Facing Strong Ranges

When Villain’s range is strong, your implied odds go up and your fold equity goes down. As we have just seen, this means that you should play more passively. The reason that small pocket pairs are very good defends from the BB against early position opens is that they have a lot of implied odds against a strong range. On the other hand, 3-betting them is undesirable as fold equity is never usually great out of position against an early position raiser ww88 .

An Example Hand

In the first hand I looked at with my student this morning, he showed me the following spot. The student had opened in the LJ with 76 to $0.75 in a 25NL game (blinds $0.10 and $0.25) and been 3-Bet to $1.50 by the HJ. He found the obvious call here. Already, as we head towards the flop, we know that Villain is a weaker player. No competent opponent is going to give us this good of a price to flat the 3-Bet. Moreover, the average weaker player’s range for 3-betting in these positions is quite strong. We are already in a situation where implied odds are high and fold equity is low.



The flop ($3.35) came A63 and my student correctly checked. Villain bet $1.50 and my student raised to $5.00. What do you think of this play? My student’s explanation was that he wanted to fold out the hands like JJ-KK in Villain’s range. This is not a terrible reason for raising, but I pointed out that calling might also allow him to do this – it would just mean bluffing later in the hand. If we call here and Villain checks behind on the turn, we will gain some cheap information that he likely does not have an ace. This will make bluffing a better and safer idea on the river than it is on the flop w88 app .

Since Villain’s range is still quite strong on the flop, and he is a weaker player, this means our implied odds for calling are very decent. When we improve to a flush, two pair, or trips, we are quite likely to win a large pot. On the other hand, our fold equity is low as recreational players will rarely part with top pair in this situation to any action. Trying to bluff weaker hands than top pair is not something we need to do immediately and so the flop raise is a mistake.

My student got called here and then proceeded to semi-bluff shove for 1.4x the pot on the turn, which was the Q. Sadly, he ran into AK and did not improve. I pointed out that even though he had embarked on a bluff on the flop, it was not too late to terminate this bluff on the turn and hope to get a cheap river. If Villain bets small on the turn when checked to, then our implied odds on a call are going to be easily good enough to call, since we can get paid off on the river a reasonable amount of the time if we improve poker online .

If Villain checks behind on the turn, which he may do out of wariness after our flop raise, then our implied odds are even better – the investment side of them will be zero and the pay-out side very good as we can lead the river and often get called by top pair and the like. Finally, if Villain bets the turn huge and we have to fold, then this is no worse than us shoving as a semi-bluff because a bluff shove is close to 0EV any way. This is a spot in which the passive line is much better than the aggressive one.