An example of overbetting in practice

by mersenneary

It's been fun here at the WSOP house, and not just because of the water polo matches or the fact that no matter what hour of the day it is, there's always a Chinese poker game available to hop into. It's also been an immersion into good poker theory with some very good thinkers of the game. Last week, I sat across the table and watched a nosebleed player, who has logged many matches against durrrr, jungleman, and other heads up legends, play four tables of heads up cash online against another housemate. For 20 minutes, I sat on one side of the (actual) table, before getting up and seeing the action from the other side for a while, and going back and forth for a few hours. I could say a lot about the match, but for this article, I'll focus on the use of overbetting in one specific situation: The out of position caller leading the turn for more than the size of the pot when the flop is checked through. This play is an example of how to identify good situations to overbet, both for equilibrium and exploitative reasons.

Let's take a drawy flop: QJ8 with a flush draw. Think about your checking back range on this flop – it's mostly composed of air that just decides to give up, ace high and king high that thinks c-betting has worse expectation, and marginal showdown value hands, like a pair of jacks or eights. One of the reasons you may check back a hand like J7 on this flop is that you can very comfortably call a normal sized turn lead on a blank. Instead, though, imagine that your opponent leads for 1.5x the size of the pot against your checking behind range on this flop, which has no big hands in it. Don't you hate your life with J7? If you call one street, don't you hate your life even more when you face a sizable bet again on the river?

I always advise that if you think your opponent can bluff you out a lot, and you're that afraid of being pushed around too much, either one of the following two things is going to be true:

1. Your opponent isn't bluffing you that often, so you shouldn't worry about getting pushed around so much, because it doesn't happen that often of the time.

2. Your opponent is bluffing you that often, so you get to just click call, obviously.

When you put it that way, this situation doesn't seem that scary from the button's perspective. However, the problem is that the big blind also has plenty of value hands in his range, as well. QJ/Q8/J8/T9/combo draws/Qx in general are all too happy get maximum value by overbetting into an opponent who is inclined to make hero calls. Remember back to the theory post, that the bigger the bet we make, the greater percentage of air we can put in our range while keeping it so that our opponent can't just easily be correct in bluffcatching. There are a lot of value hands that can cover up all the air we can bluff with and make it so neither scenario 1 or scenario 2 is really occurring...as long as overbet is the sizing we choose.

So, what CAN the button do about this strategy? Well, one option is to start checking behind on the flop with big hands – overpairs, two pair, the straight, strong Qx, ace high flush draws, and all these types of hands. However, this can lead to some horrific results. On this board, there are many turn cards that kill action, and that's a disastrous result when the button's big hand is up agaitnst a hand that it could have gotten big value against. It's also a really bad result when it allows the big blind to realize his equity and suck out, without even paying a chip to stay in the pot. To give up on a c-betting situation like this, the button has to know it's getting a ton of value on the turn, but if the big blind is only overbetting the turn a third of the time or so, it's a big gamble for an induce that usually doesn't even work.

Sometimes, it's worth it to have unbalanced ranges. This is one of those occasions, from the button's perspective. It doesn't help enough to check behind big hands on this flop, even if the big blind is occasionally overbetting on the turn when this happens. The button can choose to try to balance the ranges, or choose to leave the checking behind range capped (or mostly capped). Either is a good result for the big blind. The bad outcome is if the small blind leaves his ranges capped and exploitable and the big blind fails to follow through and attack.

Overbetting a balanced range vs. overbetting to exploit

A balanced range:

On this flop and turn, a balanced overbetting range from out of position could be composed of the following:

Value: QJ/QT/Q9/Q8/J8/9T

Bluff: All flush draws/any gutshot/some Kx

This is a fairly value-oriented range, but even if our opponent were to fold every time, it means that we win the pot every time we have T7, every time we have K4, every time we have a baby flush draw, every time we have 96...it's a lot of hands that we get to win with because of how our overbet forces our opponent to fold his middle pair. And if he decides to hero call, well then great, we have plenty of stuff that benefits in a big way from a curious opponent. This strategy is extremely difficult to play against over time, even if our opponent is component enough to see what's going on.

To exploit:

However, against most opponents you'll face, as usual (I hope I don't sound like a broken record by now), you shouldn't be trying to be unexploitable, you should be trying to exploit them. That means using overbetting in an unbalanced way, taking advantage of their strategies and their frequencies. Against many opponents, it's correct to overbet with your flush draws/gutshots/Kx, because they would always fold middle pair against such a strong bet, and bet smaller with the nuts and other strong hands, because it gets max value against that same middle pair. Against others, who love to make big hero calls, it's correct to bet smaller with bluff hands just to fold out air, and bigger with value. Whatever it is, wait until your opponent figures you out, and then if he does, you can always switch your frequencies up and remain a moving target, even exploiting your opponent's adjustments. The surprising truth is that most opponents will often fail to adjust for a long time.

mers