Found something else interesting from my PT4 analysis. Hopefully I didn't screw up the filters this time

I decided to take a look at river calls to see how I'm doing there and was happy to discover that I'm quite profitable, winning at 369 bb/100 (admittedly a small sample of just under 400 hands). I'm also profitable calling rivers from all positions.

But here's where things get interesting. I decided to break it down by bet size (as a % of the pot) and the pot size itself. Here's what I found:

1) I am unprofitable when calling river bets in small pots (<20bb) but profitable when calling bets in large pots. In fact, my win-rate increases as the pot size increases. This seems to indicate that when pots are small, I'm more likely to make a "what the hell, let's see it" call, but my instincts are good in large pots.

2) I broke down the bet sizes into 4 groups: 20-35% of pot, 36-50%, 51-66%, and 67%+. It turns out that I'm profitable at all sizes except the 51-66% size. What I find interesting about this is that the 51-66% pot-sized bet on the river is classic value sizing. While the sample size is way too small to draw population based conclusions, I wonder if there's something there in terms of a population-based exploit (I play buyins ranging from $3-$22). It could be that most players at this level use a 51-66% bet size on the river as a value bet, while opting for either a small or large bet when bluffing (or incorrectly betting weak value).

It's not necessarily a good thing to be winning so much calling river. It could just mean you overfold a lot. In an extreme example, if you only ever called the nuts on the river, you'd of course have an extremely high win rate when you call the river.

So it could be that you are overfolding in the big pots, and defending more appropriately in the small ones (just speculating). I'd look into river call efficiency, and won at showdown% after calling river. I'd also look into your win rates when facing river bets rather than just calling to give you a more complete picture.

This is a good post. Welcome to the forums.

They're absolutely correct tho that there are many pieces to it. This is sorta where hiring a coach if you have a meaningful sample is really great. They can help pinpoint whether it's disproportionate and what causes it. For example in cash games I 3bet more than the field so my redline gets hurt cause my flat ranges (where I'd typically be in position to outplay them) have more 3bets and remove the value stuff. Which is fine cause the only line that matters is GREEN.

Hi
yes Steelbreeze is right we should be profitable with river calls - there are some very easy very profitable ones so if we aren't profitable we must be calling significantly too much

So I think you might be right about the population betsizing tell - at least in the micros - I suspect I make the opposite mistake- ie using this sizing too much for bluffs and getting called down by all sorts of rubbish

Interesting, I will look into these things. How do I check for river call efficiency?

So here are the numbers, I'm just not sure how to interpret them:

1) WSD when calling rivers: 57.5%
2) Win rate when facing river bets: -101bb/100

I have no idea what my WSD should be when calling rivers, but it doesn't seem unusually high. If I were only calling with nutted hands, I would expect that number to be much higher.

But the negative win rate when facing bets does suggest that I am overfolding. Making a few more close calls and picking off some bluffs would bring down the WSD a bit and increase the win rate. The challenge of course is making the correct calls so I don't blow my win rate even more.

The other factor we have to consider is tournament survival, which is why the bb/100 win rate only tells part of the story. Calling too widely on the river can not only hurt your win rate but also your tournament results.

It's a stat in PT4.

Yeah, to be honest it gets very complex analysing rivers because there are so many factors from previous streets - for example you could be crushing calling because you're not XR value enough on the flop and get to river very strong/ overfolding flop and turn a bunch so you get to river strong - so it's probably best to just work through bluff catching spots your unsure of hand by hand.

If you face an average size of 66% on the river you'd only need to be good 28%, so winning 57.5% is way above that threshold. That said, population under bluff many spots so it's probably not a huge error.

My river call efficiency is 2.19 overall. That means I make twice as much as I lose when calling the river, correct? That does sound a bit lopsided.