Book Discussion: Theory of Poker, chapters 21 and 22

Heads-up on the end - valuebetting; why you should call with worse hands than you should bet; how to consider position
Reading hands - narrowing the range

This post is way overdue. Sorry about that.

NOTE: Please do not quote the book. This thread is to help broaden the understanding of the book, not rip off the copyright of it. Feel free to discuss, but try doing so without infringing on David Sklansky's and 2+2 Publishing's intellectual property rights. Thank you.

why you should call with worse hands than you should bet

There are a couple of reasons that you should do this.
1. If you check and call, you could win by having the best hand anyway and winning that bet from your opp.
2. You could win by picking off a bluff.
3.You also save a bet if your opp. was going to reraise your bet.

You also have to factor in what your chances are of having the best hand at this point. As mentioned in the book, if you think your chances are better than 50-50 you should call...

Xandit said:

You also have to factor in what your chances are of having the best hand at this point. As mentioned in the book, if you think your chances are better than 50-50 you should bet

Click to expand...

For calling, you only need to be as good as your pot odds, but for betting, you need to be better more than half the times.

you are correct. Sorry about that. this chapter is kind of hard to follow, if you reread the same part a couple times it kind of runs together...

There is just so much information in this chapter it's hard to think about what to say. There are so many options that you have when you are HU on the river. I think the main thing to take from this chapter is that you need a better hand to bet with than to call. You should only bluff if you think your opp will fold enough to make it profitable.
After all this info, We need to rember that if we have a bad hand and know we can not bluff the pot we need to just check and fold.

Playing the river heads-up, and out of position, is actually something I'm often more at ease with than being in position, at least when I have a good (but not monster) hand. Here's why:

I learned, from this chapter, that when I consider whether to check or bet the river when first to act I should take into consideration the possible hands my opponent could have and check if I think there's a big chance he either has me beat or has nothing This is a huge lesson to learn and will make you a lot of money if you take it to heart. If your opponent's most likely holding is something he will fold if you bet, it's better to check and let him try to bluff you out. If the river card may have improved him to a better hand than what you have, it's better to check and call, rather than bet and risk being raised. Of course, if you check with the intention of calling, you must be getting pot odds enough to call.

An example I posted a couple of months back (a thread which deteriorated into an argument about preflop ranges, but the first couple of posts deal with this topic):

https://www.cardschat.com/showthread.php?t=66996

I'll post the thread for the last chapters of the book in the beginning of the next week, when I'm back home again. Then I'll make a summary post of all the threads and get Nick to sticky it. I think there's more discussion to be had on a lot of the chapters, and it would be cool to go back and review them.