Why are you not betting the flop?

If you barrel flop and turn 44-TT probably has to fold. You raised SB's limp and Q and J showed up on the flop. Perfect spot to barrel.

id fold here, he isnt going to be totally polarized, hes gonna have a lot of Qx in his range especially BvB, also Jx is a huge part of his range. he could have been going for a c/r on the flop as well.

thank you for all the comments thus far guys. glad it's gotten some of you thinking.

as this this comment, I did try to make that clear, especially in the CBing section, to NOT pole against fish and station-TAGs. also tried to make sure I hammered that in with "dont be on level 2 when your opponent is on level 0". Hopefully that sinks in for people, lol

TY, nice post.

Thanks for the replies guys. I felt like the Flop hit his range pretty well and I didn't feel comfortable double barreling. But yeah, a C-Bet probably would have worked enough times and a double barrel also, since draws make up a good part of his range.

But anyway on the River I thought his range is pretty polarized to Jx,33 and bluffs, missed draws. I don't expect him to pot with a Q on the River a lot. On the other hand, villains don't tend to double barrel bluff too much.

I called, he had 94. Obviously doesn't mean it was correct though.

wow great post, it's the first time I read a whole COTW.

I often see this situation on the river against a player that bet a huge amount out of nowhere, for a hud-bot, it's a quick fold, but when thinking about polarized range, you might reconsider.

This why in tech manuals you have to put:

WARNING: Polarizing a cbet against 90% of the players you run into in the micros can cause death to your bankroll.

WARNING: Playing level 2 poker against level 0 thinkers will cause you to lose the hand.

.... processing complete....

Great CoW Split! Thank you for putting this together!



This hand was from a player that has the stats of 26/11/0/0 (vpip/pr/af/afq). This is over 38 hands without ever showing down a hand. Of the 10 voluntarily put money in the pot, he folded 2 time pf (to 3bet), he folded on the flop 5 times, turn 2, and river 1. At the time of this hand, he had not called the river.

Poker Stars $0.02/$0.05 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players
The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked.com

UTG: $1.33
UTG+1: $5.63
UTG+2: $6.27
MP1: $5.63
MP2: $10.00
CO: $2.90
BTN: $8.41
Hero (SB): $6.97
BB: $3.66

Pre Flop: ($0.07) Hero is SB with A A
2 folds, UTG+2 raises to $0.45, 4 folds, Hero raises to $1.37, 1 fold, UTG+2 calls $0.92

Flop: ($2.79) K 2 5 (2 players)
Hero bets $2.15, UTG+2 raises to $4.30, Hero calls $2.15

Turn: ($11.39) 5 (2 players)
Hero checks, UTG+2 checks

River: ($11.39) 8 (2 players)
Hero checks, UTG+2 bets $0.35, Hero calls $0.35


Questions on above hand: Since I was not able to see any shown down hands, is it possible to polarize his range? What range would you polarize his range to? With a player like this, how wide do you think his polarized range to be?

Other General polarization questions: How many hands before you get a feel for a person's range and how polarized it is? Is this more of a feel based or more on statistic HUD numbers? What other areas, besides 3bet, CB-ing, and VB-ing, are good areas to think about when thinking about polarization?

[ ] understands polarization

[ ] understands sarcasm.

[x] good use of check boxes

lol sammy wins this thread

Agreed.

[x] But Ricepaw1226 should have used a text box.

[x] plus one

Nice post split

Shove the flop plz. ur leveling urself.

there's also $.60 left behind after he the minr.

great post you must be a genuis

Great read, thank you for putting this together!

thanks for the compliments everyone

so let's say i'm 3betting 7%. and i'm 3betting for value only with KK+, AK. does that mean that i should 3bet less than 7% against better players b/c my range is weighted to much on one side(bluffs)? but against players who just fold all the time i don't care about such things and still 3b a ton of trash?

in a sense, yes

Great cotw split.

I hope that people start polarizing their calling ranges vs me on the river. Call with the nuts and air, and fold everything else

Great post split thanks a lot for this, been waiting for it long time

Ok, I still don't understand a lot of this. To make things easier let's assume there are no cards to come. Polarization makes sense to me in the following situation:

• We're in position
• It is checked to us
• Our possible bet won't put us all-in

In other situations it's not so clear to me.

I like to visualise my ranges graphically - strong hands on the left, weak hands on the right. So in the above situation, if for a moment we don't bluff, our range looks like

valuebet | check behind

(so we valuebet our strongest hands, and check the rest behind)

If we decide we need to bluff a certain percentage of the time we pick hands at the lower end of the checking range since we don't lose any value if we have to fold to a check-raise.

valuebet | check behind | bluff

Now let's look at a different scenario. Again we're in position on the river, this time facing a bet. The pot size is such that we have only three options: folding, calling, or shoving. Once more, if we only consider value bets our range looks like

valueshove | call | fold

Now if we want to shove as a bluff we choose hands that we would usually fold. We don't pick calling hands (need to work out why), so the bluffs come from our folding range. Since we expect to lose when called it doesn't really matter which hands we pick. However, our chances of beating a bluff catcher are of course higher the better our hands are. Thus we bluff with the top of our folding range.

valueshove | call | bluff | fold

Not sure if this makes any sense and how this ties into polarization. Also this is all probably quite trivial. However, any comments or clarifications are welcome.