[riverspecialist]

I dont think a 2-way bet can really be correct against a good player that you know very well.

1) When you dont know a player very well they might be tight (folding AX) or they may be loose (calling with jj) but from what you've seen you might speculate he does enough of EITHER to be profitable.

2) If your playing against a player who doesnt have enough history with you or they're bad they may get caught up in the tempo and make BOTH mistakes.

If your playing against a tough player his decisions are going to be good and balanced so he wont make the error in case1. For case 2, if your this agressive he'll pick up on this and ruin these thin value bets.

The bigger problem is with taking "merging" too far that they have too many "bets" in their range (this sounds silly but read it a few times and look at what went wrong in the hand again.) When your playing against strangers (and maybe even regs) you stray farther from optimal play to exploit image, game tempo and reads. But once you have enough history together your history will be a bigger factor than the temporary factors that might let u diverge from optimal play.