Range merging occurs when a player bets or raises with middle-strength hands rather than polarizing between pure nuts and bluffs. This strategy applies when medium hands carry significant protection value, need to extract thin value from worse hands that would call, or when opponents cannot adequately respond with their range. In contrast to pure polarization, merging is more appropriate on wet runout boards where protecting equity is prioritized. The risk of excessive merging is being exploited by opponent raises that capture the inelasticity of the merged range.