Some poker leaks are glaringly obvious. If you're the sort of player who just can't fold in a big pot, no matter how bad the situation, that's killing your win rate. But you probably know about that already.
Today's purpose is to shine the light on the invisible leaks holding you back. And these three things apply to almost everybody watching. Let's pull back the curtain and see what's really stifling your win rate behind the scenes.
Let's get into it.
#1: Automatic Value Bets
We three-bet. A recreational player calls our three-bet from the hijack.
We're on the button with . The flop is . We bet half pot. The recreational raises.
We make the call, and then they check the turn ( ).
This is clearly a spot where our hand is quite strong.
- The recreational can have all sorts of top pair combos.
- They can even have an underpair sometimes, like sevens or eights or nines or tens.
- They can have absolutely nothing.
And your first instinct here is probably to put money into the middle because you want to win the rest of the stack with pocket aces. Or at least, that should be your first instinct here. We're clearly not in the business of damage limitation or worrying about the rare times our opponent has top set or quad sixes or anything like that.
The Issue
Not all situations where you have enough equity to value bet call for value betting.
There are many situations where slow playing is actually correct. I'm going to teach you a few factors that can help you identify those situations.
💠 Factor 1: When the SPR is lower, urgency is lower, and there's less incentive to build the pot immediately. That might open the door to a slower alternative line being correct.
💠 Factor 2: Another factor that might make a value bet that looks tempting a bad idea is a polarized opponent range, and more specifically, an air-heavy opponent range. Did you know that recreational players actually overbluff against small and medium-sized continuation bets in three-bet pots when they're out of position? It comes down to a little thing called degeneracy. These recreational players want to win three-bet pots. Why? Because three-bet pots are bigger. They take too many hands to the flop. They don't fold enough to three-bets.
That means that when they get to the turn here, and when you pair that with the fact that they call too wide pre-flop, they can have offsuit. That's 12 extra combinations in a range that is not that big because it's a three-bet pot. So, given that our opponent's range contains a lot of absolutely nothing, betting is a bit of a shame, because that tendency of theirs to want to win this big three-bet pot that's not gone away by the fact they've given up the turn. They've suppressed it temporarily. So if you give them a little bit of room to bluff the river, they may well reignite that desire to win the pot.
💠 Factor 3: Another factor that makes your hand less of an urgent value bet, and that might just open the door to slowing down, is when your hand is stable, that is, the opposite of vulnerable. is about as stable as you can get here. It's really hard to think of a hand that could have more than two, or at a stretch four, outs to outdraw aces. And if the villain does have some sort of spew hand like that they just raised the flop with out of a raw desire to win, then they are going to be drawing dead and you want them to either reignite the river bluff or to hit the king or the ten.
All in all, this is a very mandatory slow play.
Theoretically speaking, there's no compulsion, there's no necessity to value bet here. In practice, you simply have to check. I see students bet here all the time because they are filled with this greed, this urgency, but it's more than that. It's this habitual button click that they do.
(Back to the hand)
We find the check back. Villain checks the on the river.
Now their range changes again. They could well still have given up and just didn't take the bait. That's going to happen, but at least we gave them the chance.
- They could have a hand like that they decided they were raising the flop for value with, but now they think it's too thin.
- They could have a merged hand like that they were just raising on the flop out of randomness and have now decided they just have a medium hand.
- Or they could rarely have some kind of trap.
But here's the thing: now our value bet factors are a bit different. There is now only one more chance to get money in. So, checking back and slow playing again is a terrible idea that would just go to showdown with clearly the best hand 95% of the time. That's out the window.
The other silver lining (the bonus factor to checking back the turn here) is that sometimes the villain just doesn't believe you.
The villain called this river with in about one second. They had clearly decided he had .
#1.5: Automatic Value Bets
Here's another spot against a recreational player where slow playing and giving your opponent a bit of room to bluff is not just theoretically approved but mandatory in practice.
We have . We open under the gun, and a 40 big blind stack flats out of the small blind.
The flop is , and they lead for half pot.
Our flush draw is showdown value. Our fold equity against better hands is not very good, and we want to leave the door open for as much spew as possible, because very often we're going to have the nuts by the river, or top pair, or something to that effect. So we just call.
The turn is the dream card, the .
Villain bets half pot again.
You want to raise, right? Because you're imagining villain with or or or .
Now, this was a recreational player with a 60% VPIP. So this is clearly someone with an incredibly wide base range to land on the flop with. And that means that this donk bet on the flop doesn't need to be related to the board.
And if villain does have a decent hand here (a nine, a worse flush, something like that), then yes, it would be better to raise the turn. However, we are still very likely to win a lot of money on the river. On a river such as this one, our jam is incredibly likely to be called.
However, it's very important to go back to the turn here and assess our variables again.
- Firstly, we are at a low SPR. We can shove the river easily at 1.5 SPR. We don't have to do a lot of pot building there.
- Secondly, our hand is completely stable. There's nothing to protect against, there's no reason to seek equity denial by raising the turn.
- Thirdly, the opponent does have a ton of air in their range, with the wide VPIP and the random fishy donk bet on the flop. It's just very likely they have nothing, or something low equity that's going to fold to a raise, but could easily bluff the river.
Another crucial, mandatory slow play spot against an unknown recreational (and honestly against all player types), but the most passive.
#2: Love of Comfortable Bluffs
The second invisible leak that crushes the dreams of aspiring players without them even knowing it's happening is comfort blanket bluffing. Needing to feel secure, cozy, and warm in order to execute a bluff.
We go for a range bet of one big blind on this flop of . This is an unnutted flop on which we adopt that strategy.
The lands on the turn and we have nothing. Nothing at all.
However, here's the thing: most of the villain's cards that contain a or a would have folded the flop, with the exception of and . And yeah, that's about it here. Maybe , . Other than that, we are unblocking villain's folding range.
If we're called by or or something like that, we can still hit a or a for the showdown. So even though our hand is quite trashy, it is not zero equity at all.
You don't need a draw to barrel in position.
In a really favorable spot, this board is incredibly hard to defend. You're going to have to call ace-jack basically pure. You're going to have to call a bunch of pocket pairs. Again, there is just not much chance the population is defending adequately here. So I actually favor bluffing. This is an indifferent, optional bluff in GTO theory, but we just make it all the time.
We go for pot.
What villain is going to do now is probably sometimes raise a (although they would have raised it on the flop a lot) call with a mostly, but occasionally get freaked out and fold. Fold an underpair mostly, but sometimes get stubborn and call, depending on who they are. Fold most of their rag-high hands, like their , their , all of these gutshot hands. We unblock all of the gutshot hands that are really abundant and can't handle this action here.
So I like this turn bet a lot against the pool. The pool does not have enough on this line, they're generally raising the flop a lot with it.
And then we land on the river, the .
What you'll note here is that again we are unblocking most of the weak hands in our opponent's range in theory. So when you have two low cards like this, you are not going to be getting in the way of their , which is going to be folding at a decent frequency. You're not going to get in the way of their or , these gutshot showdown value hands that call the turn.
So I actually go for an overbet here. I don't think the population has enough queens. I could dial this down a bit if I wanted to be a bit more accurate. I think against a recreational, against a reg, I think this is fine.
The point I was really trying to make here is that on the turn you can barrel hands like this, and you should certainly contemplate it. If you lack the theory to understand that in these favorable landscapes you can just bluff with random pair draws, little bit of almost-nothing type hands, you're just never going to have this on your radar. You're going to be saying to yourself, "I would bet with . I'd rather have ."
Yes, you would, but that doesn't mean you can't bet with seven-five. And you need to get this habitual, lazy "I need X to bluff" comfort blanket bluffing out of your head if you truly want to grasp the nuts and bolts of poker, the theory of the game.
Read Read#2.5: Love of Comfortable Bluffs
Another hand that illustrates the comfort blanket bluff, or a bluff that isn't comfort blankety, is the .
The flop is . We've called the hijack open. Very much our board. We can play some donk bets here, and we elect to do just that.
Villain breaks out the small raise, which is going to be a lot of things.
- It could be a bluff, it could be a semi-bluff.
- It could be any form of value hand from upwards.
- It could be more marginal like or .
We block the automatic continues here, which is nice. We have the open-ended straight draw, we have a ton of equity, we have backdoor diamonds.
This looks like a very clear three-bet to me against all but the very stickiest players, because it's going to be really scary. Again, we're ditching this comfort blanket idea that we can't three-bet bluff the flop. We're reaching up into the heart of our opponent's good hands here, trying to get fold equity.
You have to have a drive to get opponents off of hands that are actually quite good in absolute terms. This is a way of opening your mind.
For a while when I first started playing poker, I just didn't have this ability, and it was one of the later things I actually learned relative to the rest of my game. But when I started doing it, it was like a whole new world opened up. Start experimenting. Figure out where you can be more inventive and liberal with your bluffs. And don't be afraid to just claim to have a very good hand in some spots. You'll be surprised by the results.
The villain folded, but that is not the point. I think you're going to have a lot of fun with this.
#3: Not Folding in Mid-Sized Pots
Now, let's move on to our final invisible leak for today.
Not folding enough in medium-sized pots, and specifically not hero folding at the first opportunity where you get a clue that things are going badly.
Take a look at this hand. We've opened under the gun with . We are in a four-way pot. We decide to check the flop. And on the turn, we call a half pot lead.
The pot odds are really good here at 3.33 to 1. We need 23%. We have top pair and all we've done with it is call one half pot turn bet thus far.
People get sucked into this trap of "my hand is under-represented, I'll just call one more time, and then I'll see what happens on the river. I can't fold yet."
"I can't fold yet" is such a killer. Someone has a nine here almost always. We just let it go.
Stop caring about your kicker, your king-queen. Your queen is no longer relevant. Villain 12 is not saying that they have king-eight or king-ten. Villain 13 may well fold those hands to a raise. They might not. It would be a poor call with , and that can happen. But overall, we're dead. And if we're not dead, there's still the chance that someone with a draw will get there on the river, or that we could be bluffed on the river.
So we're not even guaranteed passage to showdown, even if we do, by some miracle, have the best hand. The building is on fire. Get out of it as soon as possible. Don't loiter around and collect your stuff. It's just too dangerous.
I see people just call one more time, get to the river in a spot where they're almost never getting to showdown in one piece, and then fold. And that creates this jagged, downward-sloping red line. If you see your red line going quite steeply down but at times jaggedly, this could well be your issue. You're just not folding soon enough in hands.
#3.5: Not Folding in Mid-Sized Pots
here. We three-bet from the cutoff against the hijack, called by the big blind.
We go three-way.
We decide to continuation bet small on the flop, which I think is fine. You could actually size this up a bit if you wanted. And we get called in two spots.
And then this villain in the big blind just leads for 31 big blinds.
But we have tens, right? We've just got an overpair and all we've done is put in one bet. What if they have nines?
- They could have nines.
- They could be a recreational player with a merged hand here that doesn't know what they're doing.
- They could even have a draw.
But the frequency at which people just lead out for a really big bet in this spot, having just check-called the flop, it's not really compatible. Someone with nines that wants to play it quickly is likely to raise a small flop bet, not wait until the turn and then make a big lead. Of course it can happen, but we just fold, because very likely we're already toast.
Where is the solver player that just bets with a balanced range here and then sheds the proportionate number of bluffs on the river and gives up at the right frequency? Does that exist in real life? No, it doesn't.
So execute the fold as soon as you realize that the hand is toast, that the building is on fire.
Last Hand: Not Folding in Mid-Sized Pots
On to now, our final hand for today.
And this is the epitome of a spot where people like to call just one more time, where they just don't have the willpower to let it go immediately.
We three-bet from the small blind against the cutoff. Villain calls.
We continuation bet small on We get raised, and we of course call.
And on the turn, we face this bet. We're getting three to one. It looks appealing.
But again, ask yourself: how often are people bluffing you by raising the flop and then blasting the club turn in this spot?
What would they have to have to be bluffing here? It's just not that likely.
There's quite a lot of value in the form of , , a set, or a flush. And again, how does your realizability actually unfold in real life? If you call here, how do you win? All the cards need to be stacked in your favor.
- You need to run into the rare opponent that's bluffing.
- They need to not bluff the next street.
- They need to not get there.
There are too many hoops to jump through.
Consider folding at the first opportunity when hands are going badly. Even if it feels like a bit of a hero fold, have the strength to fold. Have the bravery to execute tough folds. Your red line will thank you in the long run, by not taking one more street to eventually lose a pot a really large amount of the time.