Quote:
Originally Posted by Jkpoker10
How much would you bet on river? I like to set up river jam where bet is under pot if possible on rivers so more likely to get a call (aka I would hate to bet like 1.2-1.5x pot on river and let villian find fold easier).
If it goes check/check turn and opponent bets river, we just stuff. We want to try to get all of his value hands to call, no sense in being cute.
If it goes check/check turn and opponent checks river again, we probably bet something like 2/3, hoping to get called by an 8 or Tx that happens to still be in range.
If we bet turn small and get called, we probably still just stuff river. If we think our opponent is going to fold an 8 to any bet, it's probably just better at that point to try to get value when they have a 2 or rivered a strong hand.
But to your general question about sizing, while we obviously want to sometimes bet sizes that set up logical jams, it's also important to be aware of board textures.
In a spot where we have a significant range advantage (i.e., we still have a lot of good hands) but not a big nut advantage (our opponent has more 87o and 2x than we do), we don't really get to bet 100%. We will do a decent amount of checking here. And when we lack the nut advantage, we often want to size down a little bit.
You could obviously bet bigger on this board with 77 and stack a 2 regardless, but you're going to stack a 2 anyway. A smaller bet functions better to make sure we get called with other parts of our opponent's range, like 7x or 8x or draws. It also allows our opponent to bluff or overvalue turns a decent amount, whereas when you go bigger it becomes harder to get your opponents to do that.
77 is an edge case because it's effectively the nuts, but if we think about all of our hands here, we want to make sure that we protect our betting and checking ranges. The reason we'd mostly want to check or bet small with 77 than just stick it in the 40-60% bucket is that our hand doesn't need protection. Whereas when we have JJ, for example, we're pretty happy betting bigger to get value from worse hands and to get some protection from draws. So while I think our bets here would primarily be somewhat bigger (more like 40-60%), the super nuts might mix into a small bet range where we put some other hands like AhQh where we'd be fine betting small to induce jams (which we can easily call off) or maybe even getting to the river unimproved and winning sometimes.
The general rule I've been taught is that when you have a range advantage, you get to bet more often. If you have a nut advantage, you get to bet bigger. And when the board texture is likely to change (i.e., the nuts are likely to change on the next card to come) you want to lean towards betting bigger as well.
Last edited by jpgiro; 03-30-2023 at 05:34 PM.