[RyanCMU]

Merging Ranges and Making yourself less horrible.

There has been lots of talk in my posts and specifically other respected FR's latley about ranges and more impotantly balancing and merging ranges.

I'm going to give my brief and likely badly worded thoughts...

It's important when you take an action in poker, that your opponents can't immediatly associate your action w/ a specific and accurate hand range assement.

A simple example, 3betting. Most TAGs have very unimaginative 3betting ranges, so when a solid player gets 3bet, its very easy to quickly establish where we stand in the hand vs the 3bettor. Solution, balance your range, by adding in other hands to your 3betting arsenal. (Be careful to not just start randomly 3towning junk, make sure you have a reason!)

The above is a very simple and easy to understand example. Below is another simple and similar one.

When I 3bet another regular and they call, their range is again very easy to define, and subsequently it becomes very easy to play vs them throughout the hand. Since we always have a somewhat accurate idea of where they stand.

Ok moving on to a more elaborate yet still simple example...

A lot of people may be thinking, ok so if your 3betting a wide range vs me and then cbetting lots of flops, I'll just call the 3bet PF and then c/r hard lots of flops. Uh oh, see where I am going w/ this? That is a sitation where your range again becomes very well defined as being in the upper echelon of your hands. You can balance this by again making this play with a wider range, so it's not so easy for me to play perfectly vs your range. (Again, don't just randomly go c/r'ing flops in reraised pots, make sure you have reasons)

From those 3 simple and brief examples, hopefully you can start to think about how your giving up so much by having such an easily defined range so often, and then it will get you thinking on your own of ways to combat this and play better.