Identifying Unbalanced Polarized Ranges

An interesting hand came up on one of the WSOP circuits I played. In it, a loose aggressive player (players with wide ranges) opened from the CO to about 2.5 big blinds. With an effective stack of 60 BBs, I 3-bet to 7.5 BBs from the small blind with :Qc :Tc . The player decided to call and we saw the flop come down :Qd :6h :3s . With about 17 BBs in the pot, I checked and called his 8.5 BB bet. The turn came :2d . With about 34 BBs in the pot, and an effective stack of 44 BBs behind, I called the villain's shove on the turn. My opponent showed :Kd :4d . The river came :5s . I was so focused on the fact that he had missed the flush that I didn't notice that he had completed his straight draw. I shared the hand with several friends and many had a hard time understanding my line of reasoning in the hand. Here, I will try to explain why I played the way I did.

Party Poker is back in Brazil! Learn about the bonus and benefits when creating your Poker Dicas affiliate account.

Ranges – Pre-flop

I figured that Villain would be opening with a very wide range of CO hands, as most players are inclined to do. Since he was aggressive, I expected him to open with wider ranges than usual. My hand was certainly good for calling preflop, but to prevent him from seeing the flop in position on me more often than I would like and to try to curb his aggression, I need to 3-bet fairly often in this situation, since, in addition, the players in the BB and BTN are tight, and we don't want to give them a free flop. I had never tried this before and wasn't sure how Villain would respond. I like to use depolarized ranges with many hands like this, until I realize that Villain has the ability to 4-bet bluff with a very wide range of hands.

Up until now, I had been playing conservatively and counting on this image to make the villain fold some weak hands like Ax and Kx. Furthermore, most players call my 3-bets with hands like JTs, T9s, and T8s. This allows me to effectively value bet with the same hand. My 3-bets usually result in a situation where I have the initiative in a heads-up pot with a better range than my opponent. Just calling will usually result in a multi-way pot where I have neither the initiative nor position over my opponents. Therefore, being aggressive seems to be advantageous to me.

Ranges – Flop

On the flop, I had top pair with a marginal kicker on a dry board. This is the kind of spot where I was either way behind better Qx hands and sets or way ahead of pretty much the rest of Villain's range. I couldn't expect, with a hand like this, to bet all three streets and be ahead on the river if he called all bets. I could expect, at most, to have two streets of value of pairs between 6 and Q and combos like Q9s/Q8s, but not much more. On the other hand, if I checked and checked, many of the hands better than mine would be discarded from Villain's range, making it easier to bet for value, but also making it easier for him to catch me on the bluff with the hands I mentioned earlier.

Another benefit of this plan is that aggressive players like him usually take a check as a sign of weakness and try to run me out of the hand, thinking that I have something like 99 or AK that missed the board. Against this type of player it is good to have some value hands in my range to catch his bluffs. QT was a good candidate for this.

Take advantage of these 5 minutes of study and create your 888 Poker account by clicking this link! You'll get $88 free* and you can also play our weekly $100 freeroll every Tuesday! (*$8 in cash and $80 in bonus).

Ranges – Turn

The turn came :2d , which didn't add anything to the board or the hand. If Villain bet again, I would still be behind the hands that were already beating me before and would be ahead of any flush draws or bluffs. Against a regular player, who doesn't bet that often with bad hands in this type of situation, I would probably have folded the hand on the turn. Against this particular Villain, I would have comfortably called on the turn and possibly folded on the river. Fortunately for me, Villain made a big mistake on the turn that made my decision easier.

With 34 BBs in the pot, Villain decides to overbet shove for the 44 BBs I had behind. A bet of this size is extremely polarized, and it seems to me that he is expecting a fold rather than a call. He probably wasn't shoving hands like QJ or KQ, which takes away a lot of the hand combinations that beat me. Since he only called my 3-bet preflop, I discarded QQ+ from his range. His bet meant that he would only do this with the nuts or nothing. His range, at this point, contained many more "nothings" than nuts. His overbet, combined with his actions throughout the hand, left him with an unbalanced polarized range.

Here, he could have a set, a straight, top pair, and a strong kicker, or a flush draw. There were 21 combinations of hands that beat me in his range. However, let's say he shoved half the time, since sometimes he would choose a bet size that is more likely to be called with those hands. That leaves him with about 11 combinations of hands that beat me and more than twice that many flush draws that I was well ahead of. I needed to win about 36% of the time to break even. Since I had about 50% equity against his range, I called. Fortunately, he had a flush draw, as expected. Unfortunately, this particular flush draw also gave him an inside straight draw, which hit on the river and sent me home.

Conclusion

Once Villain decided to bet the flop when I checked, my hand effectively became a bluff-catching hand, even though that wasn’t my intention in the first place. His flop bet gave me a pretty easy call, but the decision I would have to make on the turn scared me a little. A normal bet would have put me in a bad spot. However, when he overbet, I felt a great sense of relief. This type of overbet is the hallmark of an unbalanced polarized range, which usually relies on a draw. Even though he won the chips, my ability to identify his bet for what it really was meant that I won the hand.

Look for similar situations in future games and you can beat your opponents too. Just do a better job of holding the chips than I did.

Article translated and adapted from the original: Identifying Unbalanced Polarized Range