Poker Strategy With Gavin Griffin: Elasticity

I was playing my usual game last night, $5-$5 blinds no-limit and this hand came up. There was a limper and the guy in the game who was giving the most action made it $35. I called from the big blind with 7 6. The limper called and we saw a flop of A-J-x rainbow. Everyone checked. The turn was a random card, putting a flush draw, not hearts, on the board and we checked to the raiser, who bet $100. I took this to mean a couple of things. First of all, considering my few hours-old history with this gentleman, I was certain that he didn’t have an ace. There was no way he was checking an ace on the flop. Secondly, I didn’t think there was much chance he had a flush draw, since the ace was out there and I think he would have bet a hand like K-Q and a back door flush draw on the flop and that he was unlikely to have raised worse kings or queens since he liked to play many hands, but played them pretty passively preflop.

I thought he was likely to have a small to medium pair or perhaps a jack. I had been playing back at him quite a bit and he had shown close to zero resistance, so I decided to consider to take that into consideration and raise to $260. He called and my range for him didn’t change much. He would maybe have a couple combinations of flush draws, but mostly middle pairs. The river didn’t change anything, and I bet $280 expecting him to fold his lowest pairs and king or queen high. I think I made a mistake here. I should have bet more. I thought he had a pretty inelastic calling range (meaning that if he was calling, it wouldn’t depend much on my bet sizing), but that’s probably incorrect. I think he would have folded the middle pairs he had to a bigger bet. He did, in fact, call with pocket tens and the pot was pushed his way.

Sometimes you make a really good read, follow through with it, and your opponent just makes a better one. I know that many people in that situation would say something along the lines of, “How did you call?” That’s not my first response. Mine is to figure out if there was something that I did that I could have improved upon. One of my biggest problems right now and something I am currently working on is having multiple bet sizes on each street. I tend to take a more balanced approach to bet sizing and when I’m working with my defaults, I only have one bet size. It’s possible to have several bet sizes and be balanced within each one of them, therefore still being balanced over your entire range. If I have those multiple bet sizes that are balanced internally, I can then use them exploitively when situations like this one come up. Instead of betting $280 and getting called by pocket tens, I could bet $550 and get almost everything to fold. Of course, my read has to be on and the bet has to be successful more often, but if my read is solid, it will be successful more often.

There is one other key thing at play here and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about quite often lately since I started listening to the Thinking Poker Podcast with Nate Meyvis and Andrew Brokos. They regularly talk about a concept called targeting. If you have a portion of your opponent’s range that you’re targeting with your bet, you will generally be more successful in having your bet do whatever it is you want it to do. For instance, in this hand, I thought my opponent’s calling range was inelastic, but that’s unlikely, for one big reason that I didn’t fully process at the time. The first reason his calling range isn’t inelastic is that he doesn’t have an ace very often and the inclusion of aces in his range would make his range less elastic. If he called with aces in his hand along with flush draws and mid pairs, he would be likely to only call with the aces and not with anything else, almost no matter how much I bet within reason. Once you take the aces out of his range though, it becomes more elastic. He’s folding his king and queen-high hands to any bet, but as I bet a larger percentage of the pot, he becomes more and more likely to fold his middle pairs.

If I was more efficient in analyzing the range he actually had and how elastic his calling range was, I would have made a bigger bet. If any bet will get the king and queen-highs to fold, but only a bigger bet will get the middle pairs to fold, I should choose the bigger sizing so that I can leverage my fold equity more. Put another way, if I had more clearly picked which part of his range I was targeting for a fold, I would have bet more effectively. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG

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