Quote:
So unless your opponent has given you a reason to stop betting when you have something even remotely decent, continue to bet.
This is good general advice at uNL, less good for higher levels when you have to become more deceptive. However, there is one important exception that even uNL players should know. It's if you have both a made hand and a good draw - by far the most common example being a one card flush draw.
Suppose you raise AsKh and get called. Flop is Ks 8h 3s. You bet and are called. The turn is the Ts and your opponent checks. You should probably check behind.
Betting again on the turn only gains if you succeed in getting value bets on both the turn and river, or if you make your opponent fold a hand which would have drawn out on you. If your opponent calls the turn and folds the river, that is not a gain in value if they would have called a bet on the river had you checked the turn. Betting the turn can be a losing move if you fold out a hand that would have called a value bet on the river, or if you get checkraised and forced off a hand which would have drawn out on the river.
In the situation I gave, your opponent is going to need to be very loose to call both turn and river bets with a worse hand. The only thing you might get paid off by is a worse king. In contrast, if you check, you will pick up value from hands that would have folded a turn bet. For instance, even most uNL fish are going to balk at calling the turn here with 98 of diamonds. But if you check the turn and the river bricks - the 3d, say - then they could easily decide to look you up.
The other point in favour of checking is that you are more likely to get pushed off a good draw yourself than to push your opponent off a draw. Your opponent is very unlikely to have more than 4 outs against you and will often have as few as two. If he has 4, the free card costs you 1/11th of the pot. By contrast, if you are up against KT here, you have 10 outs, but if you are checkraised you will probably have to fold. (Same applies to a flush, where you have 7 outs). This costs you not only a big chunk of the pot immediately, but in the instances where you would have hit your draw, it often costs you TWO value bets - one that you bet when you were behind and another that you would have got out of him on the river after hitting.