Thoughts on when and when not to c-bet

Due to "circumstances" I cannot play poker right now, and, being a little bored (and more inclined to actually think about poker rather than play), I decided to write this up.

To clarify for new players, a c-bet, or continuation bet, is a bet made on the flop by the preflop raiser regardless of whether or not s/he connected with the flop. It works on the principle that the majority of times your opponent will also have missed the flop and so your preflop initiative should enable you to win the pot on the flop when all players missed. A c-bet is typically about 2/3-3/4 pot in a cash game and typically 1/2-2/3 in a tournament game. The reason for this difference is that the blind to stack ratio in tournament games is much higher, and, as such, less chips are required to commit or semi-commit a player to a pot. I think alot of players probably don't c-bet near enough, and I also think alot of players probably just blindly c-bet every hand, and are often spewing chips by doing so. So this is a post primarily to help out newer players, and also to get some discussion about the subject from more experienced players. Feel more than free to disagree with anything that I have said here.

So, what are the factors when considering whether or not to c-bet?

Number of players in the pot, the stakes of the particular game, flop texture, your image/the image and tendencies of your opponent, and pot control/preserving SD value/WA-WB situations. Many of these factors are multi-faceted and actually encompass several concepts.

Number of players in the pot:

This really is a no-brainer, and is probably the most important thing to consider when deciding whether or not to c-bet. A 3 or 4 way pot greatly increases the chances that somebody called preflop with a good hand and increases the likelihood that somebody connected with the flop in some way. In general, you want to be c-betting a missed flop very often when HU, fairly infrequently without strong reads in 3 way pot, and basically never in a 4 way pot. So preflop raise sizing comes into this to a strong degree. If you are in MP with AK and have 2 limpers, you need to make a very strong raise to try and isolate and to gain position post flop. An ideal situation is where you raise 6 or 7xbb and either pick up the pot there, or one of the early limpers comes along for the ride. You are very likely to be able to pick up the pot on the flop in such a case. However, if you raise 4 or 5xbb and get the button + one of the early limpers to call, then you are in a horrid situation unless you hit the flop because you are OOP and in a multiway pot.

Stakes of the game:

This is probably not something commonly thought about when dealing with c-bet frequencies. The stakes affect c-betting in several ways.

At higher stakes:
-Players are more inclined to use some form of stat tracking/HUD. So if your c-bet % is 90, there is a good chance alot/most of the players on the table are aware of this fact and will take steps to exploit it.
-There are more regs. This is somewhat related to the previous point, in the sense that there are going to be some players that are familiar with your play/have many hands of you playing, and so are more likely to pick up on leaks.
-Players are, in general, smarter and better poker players. They are far more likely to be assigning fairly accurate hand ranges to your play and are more likely to be able to outplay/bluff you and pick up on any leaks in your play. For instance, in NL25 there is a very good chance that your average opponent isn't paying that much attention, doesn't have a HUD and so probably doesn't know what your c-bet%/pfr or steal% is anyways, and is more likely to play their cards than to try to outplay you. In NL400, there is a very good chance that your average opponent is well aware that you c-bet at x%, is well aware of your pfr% from a given position and so has an idea of your pf range, and is much more likely to make a move on you with absolutely nothing given the right flop texture. If you c-bet at 90%+ in NL25 (taking care to avoid obvious –EV c-betting spots) you probably won’t suffer at all; however, such a high c-bet% in NL400 is probably going to get you absolutely run over by good regs because it is an exploitable leak.
Plenty of players at micro stakes are going to call with a hand like TQs no matter what, and fold to almost any c-bet if they completely miss. On the flip side, there also tend to be alot of calling stations/players who give c-bets absolutely no respect at micro stakes. So this works both ways. However, in general I believe that it is better to have a higher c-bet% in lower stake games than in higher stake games. There is little need to mix it up in lower stake games, because players are thinking about their cards and are either likely to fold to a c-bet unless they hit hard, or are inclined to call c-bets all day long with basically nothing. They will tend to exhibit the same patterns regardless of the person doing the c-betting. In higher stake games, where players are paying attention and will abuse leaks in your game, it is very important to mix it up and this will be developed in a further section.

Flop texture:

As with the previous factor, this is more applicable to slightly higher stake games, where players are actually thinking about what you have. Ideally you want a flop that is likely to have hit your range. So if you are a relatively TAG sort of player, that probably means that the flop includes at least one broadway card and ideally Q+. If the flop comes K J 5, and your opponent has something like 88, they are probably going to have to fold to a c-bet even if you missed the flop with a hand like AQ/AT etc. because that flop hits your range pretty hard. If however, the flop comes 9 5 4 and your opponent is holding 33, there is a good chance that a decent opponent is going to play back at your c-bet (if you have a high c-bet%) because this misses most of your range and you really have to be holding a big pp in order to be ahead here. It is not easy to convince a player you are always holding an overpair on a dry flop when you have a very high c-bet%. An A on the flop tends to be good even if you have a hand like QJ/KQ etc. because often players seem to auto-assume that raise = an A and so these flops are easy to c-bet. An ace on the flop is also good because alot of players are inclined to fold rag aces preflop simply because of the “raise = AK” reasoning…there is a good chance if they hit they are outkicked and there is little chance of winning without hitting TP because they aren’t going to be able to semi-bluff with draws. So an A or K “hits” your range pretty squarely (even if you don't have either in your hand) and probably misses your opponents a fair bit of the time.
Try to avoid c-betting flops that you think have probably hit your opponent’s range fairly hard. This often includes draw heavy boards, such as J T 9 w/ a FD, because players will often be calling with suited connectors and the like, and so a flop like this may very well put them on an OESD or FD or give them things like a pair + SD/2 pair etc. Opponents will show up with hands like QJ/QT/JT/T9/98/87/FDs quite a bit here. It is a lot harder for players to play a FD/OESD if you check behind on the flop, than if you allow them to c/r flop, and lead the turn with a draw (or take a free turn card) or other lines. Simply put, it is harder for your opponent to lead out on a blank turn with a drawing hand when the % of hitting their hand has dropped from ~1/3 to ~1/5 and they really have very little information on your hand other than you chose not to c-bet the flop. Much of this is read dependent, however, as some players may only call your pfr with big aces/bigger pps/QK, some may tend to call with s/cs/small pps and some players may call with rag aces, K9+ etc, QT+ etc. and so you have adjust ranges as best you can.

Your opponent:

In general, it is a better idea to c-bet vs. tighter players with mid-range AFs and low c-bet call%s. Looser players often have tendencies of calling stations or being very aggressive, neither of which are good opponents to be c-betting into when you miss. Calling stations are unlikely to fold and LAG players are much more likely to try and bluff you, which isn’t going to be incredibly difficult if you have nothing. So c-betting is rarely profitable in these situations. Adjusting is very important if these players are somewhat competent, however (ie. they call your c-bet so much that you stop c-betting when you miss, they pick up on this and don’t pay you off when you do c-bet, so you have to start c-betting more, etc.), but often the players you need to be wary of c-betting because of leaks in their game don’t have the sense to slow down/stop calling when you show a willingness to put chips in the middle. So things to look for are very high or very low AFs, high c-bet call%/low flop aggression and/or a high flop aggression. A very high AF and high flop aggression means it is very likely they will play back at you on the flop and then probably continue on the turn (LAG) while a very low AF, high c-bet call% and low flop aggression means that they are probably a calling station and unwilling to fold to a c-bet. Stick to value betting the calling stations and letting the manaics hang themselves rather than wasting chips trying to bluff/semi-bluff these players. Even if you think you are ahead of a maniac’s range, you might be better off check/calling to the river instead of risking a huge pot. Other players you might want to sometimes avoid c-betting missed flops are tricky players who you don’t think you have much of a chance outplaying postflop.

Pot control/preserving SD value/WA-WB situations

What I mean in these circumstances, is that you have a hand that has showdown value, but is either not particularly strong (so you want a small pot and certainly don’t want to get c/r on the flop) or is WA/WB. If you are new to poker and aren’t aware of the concept of WA/WB, basically it means “way ahead or way behind” and describes a situation where you either have the best hand by miles or you are miles behind. The idea behind checking behind in this situation is that you can’t really get a call out of a worse hand, and are losing all your *normally very significant* SD value if you bet and are raised off the pot by a better head. A common example is that you hold KK, raise preflop and are called by 1 player. Flop comes A 7 5 and it is checked to you. If you bet here, you fold out all the hands you crush and are only realistically called with an A. If you check behind, you can induce a turn bluff (and therefore you extract value from hands you would have folded out on the flop) but are still able to keep the pot small. You can then re-evaluate whether to call a river bet or take the free check if given. Another example of trying to preserve SD value is if you raise from the button with QT and the flop comes AQ5. You have SD value here, but if you bet and are raised on the flop you are in an awful situation. So checking behind and pot control is probably your best bet. There will be other situations where you might have some sort of a marginal draw (gutshot + 2 overs + backdoor flush for example) but if you get c/r on the turn you are in a bad situation.

Your image:

Again, this is applicable primarily in higher stake games. All I really mean by this is it is important to ensure that you don’t have any big leaks in your game. You need to make sure you don’t have an incredibly high c-bet% to prevent good players exploiting this leak. However, it is also important to balance lines where you don’t c-bet the flop with missed hands/2nd pair type hands and big hands. It is fine to check behind in some of the above examples, but if you never show up with overpair/TPTK/set type hands when playing the exact same line, then this is just as exploitable as c-betting every flop no matter what. Players need to be second-guessing as to whether a check behind on a 3 6 9 flop means you have AJ or have AA. It is a good idea to mix up your pf play as well because obviously that makes it harder to pin your range, and obviously this makes it harder for your opponent to figure out whether or not the flop is likely to have hit your range.

So as a general conclusion, I would say that if you are only playing 50NL or less for example, then you probably don’t have to worry about issues such as your cbet%/pfr range, and other factors such as flop texture are unlikely to be particularly significant either (depends where you play however). So long you resist c-betting the wrong types of players or c-betting on particularly bad flops you will probably do quite alright. I personally don’t think that a very high c-bet% is a problem at lower stakes. If you intend to move up stakes at a later stage, however, you’ll need to realise that while something may not be a problem now, vs. good poker players it may turn out to be a huge leak that must be addressed.

As a side note, this is intended mainly for cash games, and I guess it can be adapted to SnG games as well. HU is much different so don’t try to adapt anything written here to HU.

Wow...now that I look at this posted I cannot believe I rambled on for this long.

...and not too long. Thanks.

Very nice post. Was a good read.

why can you not play poker?