NL: Betting weak hands on the river

... in position.

This is one of those "common knowledge" things. You're not supposed to bet weak hands on the river in NL.

Why? In what situations is it actually good to bet a hand like TT on the river when someone has called two barrells on an ace-high board? Are there meta-game advantages? What about bet-sizing?

I'm not talking about bluffs. The bet is for value.

Party Poker No-Limit Hold'em, $50 Hero (6 handed) Hand History Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: Bet The Pot)

SB ($47.46)
Hero ($67.10)
UTG ($53.03)
MP ($40.42)
CO ($50)
Button ($28.75)

Preflop: Hero is BB with 9♠, 9♥. SB posts a blind of $0.25.
4 folds, SB (poster) raises to $0.75, Hero raises to $2, SB calls $1.50.

Flop: ($5) K♥, 10♥, 3♣ (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $3, SB calls $3.

Turn: ($11) 5♦ (2 players)
SB checks, Hero checks.

River: ($11) 8♥ (2 players)
SB checks, Hero...

When you say for value doesn't that mean you want him to call? Let me know if I am wrong about that.

Unless he hit the nut flush and wants you to bet into him he doesn't have much of anything - maybe a pair of 10's. So if you bet big and he calls you are beat and out some cash. If you bet big and he folds you may as well have checked for all you gained. In my opinion there is no bet you can make here and get called and win. If he has less than a pair of 9's he is folding to any bet. Unless he tries to bluff you with a check raise.

So since he already checked I would check too. I think it is too risky to hope he hit a pair of 8's and might play with you.

Right. In NL, this is a traditional case of "omg don't bet this river." In limit, I often get looked up by AQ/AJ/A9/66+ if I bet here. If these hands never call us in NL, then we should often bet here with Q-high, of course. But that's when it starts getting interesting:

Our opponents' only way of countering these river bluffs from us (where we bet with nothing) is to sometimes call with bluff catchers like small pairs or big ace hands. But here's the kicker: We can beat a bluff catcher.

I'm not arguing that I should bet this river, but I'm trying to understand what exactly the consequence is if I do. I expect him to fold the vast majority of the time, but what exactly is his range here and if I bet $4, what hands may call and what's my EV?

The consequences are that in NLH, your opponent might not just call, he may reraise, alot; much more than you want to call with 3rd pair, in which case you may have given up the best hand. Probably not, but maybe. More likely your beat and your last bet only served as a reward for patience. In this case, with 2 overcards, and a suited board, checking is a no-brainer. But how strong should your hand be before betting is the right move. I might do it with TPTK if I know my opponent is capable of callin 1 or 2 bets with 2nd pair, isn't likely to come over the top and if he sees me as overly aggressive and might try to snap off a bluff. How about on an obvious busted draw. In this case, betting is useless. He will not just call unless he has you beat. He might make a huge re-raise in which case it would become very expensive to find out if he's bluffing. One of my favorite poker quotes is that TPTK give implied odds, they don't get them.
Note that in the assumption here is that your in position against your opponent. OP, a blocking bet can sometimes control the size of the pot when you have a good but not great hand and you suspect your opponent will raise more than your willing to call if you check.

Regarding the huge re-raise, doesn't that door swing both ways? I mean, if we only bet strong hands on the river, clearly he's in big trouble if he ever makes a big checkraise (since we will always have the goods)? Part of my feeling about betting mediocre hands is that we want to encourage these kinds of bluffs so that we can snap them off when we actually do have something.

I feel like checking behind with mediocre hands should be the default play but that sometimes - mostly when it wouldn't make sense for us to have a huge hand, nor villain - I can make a small bet on the end. Imagine being up against a thinking opponent who takes a note on you saying that you bet 99 on a board like this on the river - and imagine how much fun you can have value betting his KT hands on A-high board to death before he catches on that you actually don't bet weak hands all that often.

I think I have to think more about this.

Well, is TPTK or even 2 pair "the goods"? If you've got the nuts, the real nuts, then clearly he is in big trouble, but unless you've already seen your opponent try to steal a pot this way can you safely assume that he isn't sitting on a bigger hand? I try not to get involved in big pots without big hands, and a single pair is rarely if ever a big hand on the river. With a hand like this I don't want to re-open the betting. I'm not sure that there is such a thing as betting a hand for value on the river (in nlh). I think a cheap showdown is the best value you can get.

The goods depending on the board, of course. TPTK is rarely it. Top-two usually does the trick, unless there are obvious draws that him home. That said, don't obvious draws work in our advantage since while it makes it scarier for us actually makes it scarier for him, too?

If I bet $5 on the river with a board like the one above, I don't think too many opponents will dare to come over the top without a very strong hand very often specifically because the flush draw hitting home, and I've played it like a flush draw. Of course, that means he should be less likely to call with AQ, 77, etc too.

My problem, if I could call it that, is feeling like I'm missing a whole lot of profit by checking the river in position and finding that my opponent has a weaker ace than I had. Or second pair. Or anything else that I know that he would have called a small bet with. There's got to be a way to sometimes extract value from these situations, is what I'm thinking.

But if he only has a weaker ace or second pair, then the max you can extract will be the max he's willing to risk with that hand, and now that all the cards are out, there might not be anything more he's willing to risk.

If you've misrepresented your hand as weaker than what he might have, or mixed it up so much he can't figure out what you have you might be able to get more. Maybe if you confuse him with a small river bet? I dunno, I'm just trying to throw some fuel on the fire.

i agree. i dont think people use their position to bluff players enough in situations like this.

his calling hands (KT, TT, KK, QJh, AJh)

hands he folds, J10, QJo, KQ, KJ, AK, QQ, JJ, etc. i think i like a bet here way more than a check.

this is most definetly a bet/fold situation, though.

Nice thread FP. Most of the time as Four Dogs said checking is usually the correct move, you thinking is flawed to an extent, to get your opponent to call with a worse hand means you bet sizing has to be small, and against a strong player it will be snapped off rapid

In the example above with your 99, what in earth did he call a PF raise with, call a C/Bet on the flop, and happly take a free river card with ? A weak King. ? (getting a call) a flush draw ? (getting reraised) A strong 10 (getting called) or an underpair/AQ type hand ? Checking behind here is what i certainly do, and to be honest the amount of times ive checked behind boards like this only to discover i was up agaist a tricky nut flush is unreal.

Converse to this, if you HAVE the nuts how much do you bet ? How many times have you been in this situation only to discover you opponent isnt prepared to put a single cent more in ? My logic may be flawed, considering im mainly playing full ring ATM, i say check.

I think it would be a really bad idea to bet here. One of the few hands I can see him having that he dumps if you bet is QJ... and then there's no point to betting because you win if you check behind, and you merely give him a chance to drive you out.

If he called your flop bet with a flush draw, he of course hit it. If he called with a T, he should call most river bets because your line looks weak. C-bet, check behind on board with draws, bet river when checked to again. It looks like either a flush or nothing, with the nothing being more likely probability-wise for obvious reasons.

As usual, we tend to give general answers to general questions for the general public. But since it's FP asking I think we need to dig a little deeper here. Of course there are exeptions to the conventionl wisdom of checking the river, and if you're cabable of 3rd and 4th level thinking then there may be opportunities to scratch out a few extra shekels, but there's no Eldorado here.

Now Joose, the question wasn't with what hands you should call or fold, but rather what hands you should bet with. In order to re-open the betting you need to have a very strong hand. Neither calling nor checking does this. I think your giving the bettor too much fold equity here. Depending on the size of your bet, there are many hands on your list of hands that should fold, that really should call. This is the time for multi-level thinking. The looser or more agressive you feel your opponent sees you, the broader you must assume his range of calling hands will be, possibly offsetting the risks of re-opening the betting. In the heat of battle, this may be a little beyond most of our abilities, mine for sure.
In poker, especially Hold'em, it rarely pays to be passive, but this is one of those time where I think it's correct.

Incidently, the way the betting transpired in FP's exaple, I might even be tempted to call a 1/2 pot sized bet with 8A or 8K, in this case a loser to FP's 99.

sorry, when i originally skimmed over the thread i didnt notice we checked behind on the turn. check here ;/

I've really got to start reading my own posts before I mail 'em off. It looks like Borat wrote it.

This is really a situational decision; there is no right or wrong answer. There are of course positions, opponents, and all that to justufy a creative play,but I'd need some real motivation to buck the conventional wisdom.

One of the reasons I bring this up is - if this wasn't obvious already - the disconnect that exists between limit and no-limit in terms of betting the river. If my hand had been JJ instead of 99 above, not betting the river would have been bad - really bad. But when it's NL, checking even JJ on this river would be the default play.

So what I'm thinking is this: There has to be a middle ground. Either limit players are reckless lagtards who will bet anything that even closely resembles a hand (check out the shorthanded 100/200 tables sometime, and you'll see what I mean), or no-limit players are wusses on the river.

Or there's something in between.

The major objection - in my understanding - to betting the river with mediocre hands in NL is that we're not ahead more than half the time that we're called, and therefore cannot bet profitably. But if NL players are actually so tight as to only call river bets with "good hands" then it seems to me that we ought to bluff the river an obscene amount of times. Virtually always, in fact. Or?

As you can tell, I'm mostly just poking at conventional wisdom and asking it to defend itself. I find I learn stuff when I do that.

That's where the confusion lay. It's not "only call the river with good hands." but rather "only bet the river with good hands."

I'm not sure I'm confused about that (although it's possible that I'm confused about what I'm confused about), but let's see where this reasoning gets me:

Let's say that it's virtually certain that my opponent won't checkraise me (for the sake of argument, play along).

If I'm in position after my opponent has checked the river then the only two things I need to take into account is

a) will he fold a better hand, and/or
b) will he call with a worse hand

If a decent NL player calls a lot on the river, but doesn't bet a lot - a viable strategy - then all we need to make sure is that we're >50% of his calling range when we bet with a legitimate hand. The 99 hand above probably isn't, since there are a lot more K/T/flush/PP hands that will call than there are smaller PPs and A8 or AQ UI type hands that will. But JJ is probably okay to bet in that spot as long as we're sure he won't checkraise bluff us. Or?

Let me phrase it differently:

If he calls me with weak hands, I must value bet more. If he calls me only with good hands, I must bluff more. And here's what I think was my intuitive feeling from the first post:

If I only bet when I have either strong hands or bluffing with nothing, then I make it a little too easy for my opponent to snap off my bluffs since "strong hands" are rare and often fairly obvious on the boards. For instance, if I raise preflop and bet the flop, check the turn, on a board like the one above - a flush makes sense. But exchange that last card for the 5 of clubs, and what could I possibly have on this river that I'd bet now that I check the turn with? An observant opponent must decide that I'm bluffing a large portion of the time here. However, if I make the range of hands that I'm doing this with slightly wider, and include medium strength hands (at least some of the time), he will lose money the times that he thinks I'm bluffing, presuming that my hand is good enough to beat the average bluff catcher.

I don't know if it's profitable.

well that depends on your image. slansky talks in one chapter about betting a predetermined card (both black kings when you are drawing to a completely different hand for instance) that falls even though it doesnt help you, because it increases the # of hands that you "win" with. if you check this turn when you have a wide range of hands, then doing so also with 99 and reopening the betting on the river is good.

if your bluff gets snapped, when you do so again with the flush or trips you will get paid off.

if he folds, your betting frequency can get you called with a much stronger hand.

it's win/win if you look at it in session-wide terms.

Good post FP. I was going to try to add one more thing, but I don't think we've left many stones unturned here so let me just recap.
1) for the most part you should be less willing to bet the river and more willing to call.
2) On those rare occasions where you feel your more than a 50% favorite, you should eschew conventional wisdom and bet.
3) As part of a well balanced strategy you should occasionaly bet instead of checking to avoid being an easy read.

Hear, hear!