well that's provided villain doesn't adjust and just keeps folding his non-monsters. As you said at equilibrium you can only bluff 33% of your air range when you 2x pot, I doubt that qualifies as "almost every pot".
Am i correct ?

on the river even with a 2xpot overbet, you can only have 40% bluffs in your range. It is typically hard to have a valuebet that beats at least half his traps., say this is the case 19% of the time when you bet, then you have 41% thin valuebets.

just for clarification: I am arguing a real scenario, not one where you are playing somebody who never traps.

Yes. I said almost every pot in response to the "he'll just fold all the time and you won't get value" retort. If he's folding all the time you're getting more than enough value from all of the garbage hands you turn into winners. If he starts calling sometimes, then you adjust back to equilibrium and get tons of value from all of your big hands AND still a good proportion of your air. If you look at the hand FreakG just posted, I think there's probably more Tx in his range than non-paired hands, which means that yes, he can win every pot.

Remember, by the way, that at equilbrium, you don't care whether he calls or folds! Your expectation is the same, and that expectation is very, very good. If your opponent is doing something different, you can of course exploit him (just as in Nash endgame, if your opponent is calling tight, you don't want to be shoving Nash), but against better opponents who do have a general idea of what % you have air and what % you have value, overbetting is mathematically superior.

In real poker, the chance your opponent is trapping is often negligible given actions in the hand. If this is not obvious, work on your hand-reading skills. As previously stated, trying to make it so that you can always have a monster is generally not worth undertaking, just as limping AA pre deepstacked so that your limping range can have AA in it isn't worth doing against the majority of opponents.

k thx for the clarifications mers!

you are a sng-only player, arent you?

Making the stacks a little deeper doesn't change the math. The high stakes thread I linked has some of the best cash game players and coaches around arguing for the basis for overbetting. It's not just an sng thing.

I'm going to pepper in some practical, specific advice to make sure people leave with enough of it. Starting with:

If there's a straight on the board, and your opponent (who you've never played before) checks to you, for the love of all things holy, do not check behind. Easiest overbet ever.

cool story bro

you are a douchebag, aren't you?

Bump. This post asked how you got from the optimal bluffing frequency to the fact that your EV is +333 when you bluff optimally. It would seem that any time the villain puts $X into the pot and has defined his range as only hands that can beat bluffs but can't beat a hand that you'd shove, you can forcibly take from him some nonzero percentage of that $X by shoving the right mixture of value hands and air. Is this correct?

In fact, the EV of betting was always positive whenever we bet the right mixture of value hands and air, which depended on the bet size. Does this mean that any time the villain checks to us with a face-up bluff-catcher, we can unexploitably win money from him, and that we win the most by shoving?

Show me the maney

Yes and no. If your range is pretty obviously air too and you rep no value hands, you still can't bluff credibly, and since you have all air, you're going to have a negative expectation in the hand. Still, if you do have credible value in your range and your opponent is good, you do best overbetting the value and however much air you can get away with.

I am just a micro donk trying to understand this, but with this strategy thin value bets would be suicidal.

If you overbet the river with nutz/air and value bet thinly with marginal hands, Villian should c/r you all in all the time. So you need to adopt a strategy of checking back thin value hands like mid pair or TPWK to avoid the times he is trapping you, etc.

If I am understanding this clearly, overbetting is more EV because your range of shoving is going to be often crushing villians calling range. So with more money being shoved, you'll automatically get more money back.

You need to overbet with airs a decent amount of frequency to force him to start calling your overbets with a wider range. If he elects to trap with only the nutz, then he'll be forfeiting a lot of medium sized pots where he has 100% equity, but doesn't know it.

The trapping strategy is pretty hard to play unless you run good. Because for the one time you have a boat against his air and stack him, you might be missing value on 5 medium sized pots where you potentially had 100% equity and folded to his overbet shove.

Shoving the river makes the villain play the guessing game of air or bluff. And since your shoves are going to be weighted towards value, in the long run you'll make more money. Am I getting this rite?

Of course, I only play the micros now. People play bad postflop so I don't really need to worry about them adjusting :-)

Again, in the hands posted, you have very little thin value hands in your range.

You're overbetting with value so you can bluff more often.

really enjoying this thread mers, yay for thinking about spots in new ways

sik thread mers tyty

Excellent thread Mers, I knew that overbetting could have good results, I just didn't formulate the math behind it.

I'm interested at looking at the applications of this in reverse, from the view of the player being overbet into. Is it fair to say that overbet shoving exploits the typical "bet polarized, pot control medium hands"? And does this therefore make trapping with big hands a necessary part of range balancing to avoid being exploited in this manner by a smart villain who understands this?

thanks guys, i obv respect your opinions a lot as to whether this is just blowing smoke or actually useful. Also nathan's because I know you overbet a lot. Checking to you on the river and praying that you wouldn't overshove was one of the things that got me thinking about this whole business (as poker is a constant sum game of course, if I don't want you to do something against pretty much my entire range, you probably should be doing it).

One of the things I have noticed in high stakes games is that there is indeed a lot more check raising on the river. There are certainly things you can do to counteract this spot. But, as I argue in this thread, if you try to stay completely balanced, you're just giving up way too much value for it to be worth it. In poker, you do different things with different hands because it's better to.

Also, we should note something: The first few times you play someone, they're basically NEVER going to be checking Jx on a T9876 because they'll hope you bluff at it, or checking a full house on the river in the example hand because of how much value there is in betting. We can discuss whether they can adjust profitably by not getting in these spots so often (I think sometimes yes, the majority of times not really), but the fact is (yay being practical!) the majority of situations you see where this can be applied are not going to be ones where you're that worried about being trapped.

One more clarification: I noted in the OP that let's forget about the BB's missed draws. If he does have missed draws in his range, how does that change things? It is not a justification for betting smaller in that "smaller bets will fold the trash out, so no need to bet larger", as there is zero equity difference between betting smaller and betting larger, the trash always folds (well, you could argue smaller bets lead to more bluffraising). The difference is that this decreases the portion of his range (the bluffcatchers) in which the overbetting makes a difference, and means you're only exploiting 75% of his range instead of 100% or whatever, and the EV difference is somewhat less pronounced. If there are traps in his range, those traps have more of a chance of erasing what you're gaining against his bluffcatchers. Make sense?

IDK why i havent posted here yet. Awesome thread mers. I like to overbet as well vs people but i mostly do it with a feel for spots and don't really know any math behind it or thought about it too much. So i've learned from this and it's got me thinking about cool stuff as well.

Cheers.

Thanks AON. A lot of this you can understand without knowing the math, and I'll bet you have a good grasp of it. Overbetting with some portion of air and value makes it a guessing game for your opponent where the odds are in your favor against your range no matter what he does.

I knew this hand seemed very familiar.

Cake Poker $1000.00 No Limit Hold'em - 2 players - View hand 486744
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

Hero (BB): $1759.00
BTN/SB: $2881.50

Pre Flop: ($15.00) Hero is BB with A 5
BTN/SB raises to $20, Hero calls $10

Flop: ($40.00) 5 A Q (2 players)
Hero checks, BTN/SB bets $40.00, Hero raises to $152, BTN/SB calls $112

Turn: ($344.00) 7 (2 players)
Hero bets $280.00, BTN/SB calls $280

River: ($904.00) Q (2 players)
Hero checks, BTN/SB bets $2429.50, Hero calls $1307 all in

Final Pot: $3518.00
Hero shows A 5
BTN/SB shows K 9
Hero wins $3517.50
(Rake: $0.50)

haha yeah, I jacked it from your thread

Recently read this article. I understand his equation but I don't get how he goes from rate to a percentage. If anyone can explain, I would appreciate the help.

Thanks in advance.

Great post. Knew about the concept but had never seen the math behind it. You explained everything very well.

the equation "8.5r3 = 201.5bb" should actually look like this: 8.5 * r^3 = 201.5bb
therefore r = (201.5/8.5)^(1/3) = 2.87