What’s Your Bluff Target?

22 thoughts on “What’s Your Bluff Target?”

1. I think the best hand he could have here is probably AdXd flush draw, or any hand with a 6 or 4. the UTG limp is suspect, even though he’s a nitty regular. You’d need to put in a fairly nice-sized river bet to win this at all. To complete your story you’d need to bet $400 or more. If you check back, you’re going to be out $205.

2. TL;DR: bet either 250$ or 150$, depending on which of these sizes will get villain to fold A-high.

   Reasoning:

   Well, we obviously have to bet, since we have literally the worst hand in our range. Now, the question is how much.

   Before everything, let’s think about how villain’s range looks:
   1. Villain has predominantly flush draws, a lot of which are nut flush draws. Effectively all of these did not make two pairs.
   2. Villain also has some strong hands: mediocre trips that he was playing carefully OTF when they were one-pair hands, and perhaps a few sets that he was slowplaying.
   3. Finally, villain perhaps has some medium-value hands: some hands like TT or JJ that he decided to limp and then get sticky with, and maybe AA and KK once in a while.

   Overall, I’d say villain range is around:
   15% trips+
   10% pocket pairs and some other random two-pair hands
   40% A-high
   15% K-high
   10% other missed flush draws

   We see that villain’s range is somewhat capped, and his A-high bluffcatchers have bad equity against even our overall preflop range, not to mention against any sane range for 3-barreling in a 4-way pot.

   Let’s first consider non-exploitive (i.e. presumably balanced) approaches:

   If I were to have only one bet sizing in this spot for my whole betting range, it’d be around half pot: this is a nice amount for getting thin value from various hands villain would like to hero call with, so that it’d be a profitable value bet with pretty much any trips. (In practice I might decide to sometimes check back some of my absolutely worst trips, since getting check-raised would be ugly.) So, if we’re going with just one bet sizing here, I’d make it half pot: this makes villain decision pretty difficult with all his bluffcatching range, including hands as strong as AA.

   Now, if we were to have more than one bet sizing, then we could bet hands as weak as 9x for thin value. Since this would be very thin value, our bet would be pretty small: around 100-150$. If I’d bet 100$ in this spot I’d be worried about inducing a bluff-raise. So I’d go with 150$ or so when I do decide to go for thin value. With hands like KQ and boats we might want to go much bigger, e.g. bet around 350$, although I’d be reluctant to do that: it seems that once we bet much over half pot it begins to be hard for villain to call with bluffcatchers, since they have such bad equity. So I guess I’d have a thin value bet size of 150$ and a thick value bet sizing of 250-300$. With our hand we can bet any of these sizes, so we can pick one of these at random. An extra advantage of having two bet sizes is that we have a wider value betting range, so we can afford to have a wider bluffing range, so presumably villain should be folding more often to our bets, overall.

   Now let’s think of it exploitively: if we want to get villain to fold hands worse than K-high, we can bet anything. Presumably he’ll bluff-raise once in a while, but we don’t care that much about this. If we want him to fold K-high we should be at least 100$ or so, and for folding out A-high we’ll have to bet at least 150$, but might have to bet as much as 250$. Betting 250$ will probably usually get pocket pairs to fold. We can do a calculation to see what’s optimal, but I’m pretty sure that the best size is the size that is needed to fold out A-high. This size is somewhere between 150$ and 250$. I’d personally feel most comfortable with 250$, so that’s what I’d bet if I was going to be exploitive.

   We see that two of the three approaches suggest betting 250$, so that’s what I’m going to bet. If villain is nitty enough that you think he wouldn’t be tempted to call with A-high if you bet 150$, then bet 150$.

   • After giving it some more thought I’m thinking that since villain is a nit, and our goal is just to fold all A-high and weaker, than we can bet as little as 50$ if we throw balance out the window and want to be maximally exploitive. Nits don’t usually feel comfortable calling with A-high (well, with the pair on the board and an A kicker in this case), and we don’t care about the once in a while when we induce bluffraises, because we’re not trying to be balanced so we don’t need to worry about what happens with our thin value range. So if you think he’d fold A-high to 50$ or 100$, that’s what I would bet.

     Another factor I overlooked a bit is that the river card encourages villain to call with his middling pairs, since it reduces the chances we have him beat. So this is one more reason to avoid trying to fold out pairs, and to concentrate on folding out unpaired hands that beat us.

3. Do the time pot arrangements affect your preflop ranges much? I know it would for me.

4. Given with how he played that AK before I doubt he has AQ, AA or KK even if they are in his preflop range. He also would have bet out or check raised 44 or 66. His best possible likely hands are KQs and QJs, but there are only 2 combos each and they might not be in his early position limping range 100% of the time. The other 2 holdings you might have to worry about are JJ and TT that he got stubborn with. The problem is if the is as nitty as you discribe he is only limping in with suited broadway (supernits don’t play anything like 87s early). That leaves 6 combos of missed flush draws. $200 would be enough to get him to fold those, but if he does have JJ or TT in his range then probably need to go to $500 or more.

5. I think his range prior to the river is Qx, stubborn pocket pairs between Q and 6, and draws with equity (like AdKd). He’s a tight passive player who limped under the gun so he’s not going to have any Q or flush draw, most likely higher cards and pairs. I think his check on the river skews his range to more likely not having a Q than having one, but this could be the one time he is going for a check-raise with a Q or 99. I don’t think you have to bet very big to bluff out any non-Q or stronger hand, the question is just what is the level at which he won’t treat his Ax hand as a bluff catcher. I’m feeling $225.

6. The best hands he’ll have a real decision with are one pair hands.
   Since he limped AK on a previous occasion, it seems like JJ/TT will be in his limping range, and I’d assume he calls two streets with those when there’s only one overcard on the board. (He led out with TPTK on a previous hand, so I doubt he has a monster – including a slowplayed overpair – when he check-calls this time).
   In my experience, nits tend to be quite sticky with decent pocket pairs, presumably because they so rarely see a flop that they hate folding a made hand once they do. A9dd is another medium strength made hand that would reach the river (calls flop with a flush draw, makes second pair, calls again). (I assume he doesn’t play K9s-T9s in EP). Pairs worse than 99 that didn’t hit a set/boat probably got dumped on the turn.
   Flush draws that missed are easy folds to any bet, so those are not a problem.

   As see it, villain’s range is capped/weak, consisting mostly of air and bluff-catchers. On the rare occasions he has trips+ he’s calling or raising, but he should fold all pairs worse than 9x, along with his missed draws. This just leaves 13 combos (JJ/TT and A9dd) that need to be “persuaded” to fold. A lot of players aren’t keen to fold 2nd pair on an unthreatening paired board, but I think if you bet a little more than half pot (especially if that’s the sizing you’d use with trips), he’ll be disinclined to be a hero, and JJ/TT and A9dd will go into the muck, possibly with some sort of comment like “I don’t think you have a queen, but you can have the pot this time”. 😉

   • If I could write a cohesive response to this situation it would mimic your text Arty. That’s pretty much exactly what was swimming around in my head and I was heavily leaning towards Villain having TT or JJ. Although I hadn’t completely discounted 8s and 7s, but that’s mainly because I love to pay people off and would personally call down with those hands on this board texture. 2/3 pot sounds about right to be large enough to scare off the hero call but still appear to be a value bet.

7. I don’t see many strong hands in Villain’s range. Sets would have bet or raised at some point with straight and flush draws on the board, and if he has a Q, it will be with a very strong kicker since a nitty player wouldn’t call UTG with a hand like Q9s, and so we would expect him to bet or raise a Q at some point much of the time. I think flush draws are a big part of his range with some pp’s mixed in (and A9d). So when choosing a bet size, I’m actually more interested in selecting a size that is consistent with our story rather than finding the minimum that would get villain to fold in a vacuum. Because another Q comes in on the river, I don’t think we would be expected to barrel with a value hand worse than a Q (would we bet JJ or even AA here for value?), so we need to represent a Q with our bet. I would bet $305 and only expect a call from a surprise Q (QJd?) or perhaps JJ-TT (even that seems unlikely given Villain’s description).

8. Hi all, after lurking for months I decided to write my first post on here =)
   So, I basically agree with what you guys said about villain’s range composition, and I def agree too that his range is capped (The example Andrew gave us shows that he is not that passive with a good hand) , but a thing that not many people considered imo is the type of opponent we are playing agaist with : this guy is a NITTY reg, and nitty people tend to fold more than they should.
   So: at first I was thinking to bet something around 1/3 pot and make him fold all A-h,K-h, and other flushdraws better than 7-h, but than I thought why dont we try make him fold hands like A9dd, TT, JJ ?
   so my second guess was a decent/big size bet taregeting those hands now, but there still was a problem: all the QT, QJ and other Qx in general would call my big bet, he is not going to fold those hand EVER right ? Are we really that sure about that ? He is a nit guys: Why dont we try and bet 1000 on the river ? I’m sure if we do that he is gonna hate his life and he ll talk him self into folding EVERYTHING even a Q giving Andrew 44-66.
   I really think our efficacy if we bet 1000 is close to 100% imo…
   The only downside to this is that there is a flush draw on the flop ( I would like this move better if there wasnt one) and also the fact that you already used the 200%pot bet in a previous hand (which it may not even be a downside, it could give extra strenght to our move)

   (Sorry for my writing, english is not my first language)

   • I completely agree with this reasoning, i think the central question here is what kind of nit is this? Is he truly a disciplined nit post flop and in big pots, or is he just the type of nit that plays tight pre flop and thinks that he is “not good enough to fold better than two pair”? Since the nits at the 2/3 and 3/5 games i play are much more likely to be the latter, i would tend to bet ~$125 to get him off of missed draws. But given that you think this 5/10 nit is capable of folding trips, i think a bet of ~$1025 will get him off of damn near 100% of his capped range.

     With respect to the image and history arguments against over-bluffing. I have been experimenting with over betting a bit in my games, and it seems to me that image and game flow tend to go out the window in your opponents’ minds when you whip out the over bet. They tend to revert back to their basic tendencies. (i.e calling if they call too much and folding if they fold too much.) People seem to look for reasons to do what they like normally doing, and the over bet gives them a reason no matter their tendencies. If they like to call then the over-bet looks bluffy, and if they like to fold the over-bet looks too risky for their “marginal hand.” This isn’t anything concrete just my own observations. Needless to say i tend to over-bet for value in my games 🙂

     • Looking at this further i think that under-betting or over-betting are really your only 2 options here. Betting between 1/2 pot and pot seems like a perfect size if you are value betting. Say the turn is the 8h instead, isn’t a bet of $250-$450 almost surly going to get called by a queen, even from a nit, against this “wild” player? The smaller side of this bet size may even get looked up by TT and JJ from some “sticker” nits, but i think 77-JJ are all pretty heavily discounted from his flop overcall if this is truly a nit. With your perceived image, it seems like getting him(yes even a nit) to look down at trips and not auto call your “normal sized bet” requires that you really get his attention with your bet size. You need him to actually think and not just say, well i have trips so i call. Threatening $1000 of his hard, nut peddled dollars should get him thinking pretty quickly.

9. The first thing to note about the villain’s range is that he does not have a nutted hand. Based on his earlier line with AKo on a drawey board, we expect him to lead the flop with AQ and any slowplayed KK-AA, and check raise with 44-66. Although he’s a nit, I don’t see why he would not checkraise the flop with some of his strong draws like Ax of diamonds. In fact, by the river his hand is face up: other than the medium flush draws he may have fished with, which is not that likely but still somewhat possible, I’d expect him to have 1010 here most of the time, since pairs lower than 99 are folding after the turn bet, and were he to have 99, he would have checkraised the turn 100% of the time. He could of course have JJ, but unlike 1010, I think he’s raising with JJ preflop since unlike AKo with which he limped pre in Andrew’s example, JJ is a made hand and he would be more inclined to protect his hand from overcards, which is even more of a concern given his shitty position in the hand. One final caveat though-would he play KQ this way? I’m discounting QJ from his range given how nitty he is, and for the same reason I’m pretty confident hands that could easily be dominated such as KQ would not be in his range. That said, he did limp pre, and played it passively postflop, so I would not be terribly surprised if he woke up with KQ.

   Of course we have to bet here, since we have absolutely no sd equity, and the villain has lots of air and two paired hands that are vulnerable to three streets of aggression. Andrew represents here either a strong Q, or a boat with 44, 66, as well as some missed draws, most of which are to the flush. Since I personally put the villain on 1010 majority of the time, I expect 375$ would do the job. I’m not a fan of the overbet here given his earlier overbet to which everyone folded. Since he could not show his hand there, it’s likely that an overbet will be perceived as a bluff and induce the villain to make a stubborn, albeit incorrect, call with 1010 or JJ. Less than full pot here screams pure value.

   • Nice post, but I don’t see why this has to be true: “I’m not a fan of the overbet here given his earlier overbet to which everyone folded. Since he could not show his hand there, it’s likely that an overbet will be perceived as a bluff and induce the villain to make a stubborn, albeit incorrect, call with 1010 or JJ. Less than full pot here screams pure value.” There’s no mathematical reason why a big bet has to be a bluff and a smaller bet for value. After all, you’re suggesting doing just the opposite. In fact, playing a polarized range against a capped range on the river is about as well solved as any NLHE situation, and the solution is to bet big – to shove, actually – with all value hands plus however many bluffs are needed to balance that.

     That doesn’t mean shoving is necessarily the best play here, but if you’re going to make an exploitable assumption, you need to justify it. Why would Villain have to assume that I wouldn’t overbet for value? Couldn’t he just as easily use the same reasoning you did, then take it a step further and decide that I’d ONLY overbet for value because I’d expect it to look bluffy?

     • I think the key difference is before he saw you overbet he might be more inclined to lead out the safe river with a Q hoping to get hero called by JJ, TT or a worse Q. But since he did see you overbet he may be inclined to check whatever Q he happens to get to the river with planning to call your overbet. But just because he mmight have more Qs it’s still not going to be that many and I don’t know if that is enough to necessarily rule out an overbet math wise.

10. Initial instinct was to bet ~200 because I assume he has a missed draw here most times and you don’t have to bet big to see a fold. BUT he could have hit a pair with his diamond draw (I.e 9dXd). Therefore I’d bet bigger, somewhere in the 325 range where you think he’ll fold a draw that paired up, or the less likely 10-10/JJ.

11. I would keep the bet on the smaller side, targeting whiffed draws.

    A couple of things: when you say he’s nitty, I think we need more information about how he is nitty. It doesn’t necessarily mean bad/scared, just careful. Based on that limited description, it seems reasonable to think he is either calling with a draw, or believes he has the best hand and just doesn’t want to over-commit.

    On this particular river, he will either feel a lot better about his hand, or a lot worse. If we bet big, he might find folds on his weaker underpairs/one pair hands, but not necessarily. Again, nitty does not mean pushover. He’s not just going to mindlessly dump his marginal hands. And if we were construct a scenario where a cautious person were going to feel most comfortable making a big call, I think this river and your image make this just about the perfect time for him to show some guts and call down a big bet.

12. Villain’s range is definitely capped (but given his nitty tendencies, the cap goes up to KQ–with a heavily discounted possibility of AQ) because of his decision not to either a) lead as he did with AK, or b) c/r after the overcall (the fact that there was an additional caller on this wet flop entirely eliminates sets (and probably AA/KK/AQ) from his range).

    The interesting question here: does it really matter what villain’s distribution of hands here is (i.e. does it actually matter if it’s [50% flush draw / 50% KQ-QJ] versus [90% flush draw / 10% KQ-QJ]? Perhaps my thinking here is off, but it seems like the only relevant question on setting a bluff target is to “see how high up we can go” in terms of asking whether or not we can profitably bluff a certain category of hand.

    So, assuming we can profitably bluff his miss flush draws (including the A-high ones) with a bet of say, $175 (not arguing this is optimal), then the next question would be can we profitably bluff him off of medium pairs (e.g. Ad9d, TT/JJ*) with a bet of say, $350. The final question would be can we bluff him off of the top of his capped range: (QJs/KQ/AQ) with a bet of say, $975.

    My assumptions are that:
    1. we proceed bluffing a higher and higher amount until we reach a category of hand where we do not believe attempting to bluff that category of hands adds marginal value
    2. the opponent treats larger and larger bet sizes in a “rational” fashion and won’t be inclined to spazz out and call $1,000 with ace-high (but of course you have to make this type of assumption, absent strong reads)
    3. [very important] the opponent can’t have the nuts, and we can (Andrew and Nate discuss this on a podcast with Mike Stein)

    I think it’s almost beyond argument that you have a mandatory minimum bluff against anything other than a Queen. The bet size necessary to get him off of JJ*- is probably something like $350. Getting him to fold a hand as strong as KQ is much more interesting. I think it’s important to note here that nitty players “fold too much” but they don’t necessarily do so in a linear fashion and–in some situations–may actually be more insensitive to a large bet size even though you would expect it to align with their nit-mindset. So, it may be the case that even if it is theoretically profitable for Andrew to shove against this capped range, villain may mentally view KQ as the nuts and call (it depends on what type of nit he is).

    All things said, while I love the theoretical aspect of constructing a shoving range in this situation (and maybe you already have, per your response to samael’s post), you are obviously comfortable with the 2x pot move and it’s something that i would strongly consider here. You are effectively telling him: “I love the queen that you obviously have, but now I have 66/44 that I’ve been betting the whole time and am now going to value-bomb you.” On paper I am torn between $375 and going for the $975 bomb, but I’m going to go ahead and say pull the trigger: bet $975. Villain has played passively, may not be extremely emotionally involved/wed to this hand, and may be capable of folding as strong as a passively played AQ given the obviousness of the board pairing and the relative unlikelihood of you being perceived as overvaluing KQ/QJ.

    *The overcall on the flop from a nitty player makes me discount the possibility of him having JJ/TT here.

    P.S. props to Riar for saying all of this in 1/4 the words 🙂

    • No Props to you mwalsh for writing in a more clean, precise and refined way exactly what i had in mind =)
      and also thank you for correcting a mistake that i made in the construction of villain’s range: i didnt see that he was the second caller on the flop so i do agree that we can discount 88 TT JJ (even if he calls with them on the flop i think he is folding them on the turn)
      I think this has consequences because we now given his range we have only two choices on what to bet:
      -1000 (or 975 obv) to target the Qx hands
      or
      -175-200 to make him fold all better draws than ours

      I dont think we accomplish much by doing something else.

13. I don’t think we can assume he will automatically re-raise when he has a strong hand here, as he might be feeling that he lost value by re-raising you with his made hand last time. So i don’t discount him slow playing strong hands here like others seem to be.

    Case for not bluffing: I see a large part of his range being qx here, so i am not seeing bluffing as the automatic option here. As a nitty player top pair in a 4 way pot makes sense as he will call down often but not risk re-raising into some very strong hands. And as he is nitty he most likely doesn’t have a bad enough kicker here to get him folding trips. I put q9s as his worst holding here. he also maybe slow playing a set, as stated earlier i wouldn’t assume he will automatically re-raise based on one previous hand. But this option is still pretty unlikely as the board is so draw heavy its hard to imagine him not at least re-raising the turn.

    case for bluffing: The other strong part of his range here are flush and straight draws, which have missed. Targeting these means a small bluff should do the trick, as you are just looking to get him off ace high.

    Another small part of his range is medium pairs, and if he has called down that light already with 88 or 1010 then there’s no reason for the queen to scare him further. A bet slightly larger would be required, although i don’t think this line fits him as well as missed draws. you would expect him to raise 99+ most of the time pre flop, and a nitty player would give up on most lower pocket pairs on the turn most of the time.

    Conclusion: I think its actually a close call between checking and bluffing here, but in the end the bluff required to get him off missed draws should be inexpensive enough to make it worth it. So i would bet $175 and fold to any re-raise.

14. The best hand you should try to make him fold is JJ. You have a boatload of air in your range (bricked FD/SD) as well as monsters (limped small PP, Qx), so an overbet of $800 is in order. While he would be folding the A-hi part of his range to a much smaller bet, in order to get him to fold JJ/TT, you’d need a chunkier one.

15. bet 425
    15% of time he folds pairs
    15% of time he calls with pairs
    40% of time he folds air,
    25% time you get called/raised by Queen,trips…etc.

    So 55% you win…you only need to win like 45% (rough estimate)
    seems way above break even.

    first instinct fold
    second instinct have to bluff
    third instinct play poker.

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