Head Games: Surveying Board Textures, C-betting and Barreling Opportunities Against an Opponent’s Hand Range in MTTs

The Pros: Ty Reiman, Russell Thomas, and Trevor Pope

Craig Tapscott: Explain how the board texture on the flop determines whether you will continuation bet (c-bet) or not?

Ty Reiman: Board textures on the flop have a great impact on what determines your next action in a hand. Continuation betting used to be much more standard, but recently with how aggressive and good people are, you have to pick your spots very carefully. Say you raise and get flatted in position…there are boards like 9-2-2, J-5-4, and high flops with a few face cards that are pretty safe to c-bet. These are the boards that you can double and triple-barrel while repping a huge hand. That being said, there are very dangerous flops where if a good player flats you, it’s just smart to give up, knowing it connects with their flatting range a lot and they will probably almost always float you. Dangerous flops are connected mid cards, and flush-draw boards.  

Russell Thomas: Have a plan when you are continuation betting the flop. I always try to think ahead about the types of turn cards that can come and how that affects both my range and my opponent’s range. So first, you want to get an idea of your opponent’s hand range when you reach the flop. The first variable is the type of player I am up against. If this person is loose, you can expect his range to be wider and contain a lot of unpaired hands. If the person is tight, you are going to run into a lot more mid pairs and A-10 plus type hands. The second variable that goes hand in hand with the first variable is the position from which you have raised from and the position from which your opponent has called from. If you min-raise the small blind and there are antes in the pot, most good players will be defending an extremely wide range. Conversely, if you min-raise under-the-gun (UTG) and someone calls you in the next seat over, their range is very strong, because most players are calling a very small percentage of hands in that spot. The third variable is your table image. People tend to adjust to this better online than they do live, because they have stats on their opponents. So I am always conscious of my table image and I don’t stab at every flop, because then you become very predictable and exploitable.

Trevor Pope: If you are out of position in the hand, board texture is much more important than being in position. If you are out of position, c-betting a three-straight connected board like 7-6-5 or 10-9-8 is essentially lighting money on fire versus good players; that is, unless you have a plan to barrel later streets. Mainly because these boards don’t hit many raising hands ranges, but it nails a calling range. So players tend to make plays at these boards in position and float them a lot. Good boards to c-bet are the K-x-x, A-x-x, or any board that has one high card to two low cards. These boards are better to c-bet because it’s harder for people to represent good hand ranges. If I raise K-Q and get a caller in position on me and the flop is something like A-4-2 rainbow, I would c-bet here 90 percent of the time heads-up. Since I am the raiser I can represent an ace in my range and get a lot of credit for my c-bet. Now, if my opponent raises my c-bet on a board of A-2-4, most people will probably just throw their K-Q away. But when you break down the hands in his calling range, he’s most likely bluffing or turning a value hand into a bluff. The only value range he has is 2-2 and 4-4 essentially, because he’s always three betting A-A preflop and he’s most likely not calling raises with A-2, A-4, or 4-2. So now that we know that there are only two value hands he can have, our range can still look credible if we put in a three-bet on the flop. We would do this because a lot of players turn value pairs like 33-88 into a bluff on boards like this because it makes their hand easier to play since they are taking over the aggression in the hand. However, knowing this, we can three-bet bluff the flop and get folds a high percentage of the time.

Craig Tapscott: How does the turn card affect the board texture and then determine whether you will put on the brakes or continue to barrel?

Ty Reiman: Once you establish if you’re going to bet the flop or not, you should decide what your plan of action will be and why. If you’re c-betting with backdoor-flush draws and/or straight draws, you have to be prepared to double barrel and fire the river on certain turns. For example: I raise 10 8 and villain, who is a good player, calls. Flop comes 7 4 2 and I c-bet, expecting to get a call. I’m almost always going to double barrel the turn because there are so many bad turns. The backdoor-flush draws and straight draws come into play big time. If I c-bet that flop and turn a club or a card to give me an open-ended straight draw, I’ll probably look to go for a check-raise and fire all rivers. If it is just a brick turn, I’ll either fire a second shell, probably giving up on the river or just check/fold depending on how good my opponent is.

Russell Thomas: As I mentioned, you always want to have a plan for the hand. Let’s look at an example. So if I have a hand like J 10 and the board is 9-3-4 with one spade, I’m immediately thinking I have two overcards, a backdoor-flush draw, and a backdoor-straight draw. I know I am barreling any spade, any K, Q, J, 10, 8, 7. If the turn is another 4, I am typically giving up. This is because I am assessing the 4 against my opponent’s range for calling my flop bet as any nine, mid pairs, some ace-highs, slow played sets, and, depending on the positions at the table and the type of player, 7-5, 7-6, and 6-5 type hands. I am really not getting that many folds on that turn. If the turn is a queen, his mid pairs now look a lot worse to him. Does he really want to hero call down here for a large percentage of his chips late in a tournament when there are a million bad rivers for him? Probably not. Part of you should be thinking, “how often does this queen help my opponent when he calls this flop?” The answer is almost never. It’s really important to have confidence in your bets, even when they don’t get the fold that particular time.

Trevor Pope: The turn card affects the board a lot for a number of reasons. The most likely and best reason for it is to improve your perceived range. If you c-bet a flop of Q-4-2 rainbow with K-J, most players will call this flop with all pocket pairs from threes through tens, because they want to see if you will bet the turn, and because most players automatically assign you a range of A-K when you raise preflop. So if you decide to get crazy and raise K-J and you c-bet a flop of Q-4-2, and they call with their 9-9 and then, when the turn comes an ace, you can now bet the turn and most likely get a fold out of most of his range since you’re credibly representing an ace. However, on the opposite end, the turn could hurt your betting range because if you are raising A-J offsuit and get a flop of 10-6-2 and you have a plan of barreling turn and river, but then after you c-bet the turn comes another 2, now you have to realize the board texture did not change, so your opponent’s calling range shouldn’t change either. So all hands he calls on the flop he would most likely call on the turn, so to counter this you should be check/folding this type of turn card a lot. ♠