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Message: [QUOTE="John A, post: 2147029, member: 88730"] Alright, so welcome everyone! I know there's going to be a ton of questions. I'm going to do my best to keep up with all of them. Like I said in my original post, the goal of this workshop is to give anyone wanting to learn NL Holdem cash games better, a place to focus on a specific topic and explore it with everyone interested. I'm not going to pretend to have all of the answers, but any questions put towards me or the material in polished poker I'm going to do my best to answer. If anyone else thinks they have a relevant answer, don't be shy. In fact, I'd encourage it since that's really the best approach to learning imho. Don't worry about being "wrong", or putting yourself out there. I want this to be a supportive group, so however tempting it might be, if someone does give what you may deem a "stupid" answer or question, we don't want snarky comments back to that person, or personal attacks of any kind. If something like that happens, I will ask one of the mods to take appropriate action. [U]Quick announcement as well.[/U] Everyone who participates here is going to have first access privileges to our workshop as well. We'll be covering an array of topics on NL holdem, and it will be an exciting event. Some of my poker friends and colleagues instructing will include: Jay "Krantz" Rosenkrantz, Jared Tendler, Nate "Raskolnikov" P, David "OMGClayDol" Yan, Josh "sthief" Plotkin, Ryan "YourDoom", and myself. More to be announced soon. So hopefully everyone read chapter 9. I did notice one or two errors when I was going back over it (every editor will miss some stuff after first run). I'll correct those as we go. I'd like to start off and make sure everyone who will be participating understands what perceived range is, and what balancing your range means. I'm sure you've at least heard it a ton over the last few years, especially if you've posted on CC or any of the other major poker forums. It's especially important in today's games that you are balancing your ranges well. However, against really weak players and fish, you want to focus on exploitative play, and should pretty much never concern yourself with balancing your ranges. Balancing only comes into play when you're going to be playing against someone multiple times. Hypothetically, if you knew someone was a solid regular, but you knew you were only going to play against that person for one session, then you wouldn't want to concern yourself with really balancing your range at all either. Which brings up my first point about balancing, especially for those players who are primarily playing micro stakes. Don't start focusing on balancing your range until you have several hundred hands with your opponent, and/or you've seen them at the table more that one session. You should focus on mostly exploitative play, trying to glean any weaknesses that you perceive in their play and focus on exploiting that. A simple example would be, you are playing a 6-max cash game, and a 25/20 regular you're playing against after ~80 hands seems to not fold to 3-bets. Then maximize your value against his calling tendencies when you have a big hand. If you pick up KK, don't 3-bet your normal raise size thinking, well I want to keep my sizing consistent because I want to have a very balanced range with this sizing. Worry about that after you see him again, or after he's seen a showdown with some alternate sizing you've done. For now increase your 3-bet by about 1-2 bb's. Get more value from your hand whenever you can, even if it's only about couple of bbs, it will add up exponentially post flop and it your winrate. That's a simple example, but something else might be c-bet sizing which you'll be doing a lot more of within a single session. If you hit top two pair on a fairly draw heavy board against a regular, don't think, well I need to c-bet 2/3rd pot and keep that consistent with all of my c-bets. Alter it in some spots like this and make it 3/4 or near pot until you have some showdown hands. I guarantee no regular within a single session is going to put together your sizing and know that you are weaker in X spot or stronger in Y spot. Once you build some history, or you've gone to showdown against them, then concern yourself with balancing and more consistent sizing. So we'll start with that, and then go through some of the examples in the book about balancing and how that really looks. Then we'll get into some of the funnier stuff about balanced deception, and how to trick some of the regs at your table into completely misreading your range. [/QUOTE]

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