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Old 09-26-2007, 10:00 AM
Pokey Pokey is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2005
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Default Re: NL 50 valuebet river here?

Reasons to value bet:

1. Villain is passive. You're less likely to face a check-raise against a passive villain, which would make you hate your life.

2. Your hand is decent. Villain's range is wide enough to include lots of one-pair hands, which you beat.

3. The flush missed. If villain was on a combo draw it didn't get there, and villain can talk himself into calling with A[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] 9[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] or some such crap.


Reasons for checking behind:

1. Your opponent is passive. He's not automatically betting a hand that beats yours, but he's probably calling with it.

2. We don't have enough information to know what kind of villain he is. After 30 hands, you don't even know his name, much less his postflop playing style. If he caught a couple rounds of strange hands, this could be a TAG, a LAG, a nit, a rock, a maniac, or any other kind of opponent. Knowing nothing about an opponent makes it MUCH harder to value bet the river this thinly.

3. An incredibly obvious and entirely likely draw just made it. Any single, solitary queen just made a straight. If villain isn't blind he can spot that, and it will make him more hesitant to call without something "decent." (Oddly enough, villains can talk themselves into calling here with two pair and sets to "keep you honest," but they have a harder time calling with one pair hands; strange lil' buggers.) Also, many of villain's holdings include a queen. Also, many villains love to slowplay, even on the river. Checking with a queen with the intent to raise is entirely in character with a semi-passive player's behavior. If he's REALLY passive, he could easily check/call with the queen, worried that you have AQ.

4. Against villain's range, you're on some shaky ground. If villain's holding is "any two broadway" you're behind: most of those holdings turned into two pair or the straight by now. Worse yet, the holdings that you DO beat are going to either be missed flushes (which mostly fold this river) or very weak one-pair hands that are going to be afraid of that river card (and which mostly fold this river).

Finding value on this river is hard. I think a very tiny bet gets called here by weaker hands sometimes, but it opens you up to a check-raise that you cannot answer. As such, I check behind in this situation until I know the villain better.

In order to bet this river, I'd want to know:

- Villain wins at showdown infrequently
- Villain doesn't check-raise rivers often
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