Plenty of finance majors can never beat the market returns when investing. It doesn't mean anything

Fair enough

You have 15 outs as a OESD+NFD twice, but roughly 1/4 of the times the set fills up. rule of thumb 15*3+9~54% with the raw 15 outs then take away 1/4 of that, so instinctively the OESD+NFD should be in the ~42% range

Or i just hate myself for doing math and use http://www.propokertools.com/simulations

Hold'em Simulation ?
990 trials (Exhaustive)
board: 5s6c8s
Hand Equity Wins Ties
6h6d 60.61% 591 18
As7s 39.39% 381 18

Of course there is. A blocker bet is a deliberately smaller bet that would gain less value with a villain call but helps to polarize the villains range. For example if you are playing against a straight draw and you know that a scare card comes, and you have shown aggression on all prior streets but your top pair is beat if the scare card hit, instead of placing a standard value bet, you place a bet that is less. More than a min raise but less than your standard.

It also works in reverse where you lead out with a smallish bet to see another later street for cheaper.

That's pretty obviously exploitable with no balance. Whether it's exploited I couldn't say

You're right. The actual play itself is somewhat polarizing to theorists. I don't know the math and huds don't really have a function to look for blocker bets, but I can say from a purely practical perspective that the thought process works when applied at the right time. There are some pros who just say that blocker bets are just dumping money in the trash, but at the same time bluffs in and of themselves can be just throwing money away if used improperly... So I guess it's all in perspective.

There is still no such thing as a blocker bet.

When you bet it is either for value or a bluff. There is nothing in between. I guess you can "bet for information" since that seems to be a thing that people do, but blocker bets aren't real.

i've made plenty of bets that i didn't know if i was betting for value or as a bluff

That's not a good thing!

Never mind.

Pretty much this, though sometimes there is a mix.

I have long maintained that blocking bets are for value. Here's why:
You want to see a showdown. The two things you are trying to prevent are:
A lesser hand bluffing and pushing you off your hand that has some value
A lesser hand that might have called a small bet checking behind

And if you ever get a better hand to fold because you make these small bets with really strong hands too, that's a bonus.

Why do they work in the environments they work in:
1. Some classes of opponents just aren't going to fire a bluff that often if at all when you bet which means
1.5 you can safely fold when they bomb your bet
2. (obviously) some people will call small bets with really week hands

When don't they work unless you have a balanced range for that bet size:
When you run into nasty opponents who see weak bets as week and attack them. I love doing this, and there are a ton of opponents who this is really effective against, and some nasty opponents who mix in monsters and bait you with faux blocking bets. I love doing that too against savvy opponents, though savvy opponents aren't where I make my money.

This is a complete myth.

Didn't mean to start ww3 here. Sorry

Bet for protection!

Bet because fu I bet.

I bet because its fun to say "figh dollah"

When you bet, it is for one of the following reasons:

To get a worse hand to call
To get a better hand to fold

I am unaware of whatever alternate realities exist in which there is a third option.

You're going to have to be a bit more rigorous than that for me to be able to give a serious response. Your opponent has a range of hands, basing a strategy on targeting exclusively a specific subset of hands he might have is trivially bad. Are you simply saying that it is a prerequisite to betting that he must have at least one hand you beat that calls or one hand you can't beat that folds? How do draws play into this?

That applies more or less if you're last to act on the river, but otherwise (i.e. the vast proportion of times you bet) it's not so easy.

It's possible that blocking bets (ie a bet made in the river to prevent villain from doing something more painful) have a place in balanced play, but I messed around with some numbers this morning and couldn't trivially find one. But if we're taking exploitative play then it's another question entirely.

Systo wasn't talking about blocker bets on the river. He was talking about making them with sets on the flop on wet boards...

I wasn't talking about making blocker bets. I was talking about using bet sizing similar to blocker bets in order to control the size of the pot more

I surrender.

Fair enough but it'll be a cold day in hell when I start playing sets for pot control on the flop and turn in nlhe unless the board is like 9TJhhh...

It absolutely has a major part of balanced play especially oop although generalizing the purpose of the play is bad.

The purpose of being is simply that every other option is lower ev