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Balancing Your Game

At its heart, poker is a very simple game.

"Mostly you have bet with big hands, called in certain situations, and check folded when you have missed. As your opponents start picking up on this, they will start to treat your checks as an excuse to steal the pot from you"

You have a set hand ranking structure, set betting intervals, and set betting options each time. These four basic actions, to check, call, bet or fold, are the basic foundations of one of the worlds most complex and skilful games. What I want to think about here is how to use all three of these options effectively and to try and balance your game as much as possible.

Folding

You cannot constantly swim upstream in a game with set mathematical percentages. Although implied odds, post flop skill and weak players can enable a good player to start playing many more hands, no one in the world can consistently win without folding a large percentage of their hands in a regular ring game. This is also true post flop in most games. You have to be able to fold hands that are attractive when the story just does not add up. If you are beat you are beat, and making big laydowns is one of the hallmarks of a top class player.

Betting/Raising

This is obviously the key action that brings in the money in poker. By betting and raising with your strong hands, you not only protect your hand against draws, you also get the big money in the pot for you to win - which should clearly be the objective with big hands. The only problem with this strategy is that over the long run players start to become wary of your bets and start folding often. As covered in the changing gears article, this is usually the time to start bluffing that little bit more, but it can also be a time to start adding a different kind of deception to your game - the check raise.

Checking/Check Raising

Most of the time checking is a tool enabling you to hopefully see a free card and avoid putting any extra money in the pot when you intend to fold. However, checking is also a great tool to make your image seem much more tricky. Imagine you have been playing a solid tight aggressive game at a table for an hour or so. Mostly you have bet with big hands, called in certain situations, and check folded when you have missed. As your opponents start picking up on this, they will start to treat your checks as an excuse to steal the pot from you. Here you can take advantage by throwing in the odd check raise.

This not only gets you extra bets that you would not normally have got (as they would have folded to one of your bets), but also makes your checks seem dangerous. This will often enable you to get free cards with marginal hands, as your opponents will stop constantly trying to steal the pot when checked to.

Calling

Calling is probably the action which gets the most players into trouble. Calling too much is the single biggest leak in most player's game. Natural human curiosity seems to consistently lead to people making bad call after bad call. That said, it still has its place in a well balanced game. It is particularly useful against overly aggressive opponents - you can just keep the pots small, call off all their bluffs, and build a big profit. Despite this, it is still the weakest of the four possible plays in poker, as it neither builds the pot, or protects your hand. Next time your thinking of calling, try and think through if it is definitely the right play for that point - often you will be better off re-raising or folding.

Balancing the four actions of poker in the context of the particular game is critical. When the table is tight you want to adjust the balance of action towards a more loose, raising style; when the action is loose you want to adjust it to a more tight, calling based approach. Only in exceptional circumstances do you ever want to unbalance your game more than this - it is crucial to never overuse any one action in poker.

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