What’s Your Play? Considering a Value Bet Results

Thanks for all the comments on this week’s What’s Your Play?, and sorry that I’m late in getting up the results. My girlfriend and I are about to embark on a cross-country roadtrip, ending (for me) in Las Vegas, so we’ve been busy getting ready for that.

I want to start by highlighting a comment that illustrates why I chose this hand for a WYP post:

“First, if we get check-raised, that’s pretty much an automatic fold (right?). And if we bet, I wouldn’t think there’s anything more than a negligible chance that we can push Villain off of A9/K9/Q9 or better regardless of sizing, so there’s no sense turning our hand into a bluff.

So that means that the calculation is simply weighing (a) how likely Villain calls with worse versus (b) how often we get check-raised, either with trips/2P or a bluff (obviously, it doesn’t matter which). This balance also strikes me as highly interrelated; that is, the less you bet, the more likely you are to get a call from a medium-strength hand, but the more tempting you make it for Villain to c/r bluff with the same hand.

So it may be too passive, but I say check behind. If I’m good, I think I’m pretty happy with two streets of value from my relatively crappy hand in the cutoff, and if I’m beat, I’ve gotten away as cheaply as possible.”

The commenter offers a very good analysis of the situation and how to think about a river bet, but then more or less ignores his own analysis and concludes that we’ve won enough already so let’s just check it down. Ok that summary is a little glib, and I’ll admit to bending his words a bit for my own purposes – apologies for that. But I hope my point is taken: we need to actually do the analysis of which hands will call or raise.

Hero’s Range

A few commenters suggest that Hero has represented a lot of strength, which is true but incomplete. Hero has represented either a lot of strength or a lot of BS, and it’s a lot harder to have the latter than the former. I’m opening something like 30% of hands from this position, and I’m betting most of them on the flop, so my range for getting to the turn is quite wide. Although the deuce isn’t the best barreling card in the world, I’m certainly betting all of my good draws, of which there are many. A few of those hands contain a Q, but that still leaves plenty of air in my range on the river.

Please note that we’re talking here about my actual range, not Villain’s perception of it. If we knew that he would or wouldn’t expect us to bluff here, then we could bet or check accordingly with a thin value hand. If we’re not sure, the correct response is not simply to check behind. The correct response is to value bet the top of our range and balance that with an appropriate number of bluffs. This prevents us from being exploited either by a Villain who folds too often or a Villain who calls too often.

To the extent that I have read here, which many of you correctly point out is rather weak, I think it argues for betting. Villain is likely to hand read well enough to appreciate how wide I’m opening from the cutoff and the logic behind bluff-catching against a polarized range.

Villain’s Range

Even without a read, there are a number of reasons to think that Villain’s range consists mostly of marginal hands he’s aiming to showdown cheaply. He declined to 3-bet preflop, which discounts the biggest pairs. The smaller those pairs get, the more likely he is to be calling them, but even 99 and TT could be 3-bet candidates here. Furthermore, Villain’s failure to check-raise enables us to discount, though not exclude entirely, sets and two-pair (that don’t use the pair on the board). J9 isn’t ahead of 100% of that range, but it’s far enough ahead to merit a bet.

All of the check-calling of large bets also serves to discount hands without showdown value, namely bare draws. Only the most loose-passive players, which we have reason to believe this player is not, are going to show up here with Qs Ts. That means we don’t have to be overly worried about Villain having hit the Q.

It also means we don’t have to fear a check-raise bluff, since Villain won’t have many hands with which he’ll feel he needs to bluff. As Nate puts it,

“Another important point is that it’s not so easy for him to get to the river with a bluffing hand. Check-calling twice with a pure draw would be poor and un-Internet-ish, and if he doesn’t have a pure draw he has something with calling value. So he would have to be turning a value hand / bluff-catcher into a check-raise river bluff. This is uncommon. (I suppose he could have a very big draw that warrants check-calling even the turn, but there aren’t many combinations of this, and one-gappers will sometimes/often fold preflop OOP, depending on the guy.”

In my experience, misplaced fear of a check-raise is the biggest deterrent many players have to value betting the river, so if you were worried about it here, this might be something you should work on.

Results

I bet 150, and Villain called with TT. I regret nothing. You’re supposed to value bet into better hands now and again, and thin value bets make you harder to play against.