Poker Strategy: Down Betting With Hunter Cichy

Hunter Cichy is a professional poker player from Minnesota that now resides in Florida. He’s the CEO and lead poker coach of the training site Check Shove Poker, as well as the author of Advanced Concepts in No-Limit Hold’em: A Modern Approach To Poker Analysis.

Over the course of his career as a professional, Cichy has racked up $788,634 in live tournament earnings, including a runner-up finish in a $1,000 no-limit hold’em online event at the 2015 World Series of Poker for $116,066.

Card Player caught up with Cichy on a break at a Card Player Poker Tour event to talk about one of the big trends in tournament poker strategy over the last few years – down betting. Cichy explained why betting smaller on flops is a superior strategy than the larger sizing players used to utilize, and how it will lead to a more aggressive and profitable strategy on turns and rivers.

Steve Schult: The general trend in tournament poker over the last several years is smaller bet sizing. What is the general concept behind betting smaller on flops?

Hunter Cichy: It allows you to c-bet (continuation bet) at a much higher frequency with a range that is more merged. In other words, you can bet middle pair, bottom pair, and underpairs on paired boards for thin value and for protection against overcards and gutshots when you wouldn’t be able to do that if you were betting bigger.

It also helps you to play turns and rivers better instead of just checking back with a very wide and weak range of hands.

SS: Does a smaller bet decrease fold equity at all or do you find that people are still folding at the same rate to the smaller bet?

HC: People are folding less frequently to the small bet, but you’re getting a bigger bang for your buck. You’re producing more fold equity per chip overall.

SS: So they just aren’t folding at the correct frequency?

HC: They aren’t defending at the correct frequency.

SS: Are there some boards that you wouldn’t want to be down betting? Are there boards where you might want to size up your bets instead?

HC: It has a lot to do with stack depth as well. But in general, on the really wet boards, you’re going to want to size up.

SS: Can you elaborate on the stack depth requirements?

HC: There are times when you’re shorter. Around 20-25 big blinds where you would like to size up on a wet board, but if you did that, it would turn the hand into a two-street hand instead of a three-street hand, so you have to size down with that stack depth. If you were playing 35-40 big blinds, you would size up because you wouldn’t run out of chips by the river.

SS: How should you be adjusting against someone who is betting small on the flop?

HC: In position, you want to be floating with ace-high, and gutshots, and two overcards with flush draws, at a much higher frequency. You also want to be raising small with hands like top pair and the hands I just listed some of the time.

Out of position, you want to be check-calling quite a bit more than most people are defending and your check-raising frequency a lot of the times is going to double or triple if you are playing correctly. Most people are check-raising way less often than they should.

SS: By sizing down, you are turning hands more into two- and three-street hands to bet. But does that make it more awkward to bet larger on future streets? If you’re betting one-third pot on the flop, does it feel unnatural to bet full pot or almost full pot on the turn?

HC: It’s the opposite. Down bets create a much more natural progression. The way old school guys used to play would be that they would c-bet half pot and fold out 90 or 95 percent of hands that they could have folded out by the river instead. So there would be a huge drop-off in their turn barreling frequency. They would just check back the turn at a really high rate.

If they rivered a pair, they might consider value betting. Instead of doing that, you can down bet and then fire the turn at a much higher frequency like 50, 60, or even 70 percent of the time. Because there are still hands in your opponent’s range that you can still fold out. And it disguises your range a lot more headed to the river. It allows you to balance out your river bluffing ranges a lot more.

SS: What sort of turn cards do want to barrel? I realize this is sort of a vague, open-ended question, but depending on board texture, would you be more likely to barrel the turn on a card that completes a possible draw or one that is a total brick?

HC: The bricks are generally going to decrease your barreling frequencies. So undercards to the board, especially the ones that don’t bring a backdoor flush draw, are going to be cards where you’ll see a very steep drop-off in your game theory optimal (GTO) turn barreling range.

As far as picking good turn cards to keep barreling, you want to pick ones that give you extra equity headed to the river… ones that make the board more coordinated in your favor. You want overcards to the board if you can credibly represent those, and you also want cards that bring double flush draws because it makes it a lot harder for the guy out of position to play the river when so many draws will complete.

SS: Since you’re down betting in order to barrel future streets, when you first started implementing this strategy, did you find that you were becoming too aggressive since there are more streets to bet?

HC: I wasn’t getting out of line at all. People just weren’t reacting appropriately. The thing that I struggled with the most was dealing with really good players who were actually check-raising at the correct frequency, and then figuring out how to defend with a much wider range than normal. Much wider than you would see with bigger c-bet sizes and bigger check-raise sizes. Especially when you factor in the antes, and how much wider the ranges are and how many more hands people can check-raise with.

SS: Do you counter that with more aggressive betting and three-betting lines?

HC: In general, you shouldn’t have too many bet and three-bet lines on the flop. The correct response is to c-bet small with your bigger ace-high hands like A-K, A-Q, A-J, A-X with gutters, A-X with backdoor flush draws, and call the check-raise at a much higher frequency because it’s going to be good against a lot of the range that your opponent should be check-raising with.