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May 29 – Many players are only capable of firing one continuation bet on good textured boards. You can exploit these types by floating.

In today’s no-limit games, even the most passive players tend to know that betting on good textured boards after raising preflop usually shows a long term profit. The simple fact of the matter is that with only two cards, it is difficult for anyone to make a strong hand. When you continue with the betting lead you have a good chance to win because everyone has missed.

This concept, however, is really only understood at the most basic of levels at the lower and mid stakes. Many times, especially with nittier opponents, players will only fire one bet as a bluff after being the preflop raiser. Often times this can easily be exploited by calling with a very weak hand on the flop — a concept that is called floating. If you pay close attention you will find that an opponent will almost never check the turn on a blank card, especially if the board is wet, when they have a hand. This all comes back to the idea of them not wanting to be drawn out on as most, tighter recreational players hate bad beats. 

Let us take a look at an example of a hand I witnessed a few weeks ago at $5-$10 no-limit. I actually came behind my friend to say hello and was able to sweat the following action. A very tight, older player opened under the gun (UTG) for $45 and my friend called him heads-up on the button with 7 6 with about $2,000 effective stacks. The board ran out K 5 2 and the UTG player bet out $50. Now, obviously, this is not a good flop for my friend. But recognizing the rather small bet sizing he decided to float and call. 

The turn was the 9 and now the preflop raiser checked. My buddy interpreted this as weakness, knowing that his opponent would not check a king because of the front-door flush draw. Sure enough, his opponent folded rather quickly to my friend’s turn bluff.

You can see that the actual holding in my friend’s hand was almost irrelevant. He did have some backdoor draws on the flop, and if the villain did fire on the turn, he had a chance to pick up some equity. But the main point of this concept is that if you know that a player will only fire once and then check when he is bluffing, then you can float him profitably with a wide range, sometimes with holdings that have entirely missed the flop.

May 15 – In overly nitty games, you can drastically increase your winrate by seat changing yourself in a steal position against tight blinds

Sometimes when a table is playing overly tight you have to make certain adjustments to increase your winrate. One of the easiest things that you can do is move to a steal position versus some of the tighter players at the table. Some guys will not defend their blinds unless they have a relatively strong hand. And when the rest of the table is playing tight and the hands are constantly getting folded to you, this situation can be like printing money.

Even if the tighter player in the blind defends versus your preflop raise, often times these types of opponents will play very fit or fold postflop. If you understand the good boards to bet and to continue bluffing on, it really does not matter that they defend once in a while. It is a very profitable position to be in to have the betting lead and have position on a tight player.

In a game like $5-$5, where a top winrate might be $40-$50 an hour, stealing the blinds from tight players once an hour can increase your winrate by as much as 20-to-25 percent. The art of stealing from the last few positions is somewhat lost on live players. If you look at online statistics, you will find that the big winners have a relatively high steal rate. And if you were to also tell these players that suddenly their opponents in the blind would almost never three-bet bluff to counter their steals, then their steal rates would go up to close to 100 percent. If you are paying attention to how the tight players respond to late position raises, you can increase the rate in which you steal and thus make more money at the table.

May 22 – It’s a bit of a contradiction in logic to not bet for value on the river, scared to open the action up, when your opponents have almost a null river bluffing frequency.

It amazes me how often players check strong hands back when last to act on the river in live no-limit games. It is as if they are only interested in winning what is currently in the pot and do not care about the extra value that they can gain by making an additional bet.

This showdown poker happens so much at the mid stakes because players are scared to “open” the betting round back up. They are not capable of folding if they get raised, so to counter this leak they do not bet. They think to themselves “if I bet here and get raised, what would I do?”

This type of thinking is highly illogical and inconsistent because when someone does raise on the river at the lower or mid stakes, their frequency of bluffing is so low that there is really not much worry about being moved off of the best hand. Because of this, our value bets are almost like freerolls. Well, they are not really freerolls, but we can certainly bet extremely thin if when we are called we are good just over 50 percent of the time. If your opponents ever had a river bluffing frequency, we would not be able to value bet as thin because sometimes we would be forced to fold the best hand.

Similar to increasing your steal frequency against tight players, this type of thin-value betting really separates the top winrates from the mediocre ones. You must train yourself to not be afraid to bet thinly at the end for value and fold to a raise. A lot of recreational players have trouble with this concept because they want to see the showdown and they do not want to even think about the possibility of being bluffed off of a hand. But if you can come to terms with the fact that people bluff very rarely on the river then you will start to see your overall game improve drastically. ♠

Follow Bart for daily strategy tips on Twitter @CrushLivePoker and @BartHanson. Check out his poker training site exclusively made for live cash game play at CrushLivePoker.com where he produces weekly podcasts and live training videos.