The Game Plan Tackles the River

In my last column I introduced one of the Rules from my new book The Game Plan: How Casual Players Become Threats in No Limit Hold ‘Em Tournaments. I explained some of the thinking behind that Rule. The Rules comprise my recommendations for home game players to give themselves the best shot in a major tournament.

Throughout the book, I try to state the rules as simply as I can, but that doesn’t mean they were thrown together. Quite the opposite. As you’ll soon see, the Rules contain deep strategic ideas that are invisible to the recreational player, but should tremendously improve their results nonetheless.

In this column, I offer another peek into how I constructed the book, which is designed to give recreational players the maximum chance of a big score with the least amount of preparation.

Rule 18 (River Bet) reads as follows: If you have the initiative on the river, bet with your Good Hands, and with the single worst hand you think you could have at that point (usually a missed Draw).

By having the initiative, I mean that you made the last bet or raise on the turn. To see exactly how I define a “Good Hand” you’ll have to buy the book, but for now it’s enough to understand that I want casual players to bet the river with a fair number of strong hands, and significantly fewer (but not zero!) bluffs.

I see several benefits to following Rule 18. First, it forces players to value bet hands they might otherwise have checked. One of the biggest leaks amateur players (and indeed, even some semi-pros) have is they don’t extract enough value from good-but-not-great hands on the river. Once the river hits, they no longer have to protect against draws or other longshot underdog hands, so the temptation is to simply check and hope to show down a winner. That temptation must be resisted whenever you can get a significant number of worse hands to call, as there is a lot of money to be made on the river when bets are usually big relative to the blinds. The leak of checking too many rivers is hugely costly in the long run. By instead following a straightforward rule about when to value bet the river, amateur players can plug this leak.

Second (and this is related to the first point), recreational players are often afraid to make big bluffs. Bluffing once or even twice in an attempt to stay aggressive is usually no problem for even the most casual player, but almost all such players shut down when it comes to firing the third barrel. Professionals will eat this approach alive, since if an opponent never bluffs the river, it becomes a million times easier to call the turn. Rule 18 solves this problem. It tells amateurs that even if they’ve bet twice, they should fire one last time with the very bottom of their range (although the Rule uses slightly different language to convey the idea of “range”), and most importantly, the Rule leaves these players no choice.

Finally, Rule 18 ensures that casual players value bet the river significantly more often than they bluff. Having a correct value bet to bluff ratio is an important component of a strong strategy. I don’t bother explaining this calculation in the book, but a half-pot-sized bet on the river should be a value bet about 75 percent of the time if you want to avoid being exploitable. (Quickly, a half-pot bet offers your opponent 3:1 pot odds, which means they need to win 25 percent of the time to break even. You therefore want to be bluffing 25 percent of the time so your opponents don’t know what to do with medium-strength hands.) Rule 18 followers certainly will not bet with the perfect ratio every time, but they will come pretty close. And in fact, Rule 18 will often have players value betting a little bit too often compared to the optimal ratio. I designed it that way because in practice, people like to call the river more than they like to fold. The Game Plan tries to strike a balance between having a strong core strategy, and taking advantage of common mistakes.

Amateur players can and should learn all about the theory behind how to construct appropriate betting ranges on the river, and then incorporate that theory into their games. But until they complete all that work, they would do well to simply follow the Plan, and come close enough for the time being.

In the next few columns, I’ll continue to discuss how home game players can use my book, but I’ll soon shy away from detailed discussion of the individual Rules. What I’d really like is for readers to submit hands they’ve played, so I can show how the Game Plan would’ve dealt with them. I think you’ll see that if nothing else, following the Game Plan makes tough decisions a lot easier, and puts the burden on your opponents to figure out how to counter your approach. It will also help most every player identify leaks in their own games. Sounds good, yes? I look forward to hearing from many of you! ♠

Matt Matros is a three-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner, poker instructor, and the author of the strategy/memoir The Making of a Poker Player. His new book, The Game Plan, is available now from Amazon. Want to see how the Game Plan would apply to a hand you’ve played? Write Matt at [email protected].