Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker, Volume 1 (41 page)

While you need to balance most aspects of your poker game, most players will rarely see you make a river bet because most hands are over well before the river. Because of this, balancing your bet sizes isn’t that important against weaker players. Against good, regular players, who over time will play many rivers with me, I tend to bet around 3/5 pot on every river, assuming we are not close to getting all-in, regardless of my hand, including my value bets and bluffs, unless I am very confident in my read about their hand strength, which usually isn’t the case because good regulars are tough to read.

Over Betting the River

Against players that cannot read hands well, if you make the nuts on the river and suspect they have a strong but second-best hand, you should strongly consider betting more than the size of the pot on the river, as they will rarely fold.

Suppose you raise A
-6
to 3BBs out of your 300BB stack from middle position and your opponent, a loose but straightforward player, calls in the small blind. The flop comes J
-5
-2
. You bet 5BBs into the 7BB pot and your opponent calls. The turn is the Q
.

You bet 10BBs and your opponent check-raises to 24BBs. You think he has a strong hand but are unsure if he will call a re-raise. The only problem with calling is that a club on the river may scare your opponent into giving up with a weak flush.

You decide to just call, hoping a club or a card pairing the board doesn’t come. The river is the 10
. Your opponent bets 35BBs into the 65BB pot. At this point, a pot-sized raise would be to 170BBs, which is your 35BB call plus 135BBs that are in the pot. You only have 268BBs in your stack, so a push would be to around 1.6 times the pot. You are fairly certain your opponent has a flush and most likely will call any bet with it. In this situation, going all-in is the only play.

Your opponent’s hand range will consist mostly of flushes, sets and bluffs. He will never call with a bluff and will rarely call a raise with a set, so you only have to worry about extracting value from the flushes, with which he will probably call most raises.

You will rarely make these large over-bets, so you don’t have to balance them by making the same play with a bluff. In fact, you are making this play purely because you have a strong hand and know your opponent will not fold. While there are other spots on the river where you want to bluff your opponent, a smaller bluff will almost always do the job, making over-betting far from optimal when bluffing in tournaments. Against good, regular players, I would tend to make a more normal-sized raise, as they will quickly realize that my over-bet means I have the nuts.

In the past I have taken this concept a bit too far, over-betting with hands that were quite strong but not the nuts. At least in my experience, players will only call these with hands that are almost the nuts. Because of this, pushing with a hand like 6
-3
in the previous example would be suicide because my opponent will only call with better hands. In fact, raising with a weak flush on the river is usually a mistake in a tournament because you’ll only be called if you are beat, so I tend to reserve the over-bet on the river for my nut hands.

Not Putting Your Opponent All-in

You may have heard that you should be sure to put your opponent all-in any time the stack sizes allow it. While leaving an opponent with a few big blinds could come back to haunt you, making a bet that is much more likely to be called when you are confident you have the best hand is usually worth it. Against weaker players on the river, if your bet would normally be all-in, consider betting a slightly smaller amount, leaving your opponent with a stack he thinks is worth something. As we already know, when you would normally put in about 1/3 of your stack, you should go all-in. Despite this, some players will be much more likely to call your river bet if you leave them with a few big blinds. Those few big blinds you leave a weak player usually won’t be worth much because most of them play the short stack poorly.

Say you and your opponent, a fairly weak player who doesn’t want to go broke, both have 50BBs. You raise to 2.5BBs with A
-K
and he calls in the big blind. The flop comes K
-9
-3
. Your opponent checks, you bet 4BBs and he calls. The turn is the 5
.