Poker Math That Matters

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about balanced poker. There are only two practical reasons why
we would want to try to play a balanced game. One would be
that we have no information on our opponent. Our opponent is
brand new to us, and we have few assumptions to make about his
strategy. However, this situation probably won’t exist long for a
good player. Good players are experts at gathering and using
information. It just takes a couple orbits for an expert to start
classifying players with a decent amount of accuracy.
The second reason to play a balanced game is because our
opponent is better at exploitive play than we are. We feel he will
win the battle of information. He’ll gain information more
quickly and accurately than us. He’ll use the information better
than us. He’ll adjust to our adjustments better than we will do to
him. Or more simply put, we’re outmatched. In this case, we
would be better off playing a balanced game and taking away the
edge our opponent has in the exploitive game. However, this
scenario shows us something more important. We’re probably
not practicing good table selection.
In my opinion, the idea of developing a balanced game is
stressed much too heavily for the vast majority of poker players.
In fact, many players today are wasting a lot of time trying to
work out a balanced game. This is not to say that understanding
balanced play is useless or that it has no application in poker
today. However, the vast majority of poker players are smallstakes
and micro-stakes players. When you log into many poker
sites, there are tens of thousands of players. Most of them are
bad at poker. Many times you can play a maximally exploitive
game with no fear whatsoever of counter-exploitation. If you are
finding yourself in a position where you are worried about being
counter-exploited so much you want to play a totally balanced
game of poker, there’s a much simpler solution. Find a different
table. When a player pool is large, good table selection will beat