Crushing Live Poker With Twitter

@BartHanson: Flop sizing is a really good indicator of hand strength from a preflop continuation better. Bigger bets usually are stronger #crushlivepoker

One of the easiest patterns to pick up when dealing with weaker, inexperienced players is bet sizing. More often than not, when your opponent flops what he thinks is the best hand after being the preflop raiser, he will bet bigger. This is especially true when the pot is multiway and the board is draw-heavy. One of the worst things that can happen psychologically to recreation players is getting sucked out on. That is why you see a trend, at the lower levels, of betting to protect one’s hand instead of betting for value. These types of opponents want to drive out the draws because usually they are incapable of folding what they perceive to be big hands. 

Great players will keep their continuation betting amounts balanced so that it is possible that they have bluffs in their range. That is why you will notice these players betting the same amount – usually half-pot to two-thirds pot size in almost every situation. You cannot draw anything from the strength of their hand through bet sizing. This is something that you should strive to replicate.

Great players also realize the effective stacks within a hand. Three and four-bet situations bloat the size of the pot drastically. Say we start with effective stacks of $700 in a $5-$5 game. The under the gun raises to $25, one person calls, and the button makes it $90. We look down at A A and reraise to $220. It gets back to the button who now calls. The pot is $490 and we have $480 left in our stack. The money is going in no matter what the flop is; our four-bet made sure of that. Would it surprise you to realize that betting something super small or sometimes even checking the flop is close to optimal? Say the board runs out 9 3 3. We can bet as little as $100 here and easily get the money in by the end of the hand, even if we check the turn. Good players realize this and bet small in these situations to make it look like they are bluffing. Less observant players might come out and bet as much as $300 basically announcing the fact that they are committing themselves. It is easy to evaluate your hand against a large bettor in this situation because you can basically treat his flop bet as an all-in.

Let us look at one more simple example in a one-raise pot that will demonstrate hand strength based upon flop continuation-bet sizing. A tight, early position, recreational player, opens to $15 with A Q in a $2-$3 no limit game with $400 effective stacks. Two players call. The flop comes out J 4 3. The preflop raiser continuation bets to $20. What do we think the under the gun player has? Do we think that he is strong? Would he not bet larger on a board that is so draw-heavy with a hand that he thinks is best? My contention is yes. His sizing is usually indicative of a hand that he is not super comfortable with. It could be 9-9 or 10-10 and it also could be a hand like A-K or A-Q. The point here is that he almost never shows up with A-A, K-K or even A-J because he would have bet a lot larger to drive the draws out so that he will not get a “bad beat”.

A better player would bet here to about $25-30 with almost his entire range. You would not be able to tell if he is continuation betting with nothing or if he has a real hand. The next time that you are at the table, make it a special point to try and notice continuation-bet sizing and what gets revealed at showdown. You will find that smaller continuation bets are usually indicative of weaker hands unless the player has flopped an absolute monster like top set.

@BartHanson: There’s a lot of value in just calling with A-K or A-Q preflop in deep NL games #crushlivepoker

If you have been playing no limit for a long period of time, you probably noticed that the aggression level preflop even in smaller-stakes games has increased exponentially over the past few years. This new style can be directly attributed to training sites that concentrated on teaching players how to beat six-max no-limit online. Some instructors got the preflop game down to a science. They discovered that if you three-bet a preflop raiser who had a certain percentage of hands that he opened from from certain positions you would show an immediate profit. This was especially true when this raiser never called your three-bet but rather reraised or folded. This led to a bevy of three-bet, four-bet and even five-bet bluffing.

Well, the best way to attack this type of player was to three and four-bet with a polarized range — hands that you would go with facing a rearaise or hands that you would easily fold. There were also slightly weaker hands that people would commit with, hands that were strong and had blockers like A-K, A-Q and even A-J. Otherwise your three-betting range would include many more bluffs than value hands and an observant opponent could easily exploit you. These hands, especially A-K, became almost a mandatory three-bet stack off in a six-max game.

Unfortunately, many players who were familiar with this online style of aggression thought that this directly translated to live games. They did not realize that people in a full-ring setting limp with a lot of speculative hands and open a stronger range that they would online. They also had difficulty adjusting to the fact that people would still call a lot of three-bets even from out of position with awkward stacks. The sheer fact of the matter is that if you hold A-K or A-Q, in many smaller stakes live games, you do not want dominated hands that players may open with – say A-J or K-Q to fold to your three-bet. By calling with big unpaired hands, you disguise the strength of your hand and allow those inferior holdings to tag along. Players at the lower stakes have a lot of trouble folding top pair, and, by just calling. you give them the opportunity to make big mistakes postflop. If you feel comfortable playing big pots after the flop I contend that it is a good play to just call with these large types of unpaired hands so that you can extract value from your opponents dominated hands later on.

With that being said, if you do just flat with hands like A-K or A-Q, you must be willing to continue on when you do not flop a pair. Say for example a mid-position player raises to $25 in a $5-$5 game with $1,000 effective stacks. You decide to just call on the button with A Q and everyone else folds. The flop runs out 8 2 5 and the preflop aggressor bets $30. I would make the case here that more often than not, considering the pot odds, you should call. Not only do you have some equity against say 10-10 or J-J, but also you have so under-represented your hand preflop, that you may still have the best hand. Players at these stakes are often not capable of firing multiple barrels and you can easily do things postflop that will allow you to go to showdown cheaply. Check out my podcast Deuce Plays Premium “Hands from a Cash Game Volume I and II” for a further explanation of these concepts. ♠

Want Card Player and Bart to provide analysis on a cash game hand you played? Send full hand details (blinds, stacks, street-by-street action) to @CardPlayerMedia. If we choose your hand, we’ll send you a Card Player subscription.

Follow Bart for daily strategy tips on twitter @barthanson. Check out his podcast “Deuce Plays” on DeucesCracked.com and his video training site specifically for live No Limit players—CrushLivePoker.com. He also hosts Live at the Bike every Tuesday and Friday at 10:30 pm ET at LivettheBike.com