The “Cost” of Continuation Betting

From time to time, a poker player will tell me that he didn’t raise preflop because “it’s going to cost me three big blinds, then I’m going to have to continuation bet, and it’s going to turn into an expensive bluff.” I’m not the most experienced player in the live arena, but I’ve never been to a card room that mandated continuation betting. Nor have I ever seen someone holding a gun to a player’s head, threatening dire consequences if he doesn’t follow up his preflop raise with a bet – though come to think of it, I have run into a few players who seemed to think their heads were going to explode if they didn’t bet whenever they had the chance!

My point is that you should look at continuation betting as an opportunity, not a cost. Bluffing a flop that you miss is something you should do only if you believe it will be profitable. As such, it’s something that, in a sense, makes your preflop raise less expensive, not more.

My hunch is that this thinking is a form of loss aversion. By focusing overly much on the chips you’ll lose if your bluff doesn’t succeed, you fail to appreciate the pot you’ll win when it does.

This problem is magnified by the fact that a continuation bet can fail more often than not and still be profitable. If you bet half the pot, you need to take it down just one-third of the time to show an immediate profit. Never mind that you might well have equity in the pot even when your bluff is called. Such a bet is a lucrative proposition against an opponent who will fold just 40 percent of the time.

It feels like a cost, though, because of its low success rate. Particularly in a tournament, when chips can’t be reloaded, players may be reluctant to risk chips in this way. The thing is that when you have a large stack, a small, failed bluff won’t hurt much, and when you’re getting short, well that’s the worst time to pass up a profitable play. Instead of thinking about how much it will hurt to lose a small flop bet, focus on how good all those chips in the middle of the table will look in your stack.

Suppose that you’re playing a no-limit hold‘em tournament, and the blinds are at 50-100. A somewhat loose and passive player limps into the pot, and everyone else folds to you on your button, where you’ve been dealt 10-9 suited. You look left and see that both of the blinds are doing the “fold hold,” so you’re pretty sure you won’t have to contend with them.

Your best guess is that the limper’s range looks something like {99-66, A-J through A-4 suited, K-8 suited plus, Q-9 suited plus, J-9 suited plus, T-9 suited, A-J offsuit through A-T offsuit, K-T offsuit plus, Q-T offsuit plus, J-T offsuit}, and in your experience, he’s not real inclined to fold once he’s come into the pot. Your hand has just 38 percent equity against that range. What’s your play?

With the money already in the pot, you’re getting 2.5-to-1, plus you’ve got position and a hand that plays well postflop, so you shouldn’t fold. If you just call, you’re going to let the big blind and maybe the small blind see the flop, at which point they might like their hands more than they do now. But if you raise, you’re putting money into the pot from behind, plus then you’ll “have” to continuation bet….

Let’s stop there. We’ll see in a moment how the opportunity to continuation bet will actually turn this into a profitable raise. If we ignore the value in driving the blinds out of the pot – we can pretend it’s the last hand before break and they’ve already run to the bathroom – then a raise of three big blinds will cost you about 24 chips relative to calling. That’s because your raise puts 200 more into the pot than calling would. Because it’s a heads up pot, 50 percent would be the breakeven point. With 38 percent, you’re losing 12 percent of every chip you put into the pot.

When it comes time to bet the flop, you’ll get it all back and more, though. You’ll see the flop with 750 in the pot. Let’s assume that you’re going to bet 400 on any flop, and that your opponent will fold just 40 percent of the time (an unpaired hand will fail to flop a pair 67 percent of the time, but this guy has some pocket pairs in his range and we know he’s loose, so let’s assume he continues often).

We can subtract your costs – the 400 that you lose the 60 percent of the time that he calls or raises – from your winnings, meaning, the 750 you collect the other 40 percent of the time. That’s an expected value of 60, more than twice what you lost on the preflop raise, and that’s without considering the fact that you might have actually caught a piece of the flop yourself. You won’t actually lose that 400 every time that he continues past the flop, so in reality you’ll do even better than this. The fact that your preflop raise sets up the opportunity to make a profitable continuation bet turns it from a 24-chip loser into (at least) a 36-chip winner.

Interestingly, even though you’re bluffing, your raise is actually more profitable the larger it is. That’s right: you want to put more money into the pot preflop, even though you have the worst hand, because you’re going to steal it all back with interest when you bet the flop. If you raised to 500 preflop and then bluffed 600 on any flop, that continuation bet would average a profit of about 100. Subtract the 48 chips’ worth of expected value that you lost by putting those extra four big blinds in preflop, and your preflop-raise-plus-continuation-bet will average a profit of 52 in chips plus whatever you can wrangle from your opponent with superior postflop play.

Of course,, in actuality your opponent might be more likely to fold some flops than others. There may be some flops that hit his range so well that he won’t fold often enough for your continuation bet to show a profit. That’s fine – there’s no rule that says you have to bet those flops. A continuation bet is an opportunity, and a damn profitable one at that. ♠

Andrew Brokos is a professional poker player, writer and coach. He blogs about poker strategy on ThinkingPoker.net and is co-host of the Thinking Poker Podcast. Andrew is also interested in education reform and founded an after-school debate program for urban youth.