The PokerAcademy.com - Floating

Today, I want to talk about floating. Floating can loosely be defined as calling in position on the flop in a heads-up situation with the intention of trying to win the pot on a later street with an aggressive action.

It sounds pretty straightforward. You have position. You are heads up. Your opponent leads into you on the flop, usually as a continuation bet. You call without regard for your hand strength. You bet or raise on a future street. Your opponent folds. You win.
Although it sounds straightforward, there is really a lot to think about here. First, let’s look at why floating works and what type of player it works best against. Floating works when your opponent routinely gets to the turn or river with a wide range of hands. You are looking for situations where your opponent opens a wide range of hands in front of you and continuation bets at a high rate. On the turn or river, many of those hands won’t be strong enough for them to continue. Similar to the idea behind continuation betting, your opponent will have missed the flop around 50 percent of the time, and some of the time that they have hit the board, their hand will be weak enough that they will fold to a bet on the turn.

The type of opponent that floating works best against is a player who starts with a reasonably wide range of hands and continuation bets at a high rate. If your opponent isn’t continuation betting at a high rate, then floating becomes much more difficult, as your opponent will have a much stronger range when they bet on the flop.

Floating doesn’t come without its drawbacks. If you often have a weak or very weak hand whenever you call preflop and then call on the flop, your opponents will notice. They will bet the turn and/or river and put you in tough spots. So how do you float?

Floating works best as part of an overall strategy against aggressive opponents. When you have an opponent on your right who is raising a lot of pots, it can be difficult to play against them. The greatest weapon you have is position. But if you are always three-betting, often the hands don’t go to the flop. Sometimes you win preflop, and sometimes you get four-bet and have to fold. Every once in a while, you will get called and play a pot post-flop. But when you play post-flop, you have created a situation with smaller stack to pot ratios. Often the stacks will only have two bets left before you are all in. This diminishes the value of position.

But what happens if you decide to play more pots with a passive line? You keep the stacks deeper relative to the pot. This allows for a lot more post-flop play. Consider having stacks of 50 big blinds. If your opponent opens to three big blinds and you reraise to eight big blinds and are called, the pot is going to be 18 to 19 big blinds (including the blinds and antes). Your stack after the flop will be between 2-2.5 times the pot. This situation doesn’t allow you to use your position very effectively. Your opponent can just choose to bet twice and all the chips are in the middle. What is your position worth then? But if you just call, the pot will be between eight and nine blinds with 47 blinds left in the stacks. The pot to stack ratio will be between five and six. This means that while you can get all the chips in with three big bets, more often it will take four bets. This creates a situation where position has a lot more value. The value of position is even more pronounced with deeper stacks.

The downside to calling preflop is that your aggressive opponent will usually make a continuation bet on the flop. If you fold here all the time you miss, this strategy of utilizing your position is a lot less valuable. You need to be able to stay in the pots and give yourself chances to win if your opponent has missed as well. This is where floating comes into play.

If you routinely call this aggressive opponent on the flop with most of your hands, they will have a tough time discerning the strength of your hands. If you can call with most of your strong hands (two pair or better), value hands, draws, and some of your misses (floating), your opponent will have to check more often on the turn when they have missed. You can then bet your value hands, floats, and strong hands. You can also draw for free on the turn if you want to.

It is reasonable to still raise preflop or on the flop with your best hands to try and make the pot grow. But if you want to effectively float, sometimes you need to be calling with those same strong hands to improve the overall strength of your hand range. Floating is a good tool to have in your arsenal, but it needs to be executed as part of a broader strategy. ♠

Rep Porter is a two-time WSOP bracelet winner and is the lead instructor at ThePokerAcademy.com, whose mission is to help poker players achieve better results through better decisions and that is done by teaching poker in a way that makes learning easy and enjoyable with high quality courses taught by professional players.

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