Alright, folks. Time to wrap this series up.

This is going to be loooooong.

Previous posts: Part I - Part II - Part III

Brief summary (again):

$1/$2 NLHE, with stacks over $200. MP opened to 3xBB with AQ preflop. Only Button made the (arguable) call with A9s. The flop was Q-7-3, two spades, giving MP top pair, top kicker and Button flopped the nut flush draw. MP opted to bet the pot ($12) and Button called.

The pot is $36.

Last time, in Part III, I looked at what I thought would be a likely outcome if the turn card was a brick and how Button should act. This time, Button hits his wanted flush. What’s MP supposed to do, first to act?

The turn card is the 8♠.

The original plan was to bet half the pot and give up unimproved. What do you think of that plan?

This is not a good card for MP, which probably goes without saying, given that we know that it completed the flush for Button. But MP doesn’t have to know that Button already got there in order to dislike this card. The combined risk that he now has the worst of it and that may be drawing dead AND that if he’s still ahead his opponent just picked up 9 outs is pretty disheartening.

That’s not the worst part though. The really bad part is that MP has no idea which of the two it could be. Here’s MP’s awful predicament:

If Button has a flush draw, then MP must bet to protect it. But if Button is a tricky (and, frankly, good) player, he may raise here with a hand like KQ with the king of spades. Button could very well make that raise to both protect his hand against the ace of spades and get more value in while ahead. He might also make a semibluff with the naked ace of spades.

And, of course, Button will definitely raise his monsters now that there’s a flush draw on the table. If he has a set, clearly he wants to charge the flush draw properly for the privilege of drawing.

The only hands that are likely to give up completely to anything but a large bet are the ones that already are very far behind: The medium pocket pairs. Even there, one of those hands just got there and outdrew him (8-8).

In short, MP’s hand just turned to a huge loser, no matter where he turns. That is, if Button is capable of making a move. If MP is up against a very straightforward (and passive) Button, then betting becomes a very decent option and this hand is still very able to win money in the long run. Betting half the pot (and giving up if a fourth flush card hits the river) is almost certainly +EV if we can safely fold - meaning that we can trust that we’re beat - when we’re raised.

But if our opponent is tricky, the situation is completely different. This demonstrates how valuable the bluff is in No-limit hold ‘em. And if not the bluff, then at least the threat of a bluff. That’s all it takes for someone to make a bad call. Look here:

If Button will raise every time he makes the flush, and every time he already has us beat (AA, KK, sets), and raises sufficiently to outprice any draw we may think we have (which ranges from dead to five outs, so really any real raise) AND, say, 20% of the time as some kind of a semi-bluff (or believing that he raises for value) with a weaker hand then we find that he will raise with 27 hands out of the possible 59 (see last post). Most of the time (19 of 27), he actually has a hand, and the other 8 times, he will have outs (a redraw to a spade flush or two pairs or even a set of jacks) to beat us.

If he makes a decent but not huge bet, offering us maybe 3:1 on a call, then we might be okay to call that raise - but only if he was out of chips. This is the problem with our crappy position. We don’t know that he won’t make another bet on the river (and with his strong hands, of course he will!) and so despite being marginally +EV in calling a smallish raise because of the pot size, the next betting round is almost certainly going to be -EV for us. And if he makes a larger sized raise, we’re definitely in bad shape to call.

Frankly, calling a raise is asking for trouble. But how to avoid this trouble?

We could check/fold the turn. Perhaps realizing that our position is bad and that we have a mediocre hand is enough to persuade us to take the least expensive way out… And take up bridge. At the point of making the decision to check, we’re still ahead of Button’s range. Come on, now.

So what about check/calling? This is the move I like the best if

a) Our opponent is a aggressive, but plays the river tightly (there are a lot of players like these, actually).
b) We check/fold the river (i.e. fold to any more aggression), but we haven’t done this often or even before this session.

It’s true that checking risks giving a free card, but giving a free card is actually better for us than being raised off the pot with the best hand, and if our opponent checks behind on the turn, we can relatively safely call a bet on a non-spade river. Of course, our opponent may also bet the turn in which case we’re faced with a potentially dangerous situation, but if he’s aggressive and will bet with a majority of his hands (i.e. not just the hands that beat us but also a fair share of the ones that don’t) and he bets only about half the pot, then calling is +EV if we can safely fold to a river bet. Presumably, he will bet his strong hands again on the river, but check behind with KQ/QJ/JJ/TT and possibly even AQ, and we can then safely fold. Also, we should check/fold any spade on the river.

But what about opponents that don’t fit this description? We’re in trouble no matter what we do. But if we lead the turn with the intention of folding to a raise, we can at least make a little bit of an attempt to bet less than we normally would. It’s true that a smaller bet gives a potential flush draw (like the naked ace of spades) more attractive odds, but at this point, we should be more careful with conserving our remaining chips in our stack than the ones we have already put in the pot.So

So, usually, MP bets $16. If called and the river is not a spade, then check/calling is often the best idea.

What should Button do, now that MP has bet into him when Button just turned the nuts?

Button’s job is now to try to somehow get all the chips into the middle. This is not an easy task given the small bet that MP led out with. Why is it so small? Is it some kind of a blocking bet? Button’s problem is that he realizes that he has to raise now, not on the river. If the river is another spade, it will kill the action. He must raise now. But how much?

What kinds of hands would be willing to call any raise whatsoever? Clearly we don’t have to worry about the times that MP has absolutely nothing, since we won’t win anything else from him those times anyway (barring calling here and praying that he makes a big bluff on the river), but what could he have that he would be willing to pay off a little something with? AQ, KQ, AA and KK, of course. If it’s QQ, we can presume that a lot of money will go in if we raise, so we probably don’t have to worry about that (unless MP is weak-tight and fears the flush just because another flush card hit). How do we extract the most money from AQ/KQ/AA/KK? Raising about half the pot could do the trick. Given that we have the case ace, it’s unlikely that MP will feel like he has any redraws so if he senses that he’s behind, he is likely to fold. Our best chance of being called is if we can represent a bluff or a semi-bluff.

How much would I raise if I was bluffing? Enough to make it believable. Yet not more than I have to, since I’m supposed to act like I want to conserve my chips if my bluff is called. We’re in weird territory here, psychological warfare at its finest, but when he bet $16 the pot ended up at $52. If we make it $35 to go, we’re offering MP $85:$35, or 2.4:1. Maybe that’s enticing enough to look us up.

The problem with that, though, is that it leaves too much “behind” in our stack. I touched on this earlier in this post.

Question to you, reader: Do you have an idea of how much is left in their respective stacks if they both started with 100 BBs? Good players often form an idea of this automatically (although online sites will of course tell you directly). Yet, it’s the most important piece of information currently available, and chances are you don’t know what they are and haven’t yet thought to wonder about it. Food for thought.

MP has $166 left.

Button, before acting on the turn, has $182.

If Button makes a $35 raise, he will still have $147 left in his stack. To MP, that’s must be considered a serious threat. If MP is a solid player, he will realize that he’s not just paying $35 now, but he must consider the fact that he may be faced with another $147 to pay before seeing a showdown. That makes calling a bit less likely.

Here, I think we may ignore the higher orders of thinking lest we out-think ourselves. But the reason I point this out is so that when you’re in MP’s shoes, I want you to look not just at how big the current bet you have to call is, but also how much is “left behind” because the more that is left behind, the more the implicit cost of the call is. Be wary of this.

So, our raise should probably be along the lines of $35. It’s right on the border of “begging for a call” and “I could be bluffing,” in my mind. (If you’re Button, you should balance this raise with occasional semi-bluffs with a one-card flush draw and make those raises the same relative size.)

I could go on and on. This series has already far surpassed the size I expected it to, simply because there’s so much to say on the subject. Unfortunately, I must stop somewhere, and this seems a decent enough place to do it.

So, for the last time I ask: What do you think?