Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
When you're contemplating
When you're contemplating taking a deceptive line to balance your range, in this case, your flop checking range, you want to make sure you have enough insight into your opponent’s game. If you don't, then it's going to be a very minus EV approach to take. You're much better off just betting the flop and turn, or betting flop, checking turn and betting the river.
This was an actual hand
This was an actual hand taken from a recent online 6-max cash game. Using balanced deception can be an effective tool to use against the better regulars in your game. You shouldn't be implementing it until you're confident in reading your opponents range, and you know your opponent is a thinking player.