Double Float Gone Wrong

21 thoughts on “Double Float Gone Wrong”

1. I’m not folding this river bet either… There is no reason for villain to think that he is beat at any point in this hand. You showed no sign of aggression whatsoever and come the pot bet on the river had to be representing exactly an overpair or a 4? The fact that you bet exactly pot on the river makes me raise an eyebrow as well. It actually makes me more suspicious than anything else. I do generally give pot bets more credit on stars than ftp (obv b/c there is a pot btn on FTP), but this line is just so odd. I don’t put you on an over pair here much and obviously am not giving you credit for the case 4 especially when you fire a pot bet

   • It all comes down to where Villain is as a hand reader. Clearly I put my money on the wrong interpretation of that, and that’s my mistake, not his. For what it’s worth I think calling here even against someone capable of taking the line that I did is bad, let alone against the vast majority of tournament players. Two questions based on your comment:

     What would you expect me to do with an overpair that I didn’t do here?

     What do you put me on if not an overpair?

     • As a fellow poker dunce, I would put you on a bluff trying to get me off a weak pair or even ace high pretty much always.

       a) I would have expected an over pair to raise turn seeing as villain is representing a strong hand. Is there no value in raising villain’s 75% turn bet?

       b) I would put you on any combination of cards that raises pre from MP1 that wants to take the pot – especially if I think you are capable to trying to bluff me off a pair

       This is probably why I don’t move up in stakes 🙂

       • Hey Norman,

         I’m not Andrew but I can address your questions:

         RE A) Raising the turn with AA is, in some ways, over-representing our hand. While it’s unlikely we’re beat, if we raise the turn we’re repping a hand stronger than 1 pair. Given that we really can’t have any 4x, and villain plausibly can – raising the turn puts us in a pretty crappy situation if we get 3-bet.

         This of course assumes villain is thinking in some way. Bad players will call a raise with worse quite often.

         Still, with AA you really shouldn’t be raising this turn. You’re either way ahead or way behind, and raising forces him to shut down with his bluffs, and possibly shut down betting all worse hands.

         b) Fair enough, but that’s not actually a range, that’s just “i hope you’re bluffing, I call”. Pretty much, to call with 88, you have to assume Hero is:

         -Double floating you
         -Betting worse for value

         Given Andrew has all better hands than 88 in his betting range on the river (okay maybe not 99, but probably TT-AA), you have to find 16-20 bluff combos he’d play like this. Most tourney players aren’t double floating here with AK or KQ or something.

         Again though, that assumes villain is thinking. Many players will, in the heat of the moment, do as you said and say “well i beat ace king, I call”

         • Hi Chris,

           Thanks for the reply-

           In response to a), how often is the small blind calling with 42 43 45 46 A4 this early in the tournament? It seems to me like most people would fold these most of the time and not deal with the hassle of playing them post-flop out of position. So it just seems really unlikely he has us beat on the flop (if we had an overpair) when the only really plausible hands are 22 and 44.

           By the turn, it’s even less likely that the SB has a 4, and 22 is less of a value bet, so that really leaves most of his betting range as pairs 55-99, assuming he would raise TT+ preflop. But he bets 75% pot which would make me think he likes his hand but also wants to protect it from floats which have some equity on the river.

           Given that I think we can narrow his range that way, we should raise turn if we expect him to check/fold the river, and call and bet river if we expect him to check/call river or bet/bluff river. Since Andrew was expecting him to check/fold to a river bet, shouldn’t an overpair raise turn, especially given that we think villain likes his hand betting 75% pot? and consequently we should do that with bluffs as well? And following on, a river bet is likely to be a bluff and villain correctly called?

           All of this is especially applicable if you know your opponent is capable of trying to float/bluff you off a weak-medium pair on the river, which maybe he was?

           Anyway that was my though process, in addition to “durr I think he haz AK I call”. Thanks again for the insights (ps, I always enjoy reading the blog – thanks, Andrew! And Chris for leaving regular, insightful comments).

         • Hey Norman,

           For some reason it’s not letting me respond to your post directly, but anyways:

           It sounds like Andrew actually had a bit of respect for this opponent (wasn’t a complete fish), so if we raise turn, its pretty much impossible for his opponent to continue with a worse hand.

           While I agree that his 75% pot bet may mean “I like my hand”, do we really expect him to call a turn raise on this board with anything worse than the range we’d be repping? (QQ+)

           Against a total fish – sure, but against someone ‘decent’, I would be hard pressed to see us get value on the turn from a worse hand. Thus – we really shouldn’t raise AA, instead we can value-bet the river and hope for a hero call, which is basically what happened here.

           There’s a difference here between what we think villain ‘should’ do and villain does, which is why not raising the turn is good. Give us KK here – we’re getting called by a hand that’s folding to a turn raise.

           Against Andrews range villain should c/f river, but if everyone did what they ‘should’, poker wouldn’t be nearly as profitable.

           Given the turn added a gutshot for all Ax hands, we can see why villain might put some air in our river range, at that point it becomes a guessing game for him – are we bluffing 33% of the time on the river for a call to be +EV?

         • I guess the nesting is getting out of hand 🙂

           I suppose that’s right – it comes down to guessing how often the river pot is a bluff, and I find it hard to fault villain for concluding it’s a bluff often enough to call. TT+ is 2.3% of hands, whereas Andrew’s MP1 raising range is – how wide? 16%? More? He has TT+ only 1/8th of the time he raises here preflop. To call the river bet, Andrew has to be bluffing 33% of the time on the river. If we assume Andrew takes this line with all TT+, and he needs to have a bluff half as often as a value bet, he only needs to be doing this float/bluff line with 1/16th (or so) of his non-TT+ raising range, or with 6% of his non-value hands. Especially if villain can figure out that this line by Andrew is either full value or planned float/bluff, that doesn’t really seem far-fetched to me.

         • There is next to nothing that villain is re-raising us with on the flop or the turn. I really don’t think he has a 3b range here, he is probably putting on the brakes even with a naked 4 (on the flop or turn). Either to get value later or because we can have the case 4 (assuming he has one or is repping one).

     • Honestly, I put you on exactly AK here a lot… How many over pairs are you really playing like this? You know there are very few 4’s in his range, and an over pair is really likely from him so you could easily raise the flop or the river putting him on a smaller/mid PP calling out of the blinds. I doubt you would take this line with 99 – AA, floating with AK seems a LOT more likely. You would be missing a ton of value with your big pairs on this line as you know he will likely call at least the flop or turn (maybe both). I hate the pot bet on the river, it seems like a thoughtless button push and unless you are really balancing with this play on the river, it seems like a bluff more often than not

2. Yeah nh except that this is level 1 of a tourney and villain i’m assuming is unknown.

   • Thanks, Chris. Your explanation is pretty spot on. FWIW this was a small field $700 satellite, and Villain was not a complete unknown to me. He’s like a third tier P5’er. I did not have any specific read re: his hand-reading skills. He did use like 2 minutes of his timebank, but of course if he calls 88 he is not the guy to target with this play.

     Oh and FU for submitting this one to Cardplayer, those retards are going to crucify me for sure. 🙁

     • lol sorry, it was this or

       “BAD CALL U CANT BEAT A STRAIGHT” with the KQ post

3. Chris pretty much wrote the post I was going to write, except his version is better. Some additional thoughts…

   (a) While there might be disagreement about the best way to play the various overpairs in Andrew’s spot, there’s no reason to dismiss the possibility that Andrew would double-float any and all of them at least some of the time. You can’t rule out a reasonable if possibly inferior line of play just because you wouldn’t do it. You need more to go on than that before you assign zero probability to second-best lines that are still +EV for your opponent.

   (b) I don’t play enough NLHE tournaments to have informed opinions on what most tournament players would or should do in Andrew’s spot, but in a cash game, I’d have to peg Andrew’s range pretty dang wide to justify even thinking about calling, something like 66+/AQ+. On paper, that gives me a whopping 44 winners versus 36 losers and one tie (38 losers if I think he could have Ah4h or 5h4h), but it also assumes that Andrew would double-float his losing hands AND bet them on the river about 45% of the time just for me to break even.

   Against a sane opponent, there’s simply too much room for error in those estimates and nowhere near enough +EV even in the more optimistic scenarios to justify escalating to nuclear weapons for a third of my stack.

   There are insane donks who would play AQ/AK/66/77 that way 90% of the time, but I’m pretty sure Andrew is not an insane donk.

4. Hey Mac,

   By your argument that he doesn’t have a flop 3-betting range (which I agree with), I highly doubt he’s ever bet/calling flop and turn with worse.

   So I don’t see why you think we’re losing value by not raising pairs TT+ on an earlier street.

   Put yourself in villains shoes with 88 on the turn, are you calling a raise without any history?

   While I agree the pot bet may look suspiciously bluffy, I think the reasoning that “you would play overpairs faster” is incorrect. For some reason people keep saying “you’d raise flop or turn with big pairs”….no he wouldn’t.

   @ Norman,

   It’s a lot easier to count hand combination than it is to count %s

   TT-AA is 30 hand combinations. Villain needs 33% equity to call, so hero needs to buff with 15 hand combos on this river for a call to be 0EV (15 wins vs 30 losses, 15/45 = 30%)

   AKo alone is 16 combos, and AQ is 16 combos. If Hero floated 100% of the time with both of these and bluffed river, it would be a call with 88. However villain simply doesn’t know what our frequencies are.

   Presumably, Hero is folding AK on the flop / turn some %, or not bluffing river when checked to some %. So if hero only floated 50% of the time with AK, he’d only have 8 combos by the river, and if he only bluffed 50%, he’d have 4 combos, etc etc.

   Again, the PSB may have made the villain go “hmm weird, I call”.

   The main area I think you’re focusing on is how little of Hero’s overall range here needs to be bluffing to make a call, but Hero isn’t getting to the river with his entire opening range.

   • I’m not sure I agree with that – this is a pure bluff-the-river line from start to finish, as Andrew mentioned somewhere, so why can’t it be done with more than AK/AQ? Are we really folding this flop after raising pre every time someone bets at it, unless we have the (virtual) nuts? What about pairs 55-88 that are trying the same play? That’s another 24 combos… it just feels like hero’s bluffing frequency needs to be very low to still make this a profitable call for villain given how narrow our value range is.

     • I can’t speak for Andrew but I know that i’m not floating the turn without equity, and the only hands that have equity that are in my UTG range on this board are basically AK and AQ.

       It would be pretty spewy to double float here with T9s for example.

       I doubt villain expects us to turn pairs worse than his 88 into a bluff here. Pretty pointless to call with 55 on the turn and then turn it into a bluff on the river. If we thought we would need to turn 55 into a bluff, we should just fold the turn.

       Again, I see where you are coming from, and nobody knows besides Andrew how wide/narrow his floating range is here. This is another spot where villain just has to close his eyes and guess at hero’s frequencies, which is normally going to be -EV.

       • That’s actually really interesting – so the important part of Andrew’s hand is the equity he has to draw at an A or K, giving him an extra 12% going into the river making it possible to do this play with AK/AQ and not with 55 or 66, which I’m assuming you might call with on the flop but then fold the turn when he bets again? I wonder if you guys have actually done any real math to back that up.

         Re: guessing at frequencies – isn’t guessing at frequencies the entirety of poker, more or less? If the spot is close, it can hardly be massively + or – EV, which implies that Andrew (and you) don’t think the spot is close. I see the points you are making, but they haven’t convinced me that Andrew doesn’t show up with close to 15 bluff combos here. Especially if villain thinks Andrew can float AK/AQ here some of the time and is likely to bluff 100% of rivers missed (since that is the only play that makes the turn call with these hands profitable).

         On a side note, it seems that most of the (not so good) players responding feel that it’s pretty likely for hero to show up with “high cards” here and be bluffing or even (some think) value betting on the end. You could put that all down to donkishiness, but it’s also likely that players (in general, perhaps not top players) take this line more often than you seem to think.

         Thanks again for all the insights and taking the time to respond..

         • RE: Equity

           Yeah, AK has 10 outs vs the range villain is repping (pairs 66-QQ), and some presumed bluffing equity. A hand like 66 would only have 6, some of which are dirty.

           In all honesty, if we had 55 we’d probably call turn again with our OESD outs, so i’d add that hand as well. Still, the point remains that a good, fundamentally solid player probably isn’t floating here with something like KTs just trying to ‘make a play’ on the river.

           RE: Guessing at Frequencies

           Yes and no. Guessing at frequencies is part of poker, but this is not a spot you want to be doing it. If a FD misses and you check top pair to your opponent, and he would only bet the nuts or his missed draws – you can make a very profitable guess about his frequencies (it’s hard to make the nuts, and lots of draws missed, we call). Here, you’re trying to guess the frequency with which an unknown player double floats your lead, and then bluffs a river which he’s going to balance well with a strong valuebetting range.

           Yes, it’s going to be close. Vs any good player, it should be. In close spots, we should default to GTO play, and the GTO play might be to c/c here with 88 since he’s toward the top of his perceived range, and he’s vs a good enough villain whose going to read his range and pounce on him.

           However villain doesn’t know anything about our game, and vs a ton of nitty MTT players, I would argue this call with 88 is -EV.

           RE: High Cards

           I don’t want to pass judgment on anyone here, but that’s just a lazy way of saying i’m a calling station. Bad players love to ‘put you on AK’ and call down because they hate folding. You have to actually give a reason in this hand for villains range to be comprised of high cards.

           If we were to ask villain about this hand and he said “I expect foucault to float the turn with added equity hands like AK, AQ, and then turn them into bluffs when I rep a capped range on the river”, okay his river call may be justifiable.

           Most of the people responding that “i put you on a bluff” give reasons not grounded in poker theory, but trying to justify a call because you might bluff.

           To call this river, you have to reason that Foucault is capable of turning some hands into bluffs, or double floating with ‘showdown value’ and then bluffing the river with a high enough frequency to make 88 near a 0EV call.

           That’s a lot to assume about someone you don’t know.

           All that being said, I agree that there are bad players who just call trying to spike top pair, and then bluff when they miss. For all we know, he could have just as easily said “lol…foucault probably stayed in too long with ace king and now wants to buy the pot”. Making a correct call, for perhaps the wrong reasons.

           Phew!

           • Very very well said. It’s easy for me to go on vacation when you are around to respond to comments saying everything I would have said better than I would have said it! Come to think of it, you probably do know more than any other person about how I play and think….

         • Fair enough all around
           GG, this hand.. 🙂
           I feel like i’ve stolen a free poker lesson….

         • Noman,

           It’s not exactly that this would be unprofitable with something other than AK. It’s that, as you point out, I only have so many big pairs in my range. I don’t feel like I need to be perfectly balanced in this spot- far from it- but I don’t want to have a floating range that wildly exceeds my value range. If I’m only going to float with a small % of my non-pair hands, then it might as well be the ones that have the best equity. Given how uncommon it is for me to have a big pair, and how many AK I have, I can’t really see myself doing this with hands other than AK.

           Guessing at frequencies is half of poker, but keeping your opponent guessing is the other half. Villain’s real mistake isn’t the river call; it’s turning his hand face up with this bet-bet-check line. I doubt he ever double barrels air here, and I also doubt that he ever plays something like AA trickily enough to be flatting pre-flop, betting flop and turn, then going for a river check-raise. This means that when I have JJ+, I am never guessing. I always have the best hand, and it’s an easy value bet. I can choose to look for additional EV by guessing about how often a float will succeed, and I suppose I lost that game in this situation, but on balance position alone should give me an edge there.

           Chris said the rest better than I can. I just want to underline the point about Villain’s call not being based on the assumption that I am floating twice with AK planning to bluff the river. He tanked for over two minutes before calling, so he clearly had no plan when he checked the river (or maybe he had a plan for a smaller bet but was thrown off when I potted it). There are poor hand readers who won’t try to hand read at all and will just check-call river based on the fact that they have an “objectively” medium strength hand. Those are not good targets for a play like this.

           Then there are elementary hand readers, who will assume that I can only call the turn with showdown-bound hands or slowplayed monsters. These players will check 88, hoping to get a free showdown but planning to fold to a bet. That is where I estimated Villain would be, and against such a player this is a good play.

           There are also really sophisticated players who understand all of the above and also know that to foil it, players like me will do things like floating. Such players will take lines like this to confound lines like mine, which is itself designed to confound the elementary hand reader. Based on what little I know about Villain, it’s extremely unlikely he’s in this category, but either way, I misread him, and NH sir.

           Thanks for the very good questions, I imagine a lot of people were wondering similar things, and they forced me to think through this more thoroughly myself as well.

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