Medium-Stakes Cash Games: Value-Betting

This is the eighth column in this series. Here, I will be discussing value-betting. If you find this column useful and want to read the others, go to CardPlayerEurope.com and click on authors to find my previous thoughts on medium-stakes cash games.



Being able to get full value out of your made hands is a crucial skill. Anytime you have a hand that is strong enough to beat most of your opponents' calling range, you should be hoping to get all of your chips into the middle of the pot (or as many as is realistic). Note that I said calling range, and not just range. To explain exactly what I mean by this, we'll look at two examples.



Hand No. 1: You are playing $2-$4 no-limit hold'em. Your opponent is a weak tight-aggressive player (TAG) who respects you and generally tries to avoid you if possible. He is in the small blind, and you are under the gun. You raise with queens and he calls. The flop is 10-10-2. He checks and calls a bet. The turn is a jack. He checks. At this point, even though he is a tight player, your hand figures to be the best most of the time. He will usually have a pair of some description, with a small possibility of trips or a full house (and an even smaller chance of ace high). He is more likely to have a small pair than a large one, but you can't rule out the possibility that he slow-played A-A or K-K preflop.



So, you are ahead of most of his range here, but if you bet, he is likely to fold everything but overpairs or better hands. So, your hand is good against his range, but not against his calling range. If you are ahead, he is likely to have very few outs, and there is no need to protect the pot, so a check is much better than a bet. You are not giving up on the pot, because you intend to either call a bet on the river or make one yourself; you have just decided that you can maximise your expectation by checking. Hopefully, this will enable you to get another bet out of weaker hands on the river.



Hand No. 2: You are playing $2-$4 no-limit hold'em. You have A-K offsuit under the gun and raise. The button, who isn't a great player, calls you. The flop is A-4-3. Before you do anything here, you should recognise that this is a great situation. On this flop, your opponent will call you down (or raise you, it doesn't matter) with any high ace or a set. It is much easier and therefore much more likely for him to have an ace than a set, because there are far more combinations of aces than sets. On a flop of A-4-3 against a range of 4-4, 3-3, A-7+ suited, and A-10+ offsuit, you have just over 68 percent equity.



So, you need to plan how you can get your opponent to commit all of his chips, as easily as possible. This means taking a look at his stack and seeing what amount you need to bet on the flop and turn to make a river shove appropriate. You shouldn't check a street hoping to get him to put chips into the pot without an ace. On an ace-high board like this, your opponent will either be able to beat the ace or not; it's unlikely that he will put many chips into the pot with a hand worse than an ace, and it's far more important to concentrate on stacking A-J or A-Q. If you had a much weaker hand, like A-2 offsuit or K-K, checking some streets becomes a much better play, as you need to induce action from hands you beat, rather than just a hand that beats yours.



So, as you can see with the second example, because your hand is far ahead of your opponent's calling range, you should aim to value-bet each street. This is called getting three streets of value. In the previous hand, there weren't three streets of value to be had, so it was best to check the turn.



It's a very good idea to know what amounts you need to bet on early streets to set up a big river bet that doesn't look unusual. So, in the above example, if the pot is $36 on the flop, a bet of $32 will lead to the pot being $100 on the turn. You can then bet $85 on the turn, which leaves you with a pot of $270 on the river. If you both started this hand with $400, you will be left with $252, which you can easily push into the pot. With a pot that big, it seems natural that the only bet you would make is all in, and that's because you have set up the situation well.



Note that if you had bet less on the flop and turn, you probably would be left with an awkward stack amount on the river, and would have to go for a smaller river bet, costing yourself money. You want to make your bets and actions look as normal and natural as possible, and not alert your opponent to the fact that you love your hand, while still getting as much into the pot as possible.



Usually, just keeping the initiative yourself and leading into pots is the best course of action (assuming you had the initiative preflop). You don't want to give your opponent a chance to get away from his hand, so check-raising is usually bad unless you think your opponent has a strong but second-best hand. Check-raising can be good if you want to end the hand (by either him folding or getting all in), so it can be a good play on draw-heavy boards that may be hard to play when out of position on later streets.



It's important that, in general, you make your bet sizes the same, whether you are bluffing or value-betting. If you don't, you make it very easy for your opponents to play against you. That means that in many circumstances, you need to find a bet size that works well in both situations. When you are bluffing, the less you can bet and get your opponent to fold, the better; when value-betting, the more you can bet and get your opponent to call, the better. A good amount is somewhere from 50 percent to 90 percent of the pot, depending on the exact situation and board texture. Remember that unless you bet a strange amount, like a minimum-bet or an overbet, your opponent's decision will be close to binary. Either he will call or he won't. A few extra dollars won't change it, but it will make the pot much bigger on later streets. ♠



Daragh Thomas has made a living from poker over the last three years. He also coaches other players and writes extensively on the boards.ie poker forum, under the name hectorjelly.