I've played poker exactly once since April 15th and have been writing extensively about that day for the past month, so this month I'm going to talk about a hand that was dealt to me by one of my coaching students. Our topic this time will be: dealing objectively with the nagging fear that, even though a play may appear correct, it could be exploitable.
The Hand
The hand in question comes from a four-handed no-limit hold'em game with blinds of $2/$4. The Hero and Villain have stacks of $400.
Hero opens with a $14 raise with KJhc from the CO. The BTN folds, the SB calls, and the BB folds. My student describes the CO as loose and passive, so his calling range here is probably wider than we would expect from a better player.
The flop comes J2Kssc, giving Hero top two pair. SB checks, Hero bets $22 into a pot of $32, and SB calls.
The turn brings the Qs, completing any possible flush or straight and also putting Hero behind a possible KQ. The SB checks, and Hero checks again. Against a loose and passive player, I think you can bet here, but a check has its advantages as well.
The river is the 8c, and now the SB bets $60 into a pot of $76. My student folded, but shared the hand with me because he was worried about folding such a strong hand after having shown so little strength.
What are you so afraid of?
Players will sometimes argue that their hands are underrepresented in a situation like this. After all, all Hero has done so far is raise from late position, make a CBET, and then check the turn. How can Villain expect him to have a good hand like two pair and therefore not be exploitable by folding a strong hand with a better than 2:1 chance of winning the pot?
The short answer is yes, this would be an exploitable fold. A GTO (Game Theoretically Optimal) play would require Hero to call with almost 70% of his range. However, here we are talking about folding a hand that is probably in the 10-15% top of Hero's range to get to the river this way. This is a huge deviation from the GTO play and thus potentially exploitable.
There’s another question we need to ask, though: so what? When students come to me with fears like these, I encourage them to articulate what exactly they’re worried about. Being underrepresented or “too weak” aren’t bad things in and of themselves. Before you act on feelings like these, you need to articulate how exactly those things might end up costing you money.
In other words, what would your opponent need to do to take advantage of this “mistake” you are considering? Suppose Villain in this hand knew that Hero would fold KJ and all worse hands to a $60 river bet. What should he do with this information?
The obvious answer would be that he should bluff, a lot. The problem is that Villain would presumably need a pair or a draw to call a bet from that position on this flop. The most obvious draws are there, and even hands like AQ and QT now have pairs. It is virtually impossible for Villain to not have a pair on the river.
Exploiting Hero's extremely tight calling range here would require floating the flop out of position with no pair and no draw, with the intention of either bluffing the river or turning a pair into a bluff on the river. The former is an extremely difficult play to make and is not something I would expect to see from even a loose player at these stakes.
As for turning a pair into a bluff, this is a good time, but it wouldn't be something I would expect from a passive player. Also, the fact that Hero's range seems to be weak in reality makes it less likely that Villain would feel the need to turn this into a bluff. He may well think that a hand like JT could win at showdown and therefore be tempted to check.
What we see here is that, although Hero's fold is theoretically very exploitable, it is unlikely that this villain will play in such a way that he will take advantage of Hero’s “mistake.” So this “mistake” is not really a mistake at all, but rather a profitable strategy to exploit Villain’s failure to bluff the river with an appropriate frequency. When you can identify exploitable tendencies in an opponent’s play, then you must adapt your own game to take advantage of those leaks, and that’s exactly what’s happening here.
So does that mean Hero was right to fold? That depends on how confident he is in his read. As we said, the pot odds dictate that Hero should call about 70% of the time. If his current calling range is closer to his best 10-15% hands, that's a huge deviation from the GTO strategy. That doesn't make him wrong, but it does mean he needs to be very confident in his reads. A small deviation from the GTO strategy only requires a hunch of a read, but a huge deviation like that requires almost certainty that Villain will never show a bluff.
Personally, I'm pretty confident that we won't see a bluff here. However, even if Villain isn't bluffing, it's still possible that he's betting a worse hand than KJ. Maybe he thinks AK or QJ is good enough to bet for value. Or maybe he's afraid that Hero will bluff, so he thinks about bluffing early, with the intention of blocking the bluff with hands like KT or AQ. We need to consider these scenarios as well before folding.
I'm strongly inclined to name any hand other than AK or QJ that could bet for value. Given the possible straights and flushes, it's far from 100% certain that a passive player would attempt a value bet even on this river, especially at such a high bet size. There's also a fair chance that even a passive player would have re-raised with AK preflop against a raise from CO. So overall I think the probability of seeing one of these hands is pretty low.
A blocking bet is also a play I would expect to see less frequently from a passive player, and the size of the bet is not consistent with that explanation. While a blocking bet could theoretically be any size, they tend to be small, as the idea is to avoid putting too much money into the pot.
Again, your level of conviction in the reads and assumptions here should determine how tight your calling range is. Personally, KJ is a toss-up hand for me. If I have KQ, there is one more hand he could be betting for value that I can beat and that is enough to turn him into a caller.
Article translated and adapted from the original What Are You So Afraid Of? by Andrew Brokos
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