What do you call a bet that is profitable despite the fact that you lose most of the time when it is called?

As an example:
Suppose I am in a LHE hand heads-up out of position on the river.
I expect my hand is good against 60% of my opponent's range.

If I bet, the opponent calls with the top 60% of his range and folds the bottom 40%. When called, I lose 2/3 of the time.

If I check, my opponent bets the top 40% of his range for value, bluffs with the bottom 10%, and checks the rest. Assuming the pot is big enough (which it often is in LHE), I am forced to call this bet and lose 80% of the time. (While winning 100% of the time when he checks.)

Betting here is profitable because it wins a bet 10% more of the time than checking does. When my opponent has a better hand, betting and checking have the same outcome. But it gets a call 20% of the time against a worse hand that would check down, and it only loses out on bluff catching 10% of the time.

Yet saying this is a "value bet" doesn't seem right because I am hoping my opponent folds. The bet itself is unprofitable in isolation; it's just better in expectation than the alternative action. It obviously isn't a bluff because it never gets a better hand to fold. And it doesn't quite seem like a blocking bet, because that is typically a bet which you would like to get called but not raised, and is largely done to prevent getting bluffed off a hand.

So is there a name for this bet?

That's not possible. Under your unrealistic conditions the bet will lose less than the call but it's still not a profitable bet. Your money is coming from the pot, not the bet or the call.

What do you mean it's not possible? The bet is unprofitable in isolation but still the +EV play overall. I don't see why the conditions I set up are unrealistic. They seem quite common to me. Yet this isn't a value bet or a bluff in common parlance.

And I don't know what you mean by "your money is coming from the pot". You win the pot exactly as often whether you bet or don't bet. The only thing that changes is whether a bet goes in on the river.

Not sure what the bet is called, but the reason it works better than check under the stated conditions are (at least):
1) Villain's strategy works perfectly against your hand, i.e. he bets all hands better than yours.
2) You're not allowing for villain to raise (you'd likely be forced to call that off, too).
3) You're not considering a check-raise bluff as an option (this would likely be the least significant of reasons, and most difficult to solve for).

Now whether those are unrealistic conditions, I don't know. It's not how LHE works, though.

If your betting range is 40% villain should actually be raising quite often, so case 2) might play a pretty big part in this, pushing EVbet below EVcheck (without other changes, and assuming villain bluff raises properly to force you to call the raise off).

There's a game in MOP where folding is not allowed (which is also a part of your conditions, if only for you, not villain). IIRC, OOP bets every time, since if he wouldn't, IP villain would be able to play his hand perfectly. Not sure if they coined a name for the bet.

It is not possible for you to bet, be called most of the time and lose, and for you to make money on that bet. Your money is coming from the already extant pot. Your bet is not profitable, but it is less unprofitable than the hypothetical call.

Yes this happens in practice quite a lot actually.

In NLHE this is very frequent situation in certain particular spot that happens fairly often. In that spot it is all-in though, so it works a bit more "mathematically" perfect, when as in OP's example V can also raise, so we need a tad stronger hand to do this. A lot of people don't really understand this, but it's pretty simple why we want to do this.

Similiar spot to OP's example also happens semi often in certain other scenario where V can also raise, but it's still best to bet our semiweak hands.


Lets take a spot where only possible size is POT OOP OTR, which is effectively all-in, so we don't really prevent V from betting bigger, by betting ourself. So it's not per-se a blocking bet, well it kinda is, but yeah.

The reason this works is that when we have this type of hand, when we check Villain is never betting a worse hand, or maybe he bets a few combos (yeah, this happens a lot with the type of hands that want to do this betting), so everytime V bets, our hand is effectively bluffcatcher, and our EV is 0, so we basically lost the pot. But usually when we have this type of hand, it's so high up in our range that we pretty much have to call the bet always if we want to be defending enough, or if V bets a few worse valuecombos, we always have to call because it's +EV.

"But we have a lot of equity before we went for the check, where did our EV go?!?!?!"

We only gain money from the pot, when villain checks back, and against this checkback range we actually have good equity, because most better hands bet, so when we get a checkback, we win often.


"So why would we want to bet?"

Because when we check, we let villain get into showdown for free with hands that are worse than ours, but still not total airball, and he would need to call some of those.




So basically when we have a spot where we are OOP, that we have an ok hand that "always" needs to call a bet when villain does bet. We might sometimes want to just bet ourself and make villain hate life with his bluffcatchers. Not because we want to make villain hate life, though that's also fun, but because it's possible the highest EV play.


Term for this is blockbet/bestoptionbet.

The bet is profitable, and we do it because it is higher EV than checking. Wheter the money comes from pot, or from villains call, is totally irrelevant. The money that is already in the pot is as real as the money villain would give us with a losing call. Both are money that isn't ours, and we want that.

The bet is profitable in isolation. But we lose a bit money everytime villain calls.

Like lets say we have 40% equity against calling range when we bet POT into a POT. No raising allowed here!


So when we bet, and get a fold, which we get 50% time (1-A). We win the POT. So our EV is POT.

When we bet and get called, we on average get back 0.8 POT, so we actually lose 0.2 POT on the overall river play, everytime we are called.

So our total EV of bet is 0.6 POT. So the bet is clrealy a +EV play in vacuum. It's totally different story if it's maxEV compared to checking.

If we also add raising, it doesn't really make it that much more complicated, because we can just say that V never raises a worse valuehand, so when he does raise we have lost the pot because we have a bluffcatcher. So if our equity against V's calling range is 40%, and V raises 5% of his range, we can simplify it and just say that ok, we have 35% against his calling range. This is effectively the very same thing.

unless we're bluffing the bet didn't win us the pot, we had already won the pot. all we had to do was not fold.

ignoring the times that villain doesn't call (this is break even so will not influence whether or not the bet is profitable) let's say we bet $30 on the river. 66% of the time we lose this $30. 33% of the time we win this $30. so

30 * .66 = 19.8
30 * .33 = 9.9

19.8 - 9.9 = 9.9

This bet costs us on average $10 bucks.

You don't lose $30 the 66% of the time. In these cases, you were already going to lose $30 because the villain would have made a bet we were forced to call.

The only times in my hypothetical that betting loses us money are the times when it denies us the opportunity to bluff catch.

If villain is both betting and calling down with all better hands, these hands are irrelevant.

What makes the bet profitable or not is the ratio of worse hands he calls but checks down to worse hands that he bluffs with. The bluffs need to be smaller than the check downs but still large enough that they force us to call his value bets.

Of course it does, when villain folds, our bet just won us the POT, the pot we didnt have before the bet, it was in the middle in nomans-land, we didn't own it, villain didn't own it. But by betting we can get it. We can also get it by checking IF villain checks back. If villain bets, we basically lost most if not all of it, depending how good our hand is and how thin he is valuebetting.


No.

When we check and villain bets, he mostly bets only hands that are good and balancing correctly with bluffs, and our semiok hand isn't doing that well against this range. If he never valuebets worse, and we actually have a bluffcatcher. Our EV of pot is 0. So everytime villain bets, we lose the POT, thus we only gain some of it when he checks back a weaker hand than ours.

Lets say villain bets POT into the POT and we have 33% equity against the betting range with our hand. What's our EV with our exact hand every time he bets?







DEAD MONEY ISN'T YOURS LOL.

You should always think about actions in terms on how much money you are getting back on average from the POT and villain. Totally discounting the money you've already put in the pot, it isn't yours anymore.

Only if we were bluffing. If we had the best hand the pot was ours alrady, all we had to do was not fold.

: DD

ffs dude.


Maybe think about in terms of ranges, not exact hands.

But that doesn't happen unless the three buttons in the Pokerstars client are labeled "raise", "call" and "call anyway".

It's still a value bet imo, just one of the blocking variety. However, I'm not sure this is going to be more profitable than checking because when the river checks through and we win, that's ev gained that hasn't been accounted for in this thread.*

*unless I missed it.

Here's one where I thought my hand had <50% equity, I would be raised at a negligible frequency, and betting was best:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...p-oop-1374540/

A key premise is that the pot is big enough that we're forced to call a bet if we check, which is another way of saying that a call after a check is +EV. Since a fold after a check is EV0, then c/c will have a higher ev than c/f even though the c/f line altogether is not 0EV (its presumably +ev if opponent sometimes checks back worse).

Assuming a raise is negligible (which is absolutely not a good assumption to make against many opponents), that our opponent always calls better, and always value-bets better, then a bet will have the exact same EV as a check/call when our opponent has a better hand.

When our opponent has a worse hand, we're basically just asking whether our opponent bluffs more or calls more. If he bluffs more, then a check/call is best, if he calls more then a bet is best.

But yeah, if a bet is best its kind of weird, because we're not realistically expecting better to fold (even though that is something we'd love to see), but we aren't wanting to see a call because that usually means we're beat. Still, it seems at least like a type of value-bet since we want (and can reasonably expect) a certain part of our opponent's range to call. I wouldn't call it a blocking bet though since we aren't blocking anything. The whole point of blocking bet is to prevent our opponent from making a bluff or using a certain sizing, here we're trying to prevent worse from being able to check behind. In fact, our opponent bluffing often would be something that we would want since then we could revert to the c/c line.

I'd call this a "value-bet while behind" I think. Maybe "crying value-bet". The primary goal is to extract value, but its certainly not a regular value-bet where we want a call.

Yeah, after reading this thread I suppose it is a value bet.

A value bet is a bet that is hoping to get a call from a worse hand. And that is exactly what we doing here. When our opponent has a worse hand, we make this bet hoping to force him to call in a place where he would otherwise check down. Those times when we have a worse hand, checking and betting yield the same result, so we can exclude those hands from our decision process.

Another example of this situation would be shortstacked HU facing a raise in BB. There are a lot of hands where calling is "-ev" but not as bad as folding would be, as folding is -1 BB. Hence, eventho you lose money its the most +ev play.

It doesnt have a name Im aware of.

folding is always 0 ev.

I don't think the bold is necessarily true though. It's possible that our opponent could structure his betting range in a way that a call or fold are both 0ev, and that he could structure his calling range in a way that betting is 0ev. In this case, checking is clearly best because he may check back a worse hand.

It only sometimes has to be true for this type of bet to exist.