I've played poker exactly once since April 15th and I've written extensively about that day over the past month, so this month I'm going to talk about a hand that was dealt to me by one of my training students. Our topic this time will be: dealing objectively with the nagging fear that, although a play appears correct, it may be exploitable.
The Hand
The hand in question comes from a four-player no-limit hold'em game with blinds of $2/$4. The Hero and Villain have stacks of $400.
Hero opens with a raise to $14 with KJhc in CO. BTN folds, SB calls and BB folds. My student describes CO as loose and passive, so his calling range here is probably wider than we'd expect to see from a better player.
The flop comes J2Kssc, giving Hero the two biggest pairs. SB checks, Hero bets $22 into a pot of $32 and SB calls.
The turn brings Qs, completing a possible flush or straight and also putting the Hero behind a possible KQ. The SB checks, and the Hero checks. Against a loose and passive player, I think you can bet here, but a check has its advantages too.
The river is 8c, and now 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 say that their hands are under-represented in a situation like this. After all, all the Hero has done so far is raise from late position, make a CBET and then check on the turn. How can the villain expect him to have a good hand like two pair and therefore not exploit folding a strong hand with a greater than 2:1 chance of winning the pot?
The short answer is yes, that would be an exploitable fold. A play based on GTO (Game Theoretically Optimal) would require Hero to call with almost 70% of his range. However, here we're talking about folding a hand that's probably in the top 10-15% of Hero's range to get to the river that way. That's a big deviation from GTO play and so is 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" are not bad things in themselves. Before you act on feelings like these, you need to articulate how exactly these things could end up costing you money.
In other words, what would your opponent need to do to take advantage of this "mistake" you're considering? Suppose the villain in this hand knew that Hero would fold KJ and all the worse hands on a bet of $60 on the river. What should he do with this information?
The obvious answer would be that he should bluff, a lot. The problem is that presumably the villain would need a pair or a draw to call a bet of this rank on this flop. The most obvious draws come there, and even hands like AQ and QT now have pairs. It's virtually impossible for the villain not to have a pair on the river.
Exploiting Hero's extremely tight calling range here would require making a float on the flop out of position with no pair and no draw, with the intention of bluffing the river or turning a pair into a bluff on the river. The former is an extremely difficult play to make and not something I would expect to see even from a loose player at these stakes.
As for turning a pair into a bluff, this is a good moment, but it's not something I'd expect from a passive player. Also, the fact that the Hero's range appears to be weak in reality makes it less likely that the villain would feel the need to turn it into a bluff. He may well think that a hand like JT could win at showdown and therefore feel like checking.
What we see here is that, although Hero's fold is theoretically very exploitable, it's unlikely that this villain will play in such a way that he'll take out advantage of the Hero's "mistake". So this "mistake" isn't really a mistake at all, but a profitable strategy to exploit the villain's failure to bluff the river with 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 just what's happening here.
So does that mean Hero was right to fold? That depends on how confident he is in his reading. As we said, the pot odds prescribe that Hero should call about 70% of the time. If his current calling range is closer to his 10-15% best hands, that's a huge deviation from the GTO strategy. That doesn't make him wrong, but it does mean that he needs to be very confident in his reads. A small deviation from the GTO strategy requires only a hunch of a read, but a huge deviation like that requires almost certainty that the villain will never show a bluff.
Personally, I'm pretty confident that we won't see a bluff here. However, even if the 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 the Hero will bluff, so he thinks about bluffing first, with the intention of blocking the bluff with hands like KT or AQ. We also need to consider these scenarios 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 that river, especially for such a high bet amount. There's also a fair chance that even a passive player would have re-raised with AK pre-flop against a CO raise. So overall I think the probability of seeing one of these hands is pretty low.
A blocking bet is also a move that I would expect to see less often from a passive player, and the size of the bet is not consistent with this explanation. While a blocking bet could theoretically be any size, they try to be small, since the idea is to avoid putting too much money in the pot.
Once again, your level of conviction in the readings and assumptions here should determine how tight your calling range is. Personally, KJ is an uncertain hand for me. If I have KQ, there's one more hand he could be betting for value that I can beat and that's enough to turn it into a call.
Article translated and adapted from the original What Are You So Afraid Of? by Andrew Brokos
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