In the poker world there is a lot of weird lingo that can be hard to understand and sounds really weird. For example someone saying " I have a polarized three bet range because he's either shoving or folding " or " I need to merge here to balance my value range" can sound like another language to someone who isn't as experienced with poker forum talk. So i'll try to go over some of the terms here to help you understand what people are saying in the forums/videos.
Merge – This one is quite complex what this means is to value bet a hand you wouldn't normally value bet because of how weak it is (i.e MERGING your bluffing range with your value range). The hand needs to be weak enough to possibly get a fold from better hands but strong enough to possibly get called by worse. Pretty weird right? How can a hand be both weak enough to get better hands to fold and strong enough to get worse hands to call at the same time. The reason this can happen sometimes ( it doesn't happen often) is due to incomplete information. Which is just a somewhat more fanciful way of saying we don't really know what our opponent is going to do sometimes. If we knew what our opponent was going to do there would be no way a merge could actually work. We would know what hands he's folding and what hands he's calling with. So we need uncertainty for this play to actually have any merit.
A spot where you might merge your range is if you think your opponent will have a strong psychological reaction or feeling to a bet size you made, for example a overbet on the river. A bet like this will sometimes illicit a psychological reaction. What I mean by this is it will make him think about what you're thinking. Often when you overbet people will either think: 1) your trying to bet big with nothing to get them to fold or 2) that you have a monster hand (This is what you would call a polarized range which we will get into later) .
If you know you will illicit one of these two responses by your bet size but your not sure which one it will be this can be a great spot to merge. Lets say you bet with a weak hand on the river here, either he will think your bluffing and call you with really weak hands or he will think you have a monster and fold better. Seems like a win win right ? This is the perfect spot to merge. This can still backfire though, if he doesn't fold better hands often enough to make it profitable as a bluff or if he doesn't call with worse hands more than 50% of the time then it wont be a good spot for a merge.
Polarized – Is extremely simple heres a simple definition below:
- Polarize – To cause the electrical and magnetic fields associated with electromagnetic waves, especially light, to vibrate in a particular direction or path. The transverse electric and magnetic waves always vibrate at right angles to each other, but in ordinary unpolarized light sources, the direction of polarization of each wave is randomly distributed. Light can be polarized by reflection, and by passing through certain materials.
OK onto the next one. Just kidding! Polarization just means that either your/his range is on one extreme or the other and nothing in the middle. Either you have the nuts or you have nothing. This can be helpful when your thinking of value betting whether it be postflop or preflop. If you know an opponents range is polarized to 3rd nuts + or air, it wouldn't make much sense to value bet with the 4th nuts would it? Either he has nothing and will fold or he has you beat and will call or raise.
Equity – This is a very important concept to understand if you wanna play poker. Equity refers to the probability of you winning the hand vs his holding(s). So if you have AA vs your opponents 22 your probability of winning the pot (80%) is going to be your equity. Go to pokerstove.com to get a free equity calculator and spend a lot of time crunching numbers on it. Its important to have a good understanding of what your equity (probability of winning ) is vs your opponents range.
I'll cover more terms in future installments of this article series. If there is a speicific term that you would like to see covered, please post it in the comments!
MediaBLITZ
Good stuff, thank you for this. I’ve been kind of guessing at this and thankfully I was right about these three, BUT please give me some clarity on LEVELING. Just when I think I understand what it means, someone uses it a way that doesn’t make sense. Either they’ve got it wrong or I do.