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Poker Math That Matters

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143<br />

about balanced poker. There are only two practical reasons why<br />

we would want to try to play a balanced game. One would be<br />

that we have no information on our opponent. Our opponent is<br />

brand new to us, and we have few assumptions to make about his<br />

strategy. However, this situation probably won’t exist long for a<br />

good player. Good players are experts at gathering and using<br />

information. It just takes a couple orbits for an expert to start<br />

classifying players with a decent amount of accuracy.<br />

The second reason to play a balanced game is because our<br />

opponent is better at exploitive play than we are. We feel he will<br />

win the battle of information. He’ll gain information more<br />

quickly and accurately than us. He’ll use the information better<br />

than us. He’ll adjust to our adjustments better than we will do to<br />

him. Or more simply put, we’re outmatched. In this case, we<br />

would be better off playing a balanced game and taking away the<br />

edge our opponent has in the exploitive game. However, this<br />

scenario shows us something more important. We’re probably<br />

not practicing good table selection.<br />

In my opinion, the idea of developing a balanced game is<br />

stressed much too heavily for the vast majority of poker players.<br />

In fact, many players today are wasting a lot of time trying to<br />

work out a balanced game. This is not to say that understanding<br />

balanced play is useless or that it has no application in poker<br />

today. However, the vast majority of poker players are smallstakes<br />

and micro-stakes players. When you log into many poker<br />

sites, there are tens of thousands of players. Most of them are<br />

bad at poker. Many times you can play a maximally exploitive<br />

game with no fear whatsoever of counter-exploitation. If you are<br />

finding yourself in a position where you are worried about being<br />

counter-exploited so much you want to play a totally balanced<br />

game of poker, there’s a much simpler solution. Find a different<br />

table. When a player pool is large, good table selection will beat

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