Hand of the Week: Top Pair on the Flop

Thanks to everyone who’s participated in the Hand of the Week so far. Today’s post deals with playing top pair on the flop.

Hero is UTG+2 with a $2500 stack, and most of the table covers. Action folds to Hero, who opens to $30 with 8s 7s. The hijack, button, and SB call.  For discussion of the preflop action, see this post.

Flop ($118 in pot after rake) 7h 6d 3s. Action checks to Hero. Now what?

Bet, Check, or Both

Most commenters prefer betting, and I agree that that play has obvious appeal. Hero’s hand has a fair chance of being best, but it’s vulnerable and will be difficult to play on later streets.

The value in betting comes primarily from protection. No one seems to think that better hands will fold to a bet, nor does anyone think Hero will have positive expected value when called. There are worse hands that can call, but most have decent to good equity and may successfully bluff on later streets, and there are certainly better hands out there as well. Hero is relatively live against overpairs, not so much against better top pairs, two-pair, sets, or straights.

One quite interesting thing I’ve learned from working with GTO Range Builder is that, at least in heads up pots, very few hands in either player’s range are played with pure strategies at equilibrium. Sometimes there are hands so weak that they categorically prefer folding or hands so strong that they categorically prefer betting, but most hands in the pre-flop raiser’s range are played with a mix of betting and checking. There are good reasons why Hero is incentivized to have top pair and backdoor draws in his checking range.

There are caveats here. There likely is not an optimal equilbrium in a multiway pot, and concerns about hand protection are magnified (then again, concerns about value-cutting oneself are magnified as well). Nevertheless, betting seems thin enough to me that I think checking is worth considering as well. It should certainly have positive expected value, and I don’t think it would take much to be competitive with betting.

In my experience, most players are way too concerned about making sure they win the pot. Protection is a real consideration here, but it’s not the only consideration. The fact that your hand is vulnerable is not, in and of itself, sufficient reason to bet. There are worse things in poker, especially in a deep stacked cash game, than getting drawn out on.

So What?

OK, so checking might be just as good as betting. It’s probably not a lot better, if it’s better at all. If Hero really is indifferent between betting and checking, what’s wrong with just always betting?

Will Tipton addresses this question in Expert Heads Up NLHE, where he determines that the optimal strategy in many heads up spots involves continuation betting at a much lower frequency that what is commonly seen even in matches between two very good players. His conclusion is that, because Hero is indifferent between betting and checking so many hands at equilibrium, he does not lose money in spots where he bets at a very high frequency. He does, however, open himself up to exploitation when he checks a very narrow and defined range in these same spots. The weakness manifests itself not in the betting range but in the checking range.

Basically, if your opponents expect you to always bet a certain type of hand, that gives you a lot of incentive to check it. There may be some bad turn spots for you, but there should also be some very good ones. If, for instance, a 7 turns and no one expects Hero to have a 7, the implied odds can be quite high.

My suspicion is that many of you almost never check this spot with top pair or better, which makes your checks quite easy to play against and means you may well be leaving money on the table by not taking advantage of profitable situations that arise after checking.

If you accept that you should have a checking range, 8s 7s seems like a logical hand to include. It benefits less from protection than does 88 or 99, and it probably fares less well when called than does A7 (assuming 7x is in people’s ranges, but I think at least for some players hands like T7s and 97s should be out there). There are not as many bad turns as it may seem: 9s and below are all safe-to-good (with the exception of a 6), and spades are all fine as well.

Sizing

More important than the frequency with which you bet is the size of your bet. The bigger you bet, the more polarized you should be. I think it’s quite likely that betting 3/4 pot or more with 7s 6s is -EV, at least relative to checking. A smaller bet can more easily accommodate a merged range that includes hands like 7s 6s that mostly benefit from protection. Hero’s range advantage along with the multiway pot means that even facing a half-pot bet, there really isn’t room for people to get too tricky by floating/raising with bare overcards or something like that.

If you’re going to bet a merged range here, it’s not a disaster, but you absolutely should not be near-potting it. Unfortunately, many people seem to have the opposite idea that betting for protection requires betting big, because you want folds. In fact, the hands you are targeting for folds will probably fold to a small bet anyway, and you should also want to avoid putting in a lot of money against a range you’re behind.

Results and next decision point coming in the next post…