Seriously, I'm a winner at 3/5 somehow, but still can't seem to stop paying people off. It's really frustrating and has been a few months of this since I've realized it's becoming a leak of mine. Is there some statistic out there that says villain only ever bluffs with nothing 15% of the time, so I can know to confidently fold, even if I think I'm ahead? I guess I can't stand the thought of being bluffed. I don't know. How do people get over this leak?

As an example:

Live 1/3

HJ raises to $12
Hero calls on button with AJ

Flop J38

Villain bets $15
Hero calls.

Turn: Q

Villain bets $15
Hero calls

River: 4
Villain bets $125
And I ****ing call

What's wrong with me? My thinking is always they're trying to bluff me, not extract value from me. Is this the type of thinking I should have reversed? Probably. Maybe I'm bias to this thinking because I bluff a lot instead of just only waiting for good hands. I really don't know.

There's a fold button right next to the call button, click that instead.

Oh wait this is live?
Instead of picking up chips and throwing them in, pick up your cards and throw those in, pretty much the same concept.

Anyway, for some real advice, figure out what range of value hands villain is trying to rep by his bet in these spots.
If you do not beat any of these value hands they're repping, FOLD, every single time. Don't think about it, don't worry about bluffs, just fold if you're not beating any of the hands they're value betting with.

This seems to be a river overbet, around 90 in the pot and 125 for you to call.
So villain is repping a very strong hand here, the bottom of his range is probably KQ if he's terrible, but more likely two pair or better.

Do we beat KQ? No? FOLD, easy

We just had a thread about tells. At the smallest stakes, a line of 1/2 pot, 1/4 pot, 1.5x pot is a pretty common bet sizing tell that often means “please don’t fold the turn. Oh, he has something. Big river bet!”

yeah, this sort of big river bet is pretty much never made with something marginal that you beat, so the question is whether you think he's bluffing or not - and at low stakes live this usually isn't the case

Against a pot bet, you can fold your range (that's wide after the small turn bet, though you should probably over-fold on the river then, having exploited his small turn bet) half the time on the river without getting exploited. So, that part is easy.

If they don't on average bluff like a size of the pot like 1/3rd of the time (when they bet the pot) on the river, you can safely fold most of the time even if you think it is sometimes (up to 1/3rd of the time) a bluff. It doesn't need to read on their foreheads. Add any reads and you do better still. But even as so, you are already winning in the long run if you bluff and value bet correctly yourself, as you are exploit-folding on the river that often.

There might be enough bluffs (missed draws) on his range (even) with these high cards on board (and you block the jack, unblock the draws pretty much), and your bluff-catching strength doesn't matter vs. that bet, just your range so that you are not calling too often with hands that can't even get a split vs. his worst value bet - with a split possibility or better, you would be calling more often.

If he never bluffs them on the river, you win 100% of the pots where you have the best hand. So you can afford to pay him off with his own money sometimes and still beat him.

I think this is the best advice I could have hoped for. So, basically, most of the time, we should only be calling bets and raises on the river if we beat most of their VALUE-represented hands? Forget about if they're bluffing or not?

But what if they are bluffing and we're confident? Like, for example, I thought they were for sure bluffing in this spot at the time (in retrospect not so much), but so how do I make up for the difference?

Sometimes you get bluffed. Big deal.

Okay.

You know what they call someone who can't be bluffed? A fish.

you need to understand there are 3 components to a winning strategy. betting, folding, and realizing. that means all hands fit into one of these categories.

realizing means go to showdown. when you have no pair or draw on the flop in the big blind, mainly you want to try to spike a pair or some kind of draw and hit and navigate to a winning showdown. middling hands also tend to want to realize. when you have TPTK like in your example it's strong enough to be bet, but when the queen comes on the turn your hand is no longer very strong. it goes in the realize bucket and thoughts should be about getting to showdown as cheaply as possible. when villain fires huge on the river it violates our path to realizing and should intuitively feel incorrect to call as a result.

Not exactly.
This is something I learned in a video by Ed Miller, it's in the cash course on Red Chip Poker CORE.

It only states that we should never call if we don't beat any of the value hands villain is repping.
I guess in some cases if we only beat the very bottom of villain's repped value range, we could find a call, in most spots we probably won't unless we beat several or most of their value range.

Of course this doesn't apply when you face someone who bluffs every chance they get.

Like if you know they're bluffing obviously just call.
But be honest with yourself and have an objective way to keep track of how many times you're actually right and wrong.
You could easily become a victim of confirmation bias here.


But yeah the idea is nearly no one at the lower stakes is bluffing enough, so we don't need to bluff catch.
This is pretty wel explained and mathematically backed up in the videos, but I don't remember what the actual math is.

Oh it also only applies to big bets on the river.

You should probably just go watch the video
The course is $5 for a week and you get TONS of other content as well.

This thread is so timely for me personally as I’ve been facing huge overbets at higher stakes and have just been explo folding pretty much every time. And this is at a level where people do bluff with some frequency. Still foldin’.....

None of the above advice is valid at stakes where people are able to identify boards where you have very little nutted hands in your range. At high stakes you’ll see a lot of overbets if people figure out they can exploit your unwillingness to call them, especially in deep stacked games. That’s usually also a pretty decent sign of someone playing scared money.

At the risk of derailing, what to do at higher stakes then? Call sometimes? Use MDF? Call people you think are attempting to exploit you?

Well this advice is for lower stakes where people almost never bluff enough.
Note that it doesn't matter if they bluff 10 or even 20% of the time, that's exactly what not enough means.
iirc people need to be bluffing like at least 30%+ of the time to make our bluff catchers profitable vs big river bets, which nearly no one at low stakes is doing.

At higher stakes, assuming it's not the same fish just playing higher stakes games, but where some or most of the players actually know what they're doing.
You probably want to bluff catch at least somewhat against these capable people who do bluff.
Especially if they're paying attention, you fold 2x to their big river bet, they'll probably just keep betting big into you on the river until you show up with a bluff catcher.

You can probably still overfold a bit, though I've never played high stakes and this completely depends on how good your opponents are.
Just not as much as at lower stakes I guess?

And people bluff far less often than newish players think they do, especially at the lower stakes.

What hand is he opening with (and taking that line) that you are beating?

If he has a pair less than JJ then he's already betting on the turn into a board with two overcards to his hand. Not likely. He'd much rather do pot control

If he's bluffing - and you have called flop/turn with a J and Q on the board - what exactly is he expecting you to all of a sudden fold?
The river was a blank so there's no reason to suspect that anything has changed from your POV with respect to the turn situation. The only thing you might conceivably fold is a missed diamond flush draw. And there's no point in going large to achieve that.

We need at least some hands in our range that can call pot on the river. Given the very small turn bet, not that many though? Especially since there are so many river cards that actually improve our range, some of them tremendously.

The line of small bet on the flop and pot+ on the turn is a pretty standard online line these days. The line of half pot flop, super small turn bet and overbet on the river is something that’s happening much more in small stakes games. TBH, if I saw that happen at 5/10 I would be confused and have my fingers crossed to see a showdown. Only if I saw it more frequently I would start to wonder if it was a try to exploit a specific tendency.

If that was the case, we would be extremely easy to exploit. There’s one huge thing that changed between turn and river. Villain bet 1/4 pot on the turn and hero gets a great price to call a ton of hands that might call from the button preflop in a low stakes live game. Just count how many hands are pair + gut shot now or something of comparable strength. Hero gets 5:1 on a turn call in position. All those hands are of comparable strength to hero’s actual hand on the river and everybody is in agreement to fold here.

Bluff or not .. are you going to win 38% of the time in this spot? Then you also have to consider the 'in hand' live flow and see if there are any tells beyond the math.

Do you ever raise or c/r in these spots (as a bluff) or just call in these spots (or really any Showdown opportunity)? Some will say that it's spewing and certainly depends on how deep you are. The more aggressive your play is on the River the less likely that these types of plays will be bluffs.

Do you play with Regs? It will take some time for you to change your image in these spots for sure. You don't want to be known as a POW.

Playing 1/2 I confuse the heck out of the table by showing a few 'exploitive' folds in some smaller pots to plant the seed in anticipation of 'not' folding strong (or stronger) holdings in a larger pot.

Another thing to consider is that you are making the game more difficult than it really is .. bet, same bet, really bet is a strong line at 1/2-1/3 for sure and even some 2/5 games.

It's ok to 'lose' a hand. I always consider what could I do with 'these' chips if I just keep them. It's about winning the war, not 'every' battle. Sometimes it's better to retreat and keep some soldiers save until the next battle. Yes, that's kind of a tournament mentality, but just because you can add-on or rebuy doesn't mean you shoud/have to. GL

You think about something else. You need to replace the "I don't wanna be bluffed" thought process with the 70% rule.

So when you raise pre, you should continue with roughly 70% of your hands and 30% are check folded. Same thing on the turn and river, continue with 70%.

So at each decision point you are thinking about your entire range, not the two cards in the moment. And about 30% of hands you give up on. So you think, "are these two cards weak enough to be part of the 30% I fold?"

By the time you get to the river you will have a constricted range and in order to hit 30% you're going to have to include some top pairs.

70% is of course a crude generality that is going to be eclipsed in a given situation. But as a general rule, you expect to let go of part of your range at each step.

That rule is also from a time when most players used relatively linear bet sizing like 2/3 pot on every street.

That's not really how it works anymore though and OP is a pretty decent example. If somebody bets 1/6 pot on the flop and 2x pot on the turn, we need to adjust our strategy based on that.

the realization that pure bluffcatchers are 0ev facing a bet in equilibrium on the river is perhaps the single most important stepping stone in player development.

think about how to exploit these opponents on the river:

bluffs gto range, misses value.

bluffs gto range, value bets too thin

doesnt bluff enough, value bets gto

bluffs too much, value bets gto

bluffs too much, value bets too much

doesnt bluff enough, misses value bets.

how do u react with 0ev bluffcatchers vs these opponents and why?

Please justify. And explain more.

paying off big river bets when u cant beat any value hands vs a player pool that underbluffs is probably the most -ev implementation of gto concepts i've seen over the past 15 years.

if u can beat your opponents best bluff on the river, but you cant beat any value hands, you hold a 0ev bluffcatcher on the river in equilibrium. vs a correctly polarized betting range, if you call this hand you will get exactly your money back in the long run.(or close to it lets be real we're all human nobody's perfect at value and bluff combo stuff)

vs an incorrectly structured range, you're either making negative ev calls vs players that dont bluff enough, or you're making profitable calls vs players that bluff too much. you cant choose your opponent, but you can choose the right play given the information at hand.