The standard hand in full ring tends to go like this: Player A open raises, Player B calls, a flop comes, Player A continuation bets, Player B folds, and Player A wins. Of course, the games are maturing so floating and bluff raising are becoming more prevalent, but the majority of hands still fall into the raise/CB/win action. Because of this, we want to understand which flops are good for attacking, and also how we want to go about attacking them.
Like always, we care more about our opponents and their actions than we do about our own hand when continuation betting. For instance, say we open raise from EP, just a very tight setmining villain calls from the button, and the flop comes AJ2r. We know the button’s calling range preflop was something like 22-QQ, and if we look at how often that range hits a set on a flop of AJ2r, we see it’s about 10% of the time.
If we think he would only continue versus our CB with a set, then we know he would fold 90% of the time, making this an extremely lucrative bet.
While things like texture and size will certainly change the way we approach the CB game, there is a simple way to start thinking analytically about this spot. Start by building a pie chart. This pie chart is simply our opponent’s range. Once we have this pie chart, we just need to chop it up into the correct pieces. Say we are at 100NL, we open raise to $3 from the CO, just the SB calls, and we see a heads up flop of Q86r. He checks to us and it is our option. We know he is a tight player and assign him a range of 22-JJ/AQ/ AJ/KQ/KJ when he calls preflop. We think he wouldn’t bluff and would only continue with something like TP+, maybe float some 99-JJ as well, and of course continue with sets. Now we have all the information we need.
We see his range hits this flop roughly 44% of the time. Now we can chop the pie chart into two pieces. The piece that would continue if we bet, and the piece that would fold if we bet.
When we are bluffing this is all we care about. If a player will fold enough of the time, then we want to bluff. If a player will not fold enough of the time, then we probably do not want to bluff. Simple. If we look at the CB size tool for a static 44% C-range, we see this: 44% 56% Hands that missed Hands that hit
We see here that if he would fold 56% of his range, regardless of the size, that any bet size up to 120% pot makes a profit here. Of course, the smaller we bet, the more profit we expect to make with this bet. And all of this is done simply by looking at our opponent’s O-range, C-range, and bet size.
Now this is a very simple approach to continuation betting. There are some factors that change our approach though. The dynamic nature of the game will have certain features that change how this pie chart gets created:
Table 3: CB Profitability Given Static C-Range (44%)
(CB% of Pot) CB Size Pot Size $EV
35% $2.45 $7 $2.84 40% $2.80 $7 $2.69 45% $3.15 $7 $2.53 50% $3.50 $7 $2.38 55% $3.85 $7 $2.23 60% $4.20 $7 $2.07 65% $4.55 $7 $1.92 70% $4.90 $7 $1.76 75% $5.25 $7 $1.61 80% $5.60 $7 $1.46 85% $5.95 $7 $1.30 90% $6.30 $7 $1.15 95% $6.65 $7 $0.99 100% $7.00 $7 $0.84 120% $8.40 $7 $0.22 150% $10.50 $7 -$0.70 200% $14.00 $7 -$2.24
Texture.
• Different textures will create more or less floating, and also more or less bluffing. In the following section on textures we’ll see how they tend to get approached by players.
Size.
• The size of our CB will create more or less floating and/or bluffing against elastic action ranges. The bigger a bet is, the less action it will tend to get, especially from weak hands. The smaller a bet is, the more action it will tend to get, both in the call and bluff sense.
Image.
• Our image will tend to get us action in different ways. Player’s that pay attention to image might give our CB more respect if we have been very tight, and might float us more if we have been very loose. Lots of players do not pay attention to image and only care about their own hand, so make sure we know who we are dealing with in a particular hand.
Tilt.
• This could mean our own tilt level, or even the tilt level of our opponent. If a player is tilting, they will tend to give action more liberally, either by peeling or bluffing. This increases their C-range, and makes bluffing more difficult and usually less profitable.
Idiocy.
• Our opponent's level of idiocy is very important. The dumber they are, the less they will care about the complexities of our plays. Do not bluff idiots unless their C-range is incredibly small. The dumber a player is, the more straight forward we should approach them.
We could come up with a hundred other factors that change how we assign the pieces of our pie chart, but these are the major ones. When we consider a CB we need to quickly analyze these factors and create a plan based on our analysis. Always make sure that we give ourselves some buffer as well. The buffer adds to the C-range to increase our global profitability in a play and takes into account the times we are incorrect in certain analyses. There will always be unknowns, or even totally random actions made by opponents, and we need to be cognizant of them. The tighter a player is, the less buffer we need to assign as they will bluff and float less often due to being straight forward. The looser a player is, the more buffer we should assign because they will bluff and float more for random reasons. If a bluff would still be profitable even with a buffer added, we should certainly make it.