Check/Fold

Check/folding these spots is to resign ourselves to the fact that we cannot value bet and cannot call a bet from Villain if we check because in either case, the sub-range that we're facing is too strong relative to our hand.

Just because we adopt the plan to check/fold does not entail that we will always lose the hand. In fact a good example of a check/fold spot on the river is when we expect Villain to have little air and a lot of hands worse than ours with SDV in his range, but we think he won't be calling a bet with those worse hands. We also don't expect Villain to turn his SDV into a bluff and so when we check and he bets we expect to lose very often.

Let's look at an example of when we might choose each line. As you work your way through the

following three hands, try to decide what line from the three above suits the river situation best before reading the answer for each hand.

Let's look at Villain's range. He probably gets to the river with a mix of pocket pairs, 5x, Jx and flush

draws, which then improve to flushes. Given that Villain is a weaker player, we can certainly expect him to call a reasonably sized bet with any weaker J and probably some weaker hands like pocket pairs too some of the time. Betting for value should still be possible even on this river as long as Hero doesn't size too big. Villain's flushes are not a huge part of his range.

A common mistake some of my newer students might make here is to automatically check the river due to the flush completing. This makes very little sense.

We certainly don't want to check/call as Villain's betting range will be a lot stronger than his calling range due to his passivity. While he will almost certainly bet any flush or full house on the river, he's likely to check behind with all of his weaker hands. Check/calling is a huge mistake.

We also don't want to check/fold with a hand this strong when it's very possible that Villain could bet worse Jx if we check.

If Villain does shove over our value bet, we can probably narrow his range to mostly flushes and better and hit that fold button. That doesn't make our value bet bad as it's the weaker hands that won't shove that we're targeting with it. As long as these are more abundant than his flushes and boats then our bet is fine.

Hero bet/folds 20BB.

Having value bet flop and turn, Hero finds himself in another marginal river situation, but here we

have the opposite type of opponent and river card to Hand 39. Villain is of the aggro variety of Fish and the river is a blank leaving missed draws in Villain's range. This kind of player will bluff a lot when checked to, and moreover, has a fair bit of air in his range here as any 5x or 7x straight draw has now missed as well as all of the flush draws that haven't made pairs. In addition, Aggro Fish are often capable of betting out randomly even with SDV in the form of 6x, 4x or 3x, which Hero beats.

All of this suggests that Hero should expect to do well bluff catching vs. Villain's betting range. A value bet from Hero would be very thin indeed. Hero should therefore elect to check/call vs all the worse hands he expects Villain to bet.

Hero check/calls.

Flop and turn were clear value bets. Hero could of course consider going for three streets here, but

without some kind of read that Villain likes to bluff catch with a wide range or history where Hero appears aggressive it's probably too thin.

Note that this board texture allows for very little air to remain in Villain's range by the river. There just aren't any draws for him to get to the river with (he probably doesn't even call Hero's pre-flop raise with 54s.) When Villain bets the river after Hero checks, he's likely to have a set, JTs, AT or perhaps some QJ-AJ type hand that called the c-bet lightly on the flop. Hero will not be good often enough to check/call. His reasoning is that most players will not turn their SDV hands like 77, 88 and 99 into bluffs here.

So this is a spot where bet/folding for value is too thin and check/calling makes little sense. Hero resigns himself to the only remaining alternative, but still expects to win here a good amount when the river checks through.

Hero check/folds.

5.6 Sizing and Elasticity

Bet sizing is an absolutely massive issue in NLHE cash. It's something I've devoted a lot of time to in my poker career and an area of the game that is often neglected by my students. Throughout the

manual, I'll be covering the topic time and time again in a variety of situations. For now though, we'll stick with the spirit of the chapter and discuss how to go about sizing our value bets.