POTD #243 I Make a Thin Value Bet on the Turn and am Forced to Bluff the River
My pair is counterfeited and Richard Yong hero calls me.
I began this week (POTD #241) writing about making some loose and speculative preflop plays, and how smart one feels when they expand their ranges and it works, and how stupid they feel when it doesn’t. The meta game in NLH used to involve playing too aggressively: Most people were too tight, so if you bet early and often, you’d win a lot of hands and do well for yourself. Blind aggression did not always work, but it set you up for success and became a crutch that many players relied on. As solvers became more popular, people attempted to play a more balanced game, but the current metagame, which involves many people using mass data analysis, has swung back the other way. People have analyzed millions of database hands and concluded people don’t check-raise, call check-raises, hero call the river, float the flop, raise over flop stabs in limp-check hands blind vs. blind as often as the solver does. The counter to this is to capitalize on that tight play by amping up your aggression everywhere and daring your opponents to fight back.
These tactics work against weaker players, especially if you know how to adjust if you meet resistance further down the game tree. Sometimes they make me feel similarly to the way I felt when writing about expanding my preflop ranges in Monday’s post. It might feel like you’re running over tight opponents, but maybe you’re just running good that you haven’t been up against a strong hand. In POTD #139 I wrote about a hand where Alex Foxen played a hand in a way that seemed designed to exploit his opponent’s tightness. He made loose-aggressive preflop, flop and turn plays designed to punish tight play at a big FT, before giving up on the river and losing the pot and the chip lead. In today’s hand, I am going to look at a similar hand, where I raised and kept betting a hand I wasn’t sure if I should but thought was the best exploit against a tight opponent. Sometimes that is the best play, but sometimes it’s a lazy cop out. Three-barrel bluffing is part of a normal poker strategy, but a macro strategy of let’s keep betting and hope things work themselves out is different and something one should try to avoid at all costs.
Triton Jeju 2018 - NLHE Main Event 2M HKD $255K
(6k/12k/12k) (SB/BB/BBA) Registration is open. Starting Stack 250k.
It folds to me in the HJ (1.6M) I raise to 25k with 5♥️5♦️, it folds to Richard Yong (208k) who calls in the BB.
Flop (68k) Q♠️8♠️3♥️: Richard checks, I bet 15k, Richard calls.
Turn (98k) 8♥️: Richard checks, I bet 30k, Richard calls.
River (158k) Q♦️: Richard checks, I shove for his final 138k, he calls with A♥️3♣️.]
