Quote Originally Posted by Pelion
Something Ive been thinking about for a little while (and it relates to my previous post and sauces post) is that the whole purpose for balancing ranges is misunderstood by alot of people, and consequently balenced ranges are overused.
Ideally you want to be playing an unbalanced range to exploit the tendancies of your opponents. Verses an opponent with static tendencies you will use static ranges and tendencies to exploit them. Against a calling station you will value bet "too much" and bluff "too little". Against a rock you will value bet "too little" and bluff "too much". Against an opponent who is trying to adjust to you you must oscillate your ranges so that when he is folding too much you will bluff too more and when he is calling too much you will bluff less. You oscillate your ranges to take advantage of his tendencies oscillating between rocky and stationy, but your ranges remain unbalanced to fully exploit his tendencies at that time.

It is only when someone sits down at the table who can predict your gear changes and remains one step ahead of you that you have to start balancing your ranges against them in order to defend against them exploiting you.

So yea, I think balanced ranges are a defensive tool that we should use when we are at a table with a decent number of players worse than us, but also with a decent player capable of "getting inside our head" at the table. Without this player at the table a balanced range becomes less than optimal, but if we left our ranges unbalanced with him there, he would be able to play against us too easily and would ruin us.

It would be nice if some of the high stakes players would jump in on this. (nice to see sauce here already )

to elaborate a little: often on an Ah 8h 6s flop I'll be check/raising or bet/3betting with any hh combination. people often attribute this to "balancing a range" and attempting to get action on my sets/2prs/AK type hands. while this in a sense applies, i think its more important to note that playing my drawing hands aggressively is the OPTIMAL line against a pretty much everyone. Why? Well if we have 5 high, and can get a pair of tens to fold, thats a pretty big FTOP victory, and our implied odds are relatively low.