discussion regarding what balanced play is all
about, let’s begin by discussing its counterpart, exploitive play.
The idea behind exploitive play is to take advantage of
weaknesses in your opponent’s game. Exploitive play is a more
responsive form of poker. We’re making decisions in response
to our opponent’s strategy. Some obvious examples would be:
• If he folds too much, we bluff more.
• If he calls too much, we bluff less.
• If he bluffs too much, we call more.
• If he bluffs too little, we call less.
We take advantage of the weaknesses in a player’s strategy with
whatever type of betting decision that’s appropriate in that
situation. In terms of expectation value, in general, the basic
idea behind exploitive play is to make the decision in a hand that
yields the result bringing us the most money on average. This is
called choosing the maximally exploitive play or strategy. In
this regard, that decision might be called the optimal play, which
is why I stated earlier that we should be a bit more specific when
we use the term “optimal”. Making the optimal decision in
exploitive play is to choose the betting decision that has the
highest expectation value. That has been the theme of this book.
Making a betting decision that follows a game theory optimal