I recently noticed I leak where I'm losing money with cbet bluffing with the bottom of my range.
However, is it fine that we have some -EV hands in our betting range?
I think ideally we want every bet to be +EV.
Interested in both theoretical and practical applications.

Let's say the board is K42
Imagine we're the nittiest villain out there with cbet 30%. Villain can adjust very easily by folding anything weaker than Kx or open-ender.
Now let's say our cbet is 60% and on that specific flop we're cbetting 70%. In order for villain to adjust he has to start floating wider. Let's say we cbet JTo. When turn is a Tx, we can all the sudden make a good value bet. Villain doesn't believe us and calls again with A-high.
With our complete air, we may choose to check back in order to lose the minimum, if it's not worth to keep bluffing. In contrast let's say we cbet the flop with 76 and then give up once we miss the turn.

So in the big picture, by cbetting wide, we got a wider call from villain, that allowed us to profit with stronger portion of our range. One hand made us lose, but by doing so, we were able to extract more value with another hand.
If we reduce our bluffing frequency, theoretically villain will defend much tighter. That will also reduce our ability to value bet thinner with our positional advantage.
One hand is seen as negative, while in the big picture we don't realize the profitable spots like the JTo hand.

Has anyone given thought to this?

You realize that if you filter in hm2 for weak cbetting hands, they will show a loss over the hand. That doesn't they mean they are necessarily -EV cbets, as the money you invested preflop also counts in the trackers.

Good point doctor but his scenario is still interesting. IMO if you have a low cbet like 30-40 vs most good players they will play correctly against you easier (by folding to your strength of course). You can polarize your cbet range though too but then you still get little action due to your frequency but make a little more with your stronger check back range (but I don't think a net gain). I think you have to play your hand to get max value from the strong part of range which almost always means betting to build the pot and know sometimes you will get called when you are not strong enough to keep barreling. Those spot where you hit the turn and get called light for two big bets are much more profitable than saving chips by cbetting less. Course you can't over do the betting.


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Interesting! But then again, probably more than 50% of the players dont use HUD and/or doesnt take your cbet stat into consideration. So in general I would rather cbet depending on the villain's stats (raise, call, fold to cbet) and of course his turn stats as well..

You should only take -EV options if that is the highest EV option available to you. Really though you should be able avoid -EV options in any position but the blinds due to the forced bet (because folding will yield EV 0).

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I use PT4. My filters are correct. The "action" starts once I make a cbet with weak air-type hand.
For whatever reason, when I make those bets it's -EV overall. Maybe it's because I've cbetted too much vs fish, and my triple barrels haven't worked. Or then I'm just not skilled enough with barrelling.
It's hard to see how some of the small stabs wouldn't be profitable overall.
But like I stated, it's only the one side of the equation. That graph doesn't show the times when villains make mistakes by calling down A-high etc.

Yeah that's something I've thought about. Only open raise when it's profitable. Can save you from a lot of tough spots post-flop.

Well I mean you can have a profitable open and still be put in tough spots especially as profitable becomes subjective with position and opponents.

I think you've misunderstood Doctor's point, or don't understand what the filters show.
There are no minus EV bets in your range on the flop.
You just need to build a range that maximises the total EV of your strategy. Some hands are very profitable as bets. Some are less profitable, and will do better in the long run by checking back. None actually lose money right there (because of dead money, fold equity and hand equity), unless your range is a mess to begin with, or your strategy for the later streets is really terrible (like folding to a check, or calling a river shove with 9-high).

As a rough math example, one of the worst hands you can have on that board is 97o. If you bet half pot into a 5bb pot with a trash hand like that, the EV of the bet will still be about +1bb. You lose in the long run, because you're only winning about 20% of the pot, and you put in 2.25bb pre-flop, but it's still a +EV bet in a vacuum.
Whether you actually should bet half pot with a total airball hand like that is debatable. It depends how the rest of your range is built, and what your strategy for various runouts is.

Okay i understand generally that vacuum plays are purely exploitative and long term means GTO?

Im still confused as to why this hand is +EV and -EV at the same time... ik there are other factors to consider but can you explain to me why it is profitable yet unprofitable?

Sorry im a noob to EV/Strat and theory.

NO In both theory and practice you should strive to always make +EV actions

How do you know which hands are -EV bets is the challenge. HM or PT will not give you the answer due to small sample size for each "spot" (HU v multiway, flop ZXY or flop ABC, EP v BTN or SB v BB...........)

It depends on which reference point is considered.

A bet that is +1 bb relative to the flop (i.e., relative to getting up midhand and surrendering everything in the pot) is -1.5 bb in the hand overall if you invested 2.5 bb preflop to get there. You are making 1 bb of the money in a 5 bb pot. But you aren't making 1 bb out of thin air. 2.5 bb of that was already yours.

Don't be confused by the custom of treating all money invested in the pot as "dead money". That is done to simplify EV calcs, so that EVs are expressed as neatly as possible. (At the cost of some ambiguity, as seen here.) Of course your share of the dead money is actually coming from you. Facing a bet, for instance, it would be a misnomer to say that folding "loses nothing"; more accurate would be that it loses nothing more.

Seems to me that if you only make +ev bets and calls, then a fold can't possibly be -ev. However, I did just wake up.

I'll use a hopefully clearer example.

Let's say you open for 3bb in the CO, the SB folds and the BB calls. The pot on the flop is 6.5bb. BB checks.
If you mis-clicked and open-folded, you neither gained nor lost any money post-flop, but if you look at the hand in your tracker, it will say you lost 3bb (or 300bb/100).

When you committed 3bb to the pot pre-flop and got called by the BB, you need to win 3bb of that 6.5bb pot just to break even. Many of your hands are pretty trashy and won't get back 3/6.5 of the pot and break even in the long run, but if they can collect some of that dead money (even if it's not the whole 3bb you put in earlier) that's still better than open-folding.

If Fishtankz wants to use his filters, he should be looking for hands that do even worse as bets than they do as "give ups". The "total give ups" (where you literally check back and look to fold ASAP) will be at -3bb per hand (based on a 3x pre-flop open) in the database. The "low EV c-bets" will obviously be losers overall, but should still do better than -3bb per hand. At the moment, I think he's found lots of hands that lose -2bbb or -1.5bb and thinks he has a serious leak, when he probably doesn't. The best player in the world can't collect 46% of the pot (3/6.5) when he has complete trash. It's unpossible.

When you find yourself seeing a flop with a trashy hand, you kind of have to think "OK, I paid 3bb to see this flop. Now can I get some of that 3bb back by betting, or should I just limit my losses by giving up?"
If FT is losing much more than 3bb when he c-bets with air, then he's been firing more money in the abyss, but I suspect he's seeing red numbers like -2bb for much of his range and thinks it's a disaster, when reducing your losses from 3bb to 2bb clearly shows that betting was +EV.

Okay this is getting interesting.
I know that when we call a 3-bet, we need to do better than say -300bb/100 (3bb per hand).
Now you're telling me it's the same as PFR after post-flop?

Does the same concept apply for say, we call min-raise in BB. Opener checks back flop. If our turn probe bet does better than -200bb/100, we're good with betting?


Here's the graph for the air cbets this month. I ran bad with 3-barrels. It's a bit worse than yearly average -88b/100

And here's the filter. Note that no hands are specified.

On the contrary here is me opening 65o-87o on the BTN. We can clearly see that it has not been profitable for the entire hand

Thanks guys this makes much more sense to me now, i really appreciate it.

Right i totally forgot dead money in the pot effects your EV, but losing a few bb per hand with a certain strat prolly adds up im guessing.

Are you sure it deletes all money invested before the action starts? If so, PT4 is pretty cool. Easy way to check it, is filter BB defense with ok/weak hands.

I don't actually know.

When we open BTN and get 3-bet, we already have some money invested.
If we raise the SB, then by raising we need to do better than -50bb/100.
But when talking mainly about BTN & CO in this case. Once our bet gets called and we see a flop, in that case we do have money invested right? Let that be 2bb min-raise.
In that case it would make sense how our bluff cbets only need to do better than -200bb/100
Would same concept apply in 3-bet pots? If we 3-bet to 9bb, would our cbet need to do better than -900bb/100?

Your bluff c-bets should perform better than checking the flop would, first and foremost.

+1

and drawing conclusions from small sample size in PT is not really very accurate

I do always look at yearly sample when making the comparisons.
Correct. It we would get probed into 100%, we would lose say -2bb.
By betting, I'm now losing -2bb + ~-1.5bb

Yes, this has been my point from the first post on.

So the conclusion is that I'm not losing money with those bluff cbets, because of the dead money invested preflop (say 2.5bb)?

It's really hard to understand the big picture though. But this definitely helps my overall confidence. I noticed a similar trend where I'm losing money with check/calling, but still doing a lot better than >-200bb/100

If the filters in PT work the same way as in HEM, then YES. I was going to use the "call 3-bet" filter as an analogy, but I'd written too much already.
You play that trash?
I fold pre. #NitsGonnaNit

I quickly checked HEM2 and yes, they work the same way.

No I don't really open those connected hands unless there's a big fish in the BB.