I am trying to be more mindful of my c-bets and start thinking in terms of better balancing my ranges, but it's hard man, It's hard!

My old way of thinking on a flop like this is "we are heads up and I have a ****-ton of aces and kings so I am going to c-bet and he will have to fold a lot. Click the bet button!"
My new way of thinking is "I am at the bottom of my range, I have a lot of hands that will want to bet this flop. is this a hand I should include as one of my bluffs?"

But that is as far as I get. Then I just kind of stare at the screen and go blank.

On the pro side I am at the bottom of my range with a horrible board and need at least a few pure bluffs. Villain will fold a lot of PP's here on this board.
Cons: About all that a bet targets is PP's. There is not much else he will fold which beats us and he should have a ton of Aces and Kings in his range. QJ type hands will peel. Tx hands that beat us also find a peel. Also, we should have a fair amount of hands which can bet as semi-bluffs with either SD, BDSD, FD or BDFD's so do I really need this in my bluffing range?

This is a simple spot that we will find ourselves in very often. It is easily dismissed as a boring hand to post, but I suspect that such small spots that occur very frequently have far more impact on our overall win-rate than the handful of big pots we find ourselves in and post on here simply because we ran KK into AA preflop or had our set get coolered on the river.

Help me construct a proper balanced range for C-Betting here. It's time for me to go to a meeting and I suspect that at some time all of you suffered from C-Bet-aholicism.



Hand History driven straight to this forum with DriveHUD 2 Poker Tracking Software

NL Holdem 0.25(BB)
HERO ($25.10)
CO ($25.65) [VPIP: 8.7% | PFR: 8.7% | AGG: 40% | Hands: 23]
BTN ($11.67) [VPIP: 13% | PFR: 2.2% | AGG: 25% | Hands: 46]
SB ($7.60) [VPIP: 0% | PFR: 0% | AGG: 0% | Hands: 2]
BB ($26.21) [VPIP: 34.2% | PFR: 13.2% | AGG: 27.3% | Flop Agg: 28.6% | Turn Agg: 33.3% | 3-Bet: 0% | 4-Bet: 0% | Cold Call: 42.9% | Hands: 38]
UTG ($29.68) [VPIP: 58.7% | PFR: 21.3% | AGG: 40.9% | Hands: 75]

Dealt to Hero: 8 T

UTG Folds, HERO Raises To $0.63, CO Folds, BTN Folds, SB Folds, BB Calls $0.38

Hero SPR on Flop: [17.99 effective]
Flop ($1.36): K A 3
BB Checks, Hero?

Dont overthink it. In poker its much more important how you play turns and rivers then to have super balanced cbet range.
On this board you could either go with really big sizing in which case this hand is most likely check, or you can bet very often for small sizing. Solver will tell you to ob this kind of flop. In practice its much more important to ask yourself what kinds of mistakes is my opponent is likely to make. I would check this hand and then dcbet or check turn and bet river.
Here is how GTOWizard is playing this spot



and BBs strategy vs bet

It's interesting that on most flops pretty much every hand is mixing bet/check. Frequency is more important than individual hand selection. Try using RNG and just literally betting half of your air and checking half. This'll be closer to balanced than trying to pick specific combos.

This is a 100% check for me.

"... need at least a few pure bluffs. "

Why do you need pure bluffs? I save my pure bluffs for the river, I like to have some equity when my bluffs get called on the flop or turn. The BB likes to play hands with Aces and Kings too.

Do you have any hands you would like to check on this flop? A2, K9, QQ, JJ?

Population will not punish you for c-betting too much/for the wrong sizes. Everyone loves to nitpick it on here, but it should be fairly low in your priorities list

What do you use as bluffs when all the draws come in?

If the flush draws hit, I would bluff with something with a high card of the flush suit. I'm going to have some flushes in my betting range and my checking range. I try to bluff with blockers but I don't understand them that well.

Yeah, the issue with only cbetting draws is that you have no bluffs to continue barreling turn with on a flush completing Q/J/T. Most regs will correctly overfold on these runouts