What’s Your Play? Unexpected Bet Results

It eventually disappeared, but initially I noticed an interesting pattern in the comments that this week’s “What’s Your Play?” received on Thinking Poker vs. Card Player. The vast majority of the early posters on my website argued for an admittedly tight fold, while the first Card Player responders unanimously wanted to call. As time went on, the responses on both sites became more mixed, but I think this disparity is meaningful. There is one sort of player who looks first to pot odds, and, when they are good, asks “Can you give me a damn good reason to fold?”

The other sort seek to put an opponent on a hand first, or perhaps just to get a feel for how likely they are to be good. If they don’t like what they see, then they ask, “Just how good are those pot odds?”

I put myself squarely in the second camp, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Pot odds really are fundamental and ought to go a long way towards dictating your decision. The danger of the second camp is that, while it’s easy to get a “feel” for whether your hand is likely to be best, it’s hard to get a feel for exactly how likely. We all know that sinking feeling that says you’re probably beat, but how many of us can pinpoint the feeling of being beat 78% of the time? Bigblatch encapsulated this problem nicely when he said, “Everyone who says fold really think he has a straight more than 78% of the time that he does this? I think there are enough blocking bets/bluffs/weird plays happening here that, even though it’s possible we may be losing more often than not, we do have the correct odds to call.”

Perhaps you can see where this is going, but nonetheless I’m going to hold off on the results until I discuss the hand a bit more. As a second-camp-stickler, I want to talk about how to interpret this bet and what it might and might not be.

Bluff

The problem with this interpretation is that it’s awfully hard to put Villain on something needs to bluff. After he check-calls two sizable bets, there simply shouldn’t be much air in his range. The only draw that missed is KT, which really ought to be suited given how poor of a pre-flop call KTo would be. My two Kings cut in half the number of combinations of KTs he could have. No one tried to make a case for how he could be bluffing anything else, so I think there’s general agreement that we’re looking at a slim bluffing range. That’s a shame, because it’s about all Hero can beat on the river.

Sammy adds a few more problems with this interpretation: “I have a feeling these small bluff bets on a marginal scare card work very seldomly live and he would know this; I’d expect a bigger bet were he bluffing. Not to mention, of course, that your hand eliminates 2 of 4 combos of KTs.”

Blocking Bet

This would be a bet with a hand that isn’t likely to be good if I bet big on the river. With these hands he’s betting not to get called by worse but to prevent me from bluffing (if he plans to fold) or value betting larger (if he plans to call). That’s not sound logic for a bet, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t what he’s thinking.

There are other reasons to be doubtful, though. For one thing, it’s not consistent with how he recently played a pure bluff-catcher out of the blinds. Secondly, half-pot is large for the purposes of a block. I’d be a lot more willing to accept this explanation had he bet $100 to $200. Finally, it doesn’t explain his body language upon seeing the 8. If he thinks my turn range is wide enough that his AJ or whatever still has a good shot at being ahead, then the fact that one possible draw got there for me shouldn’t cause such sudden interest in him.

Given how few bluffs I could put him on, my decision whether to call hinged on whether blocking bets made sense. As much as I wanted this to be the case, it felt like I was being overly optimistic and stretching for reasons to call rather than objectively considering the likelihood of this play.

Thin Value Bet

Could he be betting a hand worse than KK expecting to get called by worse (ie not as a block but because he thinks he’s still good often enough when called)? Now that would be optimistic. My default assumption is that people in general and live players in particular are too passive, especially when it comes to thin value betting. This wouldn’t be a good time to value bet AQ – after all, I’m considering folding KK! – and if anything I expect him to err on the side of not value betting. Given that I still have damn near every hand better than AQ in my range, I don’t see this happening at all.

Value Bet From Better

This, of course, is what I’m worried about.  Several commenters suggested the possibility of a slowplayed QQ/JJ/QJ. That didn’t seem likely to me at the time, but the folks saying that probably have more live experience than I do, so I’ll defer to their experience with regard to whether these are plausible candidates for check-calling twice.

Given his reaction to the river card, T9 is what worried me most. Granted it would be a poor check-call on the turn, but as you can see it’s hard to think of any hand with which this is actually a good line.

My biggest difficulty in putting him on the nuts is that $300 feels to me like a small bet for a lock hand, particularly one that needs to recoup a lot of lost equity after calling a big turn bet. I ultimately arrived at the same conclusion Ian did, that “a lot of people bet smaller on later streets relative to the potsize, because the absolute size of the bet seems large. I wonder if this could be the case here, and a 30% psb might actually be perceived by villain as a big value bet.”

Physical Tells

Whatever he has, Villain played it badly, so perhaps trying to deduce his holding from his betting pattern is a fool’s task. Let’s look at  his body language instead.

That 8 got his attention. It either improved his hand, scared him, or struck him as a good bluffing opportunity. I’ve already said that there’s not much reason for it to scare him, so he’s either excited because he improved, in which case I’m beat, or because he sees it as a good card to bluff.

With regard to the latter possibility, Bond2King says that, “You need a good reason to think that he would be capable of such a performance on a bluff, as well as a reason for him to think you would fall for it. Given the limited history you have neither. His hand is face up as T9.”

I don’t think his mannerisms would have to be an elaborate performance for him to bluffing, particularly not the suddenly straightening up and swallowing hard. I know that in the past I’ve gotten legitimately and visibly excited upon seeing a good bluffing opportunity. So I think Villain’s reaction may simply mean, “OK, one of my bluff outs got there, time to pull the trigger,” rather than, “If I’m going to bluff, I need to convince him that the river improved me, so I’ll sit up straight and give a little swallow and blink a few times and then throw out three chips real casual-like.” If he seemed comfortable after betting, well, he did seem to be a work-a-day regular in this game, so it’s conceivable that a 30 BB bluff simply doesn’t cause him terribly much stress and/or that he’s accustomed to hiding it.

SurfBum4Life offers another interesting interpretation that didn’t occur to me: “His river reaction suggests that he improved, but it also indicates that he was not actually looking for a card to come out and it is a surprise to him and he needs to reconsider his action. Thus we can take 10 9 out of his range as he would be looking for an 8 or a K to improve his hand and would not be surprised when it fell on the river.”

Results

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll make an embarrassing admission: KT did not occur to me as a possibility as I was mulling this decision in real time. To be generous, I could speculate that I unconsciously ruled it out of his range based on the prior action, especially the turn call, but in any event it’s a pretty bad oversight to make. Even the two combos of KTs are enough to make this a call if T9s is the only value hand I’m worried about.

I’d like to think that I would have called if I’d consciously considered the possibility. If nothing else, my uncertainty about what exactly to put him on ought to have led me back to the very good pot odds and a conclusion of “Screw it, I don’t have to be right very often, I call.”

As it happened, I believed I could only beat a bluff, and seeing that T9 got there and there were no flush draws (and overlooking KT), I couldn’t put him on one. I folded, and he showed KTo as he scooped the pot.

Thanks as always to everyone who participated, and especially to those of you who wanted to fold. You made feel better about my decision! 🙂