Card Player Pro -- Andrew Brokos

Game: $5-$10 heads-up no-limit hold’em cash game
Opponent: Solid, winning player
Stacks: His: $2,005; Mine: $4,814.25
My Cards: Q Q
My Position: Big blind

This hand is from a heads-up match with $5-$10 blinds. My opponent had $2005, and I covered him. He raised to $30 from his button, and I reraised to $111 with the Q Q. He four-bet to $250, and now I had a decision to make.

I had not been three-betting overly much in our match thus far, and this was his first four-bet. Obviously, Q-Q is a very strong hand, and I was sure that I was ahead of his range, but I had my doubts about how much action I could expect to get from worse hands if I five-bet. I thought his range for getting 200 big blinds all in preflop was going to be K-K, A-A, and A-K, so I wasn’t eager to build the pot more, even with Q-Q. I decided to keep weaker hands in his range by just calling the four-bet. Hopefully, he’d either flop a second-best hand or decide to bluff.

The flop came 10 7 5. I checked, hoping to check-raise. However, my opponent checked behind.

This was telling. Even though calling a four-bet out of position shows some strength on my part, I nonetheless expected him to bluff the flop if he’d missed it completely. He’d represented a lot of strength preflop, especially since this was the first four-bet he’d made, and I expected him to follow up on that post-flop with his weakest hands.

I also thought that he would have bet any hand better than my queens. If he had an overpair or two pair, he’d want to bet the flop, given how coordinated it was. So, when he checked, I put him squarely on one pair that was worse than my queens.

The turn brought the J, which didn’t change much. He certainly could have J-10, but my read remained the same: I had the best hand, but he had something good enough to call a bet. I bet $345, and he called.

The river was the 7. Given my read, this wasn’t a great card for me. I had put him on a weakish one-pair hand on the flop, and something like 8-7 would certainly fit the bill.

It was time to reassess the situation. There was $1,190 in the pot and $1,410 in the effective stacks. I quickly ruled out checking and calling. This would allow him to check behind with hands worse than mine, but value-bet hands better than mine. Since I thought he would have at least a pair, and my own hand didn’t look very strong, I didn’t expect to induce many bluffs by checking.

If I checked, then, I was going to have to fold, and that didn’t seem too desirable with a hand as strong as mine. Thus, value-betting was my only option.

I knew that I would be shoving into a better hand a fair bit of the time, but that’s not a reason to forego a value-bet. As long as I bet more than 50 percent of his calling range, which I believed I would, value-betting would show a profit. And since my only other option was check-folding, which would have zero expected value, a bet seemed correct.

The next question was how much to bet. I actually didn’t believe that my bet-sizing would affect his calling range at all. If his calling range is static, and I beat at least 51 percent of it, bigger is better. Even a 1 percent edge is worth more on a $1,400 bet than an $800 bet.

Let me emphasize that point: The fact that you are making a thin value-bet does not mean that you ought to bet smaller than you would with a strong hand. In fact, a big bet might look more like a bluff, which is usually what you are trying to represent when going for thin value.

I moved all in, and was quickly called by 7-3 suited. Does this mean that I made a mistake? Not necessarily, at least not on the river. I knew all along that this was a thin bet, and that better hands were very possible for my opponent. As long as he would have called here with hands like J-10 and A-5, I believe that my bet was a good one, and I just got unlucky to run into trips this time.

Seeing a hand as weak as 7-3 suited did make me re-evaluate my preflop play. If he’s four-betting that wide, he’s probably six-betting lighter than just K-K, A-A, and A-K, and I probably ought to five-bet Q-Q. That certainly affected how I played against him going forward, but given the information that I had at the time, I am happy with how I played this hand, and I wrote off the loss to an unlucky river card.