Online poker players should always think carefully when they’re deciding whether or not to bet.
Too often, people bet without being able to justify their action. Being able to back up your actions with logic and reason is key to being a successful online poker player.
In this article, we’ll look at when you should bet and when you shouldn’t. In the next article, we’ll look at how to decide on the size of your bets.
Reasons to Bet
There are several reasons to bet, but the majority of betting decisions will be based on the following two golden reasons:
1) Value: To make worse hands call.
2) Bluff: To make better hands fold.
A successful bet for either of these reasons will result in a profit. Most other reasons for making a bet (including betting for information or to end the hand now) are likely to be incorrect, and will lose your money.
Before deciding whether to bet or not, you should first take a little time to think about several things:
1) What hands will call me if I bet?
2) What hands will fold if I bet?
3) If I make a bet, how will I respond to a raise?
4) If my bet gets called, what is my plan for the next street?
Answering these questions will help you to decide whether you’re betting for value or as a bluff.
Value-betting
A value-bet is a bet which will be called by worse hands than yours.
One of the biggest mistakes that most players have in their game when starting out is that they don’t value-bet enough.
At the lower stakes in online poker, players will call bets far too often. For this reason, improving your value-betting skills is one of the most important things to improve to increase your profits.
Remember that every time your opponent puts money into the pot with a worse hand than yours, you make money.
Let’s look at an example.
The game is a No Limit Texas Holdem with 9 players. You can view the hand here.
The players are currently sitting at the game with the following amounts of money:
CO (starting position): $184.45
BTN (button): $98.50
SB (small blind): $101.00
BB (big blind): $116.70
UTG (under the gun): $50.00
UTG+1(under the gun +1) : $102.90
UTG+2 (under the gun +2): $41.00
MP1 (middle position +1): $100.00
MP2 (middle position +2): $154.30
Pre Flop: MP2 has Ace of Spades and Ace of Clubs. 4 players fold, MP2 raises to $3. Another player folds, then BTN calls $3 and 2 more players fold.
Flop: Two players are left. The flop cards are 2 diamonds, 8 clubs and 7 clubs. MP2 bets $4 and BTN calls $4.
Turn: Still 2 players. The additional card is 3 spades. MP2 bets $10 and BTN calls $10.
River: The card is 2 spades. MP2 bets $20, BTN calls $20.
Final pot: There is now $65.50 in the Final pot.
BTN shows two pairs, Tens and Deuces (i.e a pair of tens and a pair of twos)
MP2 shows two pairs, Aces and Deuces (i.e a pair of aces and a pair of twos).
MP2 wins $62.50
(Rake: $3.00)
In this hand MP2 made four value-bets, each time knowing that his opponent was capable of calling with a lot of hands that he beat. Preflop is an obvious value-bet because we have the best hand 100% of the time.
Each bet postflop is also a fairly easy value-bet. Although there’s a possibility that MP2’s opponent will have a better hand, the chances are low. BTN may call with a flush-draw, a straight-draw, an eight or a worse overpair.
Bluffing
A bluff is a bet which forces hands that are better than yours to fold.
Bluffing is often seen as the exciting and glamorous part of poker, but in reality it is nowhere near as important as value-betting, especially until you are playing amongst much more sophisticated opponents.
As we've already pointed out, most players tend to call too much, so bluffing just doesn’t work enough against them. Nevertheless there are still positions where bluffing will work.
The most obvious of these is the continuation bet. This is where you raise preflop, then make a bet on the flop regardless of whether you hit it or not. This is a common strategy that works well because you are appearing strong throughout, and it is unlikely that your opponent will have hit the flop well enough to call a bet.
Semi-bluffing
Semi-bluffing is similar to bluffing but is a much more powerful tool. We are still aiming to get better hands to fold, but when we semi-bluff, we have a chance to improve to a better hand ourselves.
This means that if our bluff fails and we get called, we still have an escape plan.
How much?
Now that we've discussed the reasons that we make our bets, it’s time to look at the amounts that we bet. This will be covered in the next article: How much to bet.
