Quote:
Originally Posted by chopper5654
I have been studying a lot of scenarios lately. And, the newest thing I've learned when it comes to cbetting 1/2 games........flop texture, calling ranges, and turn barrels are incredibly important to know.
Ex. A 8 4r flop vs K 8 4r vs K T 4r
Ex. Nit limp/calls vs Fish limp/calls
Ex. Knowing which turn cards fold weak made hands and which improve, and therefore never fold, weak made hands.
Putting it all together solves a lot of the cbetting issues very quickly. The better you are at recognizing cbet/turn barrel spots, the less important your cards become in position. (FYI, my cards are still fairly important. )
For me flop one is hardly worth cbetting at standard 1/2 tables. Even my nits will limp/call with a heavy weak/mid Ace range. Add in some peeling pp's like QQ-99, and when called, I'm smoked when I'm cbetting air. That in and of itself isn't bad if I felt I could ever 2barrel this flop. The reality is: I can't. The analysis I did with pencil and paper and breaking apart the hand ranges of different types of villains yielded the same ratio. Half of the time, someone connected with flop one. And, of the hands that hit it, half of those hit it pretty well with 2nd pair at a minimum. Depending on your villain, most of the hands that hit this flop aren't even necessarily folding to any turn card. To me, that's not worth a cbet.
Flop two was MUCH better because of the lack of an ace. Instead of half the hand combos hitting this flop, now about 1/3 did...and about 3/4 those "should" fold to most turns. The AX hands won't peel w/o a pair the vast majority of the time. So, the A on the turn actually becomes a good barrel card to get QQ-/2nd pair to fold. Same would go for a QXXr or JXXr flop imo. But, you don't want to get too low because more overpairs that flat raises in 1/2 games come into play....and they don't like to fold until an overcard falls.
Flop three is exactly what was mentioned. The draws. So many combos hit a small made hand or a weak to strong draw. And, at 1/2, they don't raise their draws often in my games.....certainly don't c/r. Depending on your villain, you can barrel, though. The wider the calling ranges, the more you have to know which cards to barrel. Look for turns that "improve" drawing hands. On K T 7ss, I would be leery of barreling the third spade, ldo, an 8, 9, J, Q, or A, unless it also improved me. Those cards really help gutters and open-enders by giving them a missing straight card or suddenly giving them a weak pair to continue drawing. The best adage I've read in a long time is: Players rarely fold on turns when they improve. So, we have to watch for that big time. The tighter the villain's calling range preflop, the more you may be able to play scare cards here, though.....typically vs nits. Their range is so pp-heavy, and they usually know pot odds. So, it may be worth a gamble to 2barrel a scare card that completes a draw vs nits because most of their draws may have disappeared to a nice cbet on the flop.
However, the only way to get a feel for this is to do the work yourself. And, it takes time. I've played for a lot of years and I've never done the work until last week. I plan on doing more, but it's hard to find the time because it's boring. However, if we want to be clairvoyant when turns and rivers hit, we need to do the work....plain and simple. The more we practice, the faster we will recognize spots like these.