‘Polarize’ – It’s An Adjective, Not A Verb

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That might strike you as an unusual title, but stick with me. It’ll make sense soon. What I want to talk about here is a trend I’ve noticed recently among my students, and among some other low-stakes players who are just starting to get their heads around some of the more advanced concepts involved in hand-reading and understanding their opponents’ ranges.

What the title refers to is the frequent misapplication of the term ‘polarized’ or ‘polarizing’ when describing situations or analysing hands. In general, the term refers to any situation where a player’s range is defined as containing mostly very strong or very weak hands, with nothing in between. There are a few common usages of the term I hear from students that are slightly erroneous. I’ll outline them here.

“I’m going to do X here to polarize my range”

The reason this usage is incorrect is because it assumes that the action a player takes on a particular street determines their range, and discounts any consideration of what the player’s existing range was before they made the bet. This is a theme we’ll come back to later.

It’s not possible to make a bet that polarizes your range if your range isn’t already polarized going into that spot. In many instances, players use this as a justification for betting larger amounts. You can try to make your range look more polarized, but if you take a line in a hand that makes it look like you’re unlikely to ever really be bluffing, all you’re doing with a bigger bet is giving your opponent more reason to fold and not give you value.

For example, let’s say we’re in a pot where we open in middle position and get called in the big blind. We have Queen-Jack offsuit, and the flop comes K-9-4 rainbow. The big blind checks, we c-bet, and we get called. The turn comes a Ten, and we make the nuts. The big blind checks again, and we decide to check back, for deception purposes.

We’ll focus on the river here, since that’s where ranges are the most polarized. The river comes an offsuit 2, a huge brick, and when the big blind checks to us, we decide to make a large bet, around 90% of pot. Is our range polarized? Well, when we make a bet this big, it should be, but it’s probably not.

In reality, our range isn’t that wide for opening in MP, so on on a board like K-9-4-T-2 rainbow, there are very few hands we could have that don’t have at least a little bit of showdown value (ace high or better). To have pure air in this spot we would likely need to have specifically J8s, 87s or 65s, none of which are guaranteed to be in our opening range 100% of the time in MP. To add to this, we checked the turn, so it’s much less likely we have the nuts in this situation.

What this means is that if we make a massive bet on the river here, we’re not really polarizing our range, because we can’t – we checked back the turn so we can’t have nut hands, and we also can’t have much air. Our range was already depolarized when we got to the river, and betting big can’t change that.

There are some occasions where betting bigger can influence our perceived range in the eyes of the villain to make us appear more polarized, but it’s important to consider that this is only going to be true in specific instances – in fact, it may be most useful in the reverse instance, where our overall range is actually polarized, but we happen to have a value hand that isn’t particularly strong. In these instances, betting larger can take advantage of the fact that our preexisting range for getting to the river was actually polarized, and get more value from the lower end of the value half of it.

“This bet from villain looks quite polarizing”

This is more or less the reverse of the previous situation. I see people attributing polarized ranges to villains without actually stopping to think about how their ranges break down over multiple streets. They simply see a big bet and assume the villain’s range is polarized, which is the reverse of the process we would ordinarily be using. If our traditional process is to break down a villain’s range and then decide whether we have enough equity to call on the river given his bet sizing, why would we change that when we face a bigger bet?

The major difference in these spots is that the frequency with which we need to have the best hand changes fairly dramatically. It goes from 25% in the event of a half pot value bet, to 33% in the event of a pot-sized bet, or 40% in the event of a 2x-pot overbet. The bigger the bet, the more often we need to be right, obviously.

But what happens when we find ourselves up against a larger bet with a marginal hand in a spot where the villain has eliminated most of the pure air bluffs from his range by, say, check-calling the turn or checking back the flop? Well, in those spots it becomes a case of evaluating several criteria.

Firstly, we have to consider whether the villain is likely to be aware of his own range at this point. In many instances, especially at low stakes, this won’t be the case. In these instances, we should disregard our usual assumptions about polarization to some degree, since many weak players are prone to adopting larger-than-usual betsizing as standard.

Secondly, we have to evaluate the possibility of villain turning some of the weaker parts of his value range in these river spots into bluffs. In a game theory sense, this makes sense for villain to do, but particularly at low stakes, most villains are simply not considering game theory optimal play at all.

Finally, we should bear in mind two things – primarily, that many weaker players like to slowplay big hands in spots where it’s significantly suboptimal. This often leads to situations where they make much bigger river bets than usual as a way to recoup the value they lost on earlier streets, without realising that their sizing makes it harder for them to do so. Secondarily, it’s also true that weaker players rarely tend to take the bet-check-bet line as a bluff – if they check the turn, it’s likely because they’re giving up the pot entirely, so their range on the river includes fewer bluffs once that happens.

Calling down big bets on the river with marginal hands is something that we should mostly be considering when our evaluation of the villain’s range leads us to realistically assume that he can still have a variety of very strong hands, plus some complete air hands. In my experience, when unknown players at low-stakes make big river bets, it may be true that their range is polarized to some extent, but it’s more often than not going to be heavily weighted towards the value end of the spectrum.

“Being polarized is a good thing, I want to be polarized as often as possible”

Having a polarized range isn’t any more of a good or bad thing than having clubs versus having spades. Every spot in poker comes down to a question of how you play it, so while it’s possible that you might be able to gain a greater skill edge by creating bigger and bigger pots as a function of doing both a lot more 2-barrel and 3-barrel bluffing and a lot more valuebetting to go with it, polarizing your range in and of itself doesn’t have any inherent benefit.

Instead, what’s much more worthwhile is to focus on identifying spots where your range is actually polarized going into a particular situation, and to focus on adapting your betsizing accordingly. When your range at the start of the river action is polarized, for example, your betsizing should be bigger than usual, with both your valuebets and your bluffs. This gives you the chance to get more value with your strong hands, and maximum fold equity with your bluffs.

Developing the skill of thinking about your own range in every single spot is an essential part of learning to thrive in MTTs. In many instances, the biggest mistake people make when approaching the topic of polarized ranges is to think that the betsizing or the action (it can also include things such as timing tells) dictates the player’s range, rather than starting with the range and then interpreting the betsizing. In fact, if we don’t know what their range was before they made a specific action, we can’t actually use their action to effectively narrow it down, so we’re jumping ahead of ourselves and leading ourselves down the path to incorrect assumptions.

Polarizing isn’t something you do, or something your opponents can do. The closest thing you could get to doing it deliberately would be to plan future streets ahead of time and play earlier ones accordingly with your nut hands and weak hands. Instead, focus on polarization as an after-effect of the other decisions you make – just a way of describing your range. Herein, we have this article’s title – ‘polarize’ isn’t a verb, it’s an adjective.