Overbetting against possible draws

My problem is - I imagine that villain who are calling my raises may have a draw when board is wet. So, if I have 2 pairs or set on a wet board I hugely over bet, just to be sure that villain with possible draw fold.
I understand that more profitable play would be pot size bet allowing him to stay in the pot with unfavorable odds, but two possible outcomes scares me:
1) villain completes his draw and I have to fold or lose huge
2) villain represents that he hit the draw and I have to fold.

Over betting against draws is the right play.

yep you have to protect your hand...just play in the pot when you believe his/her range plays a pair or something even small.

it depends on the players, really.
there are some players that call you with a draw if you go all in on the flop
and there are others that fold when you bet the pot so you get the idea.

if i don't know what kind of players they are,i just focus on getting the pot

its a hard job try to guess if the villain has the draw or not considering he/she is not a beginner.

over bet a pot is never a good player. think of the pot as something that you want to buy, if you wanna buy a bike that is $100 and you offer $50 and get this bike this is a good achievement, although do you really would like to pay 150 to buy a $100 dollars bike? it makes no sense.

this is how i see overbetting a pot

You don't need to size that large. In MTT's I like to size 2/3 to 3/4 pot on wet boards where our hand needs a lot of protection like in the situation you are describing.

For example let's say you have KK and you open from UTG and the BB flats and the flop is 567dd and you don't have the king of diamonds. This is a flop which could certainly hit a BB defend range, he will have lots of one pair hands, draw hands etc. so it's not wrong to make villain pay to continue. Overbetting looks really weak though and if I had a pair + draw or some sort of nutted draw I would snap get it in vs you because it's clear you don't want a call.

Generally speaking we want to size roughly 1/3 pot on boards where our hand needs little protection/ standard cbet bluffs and 2/3-3/4 pot in spots like this where we need to protect.

If the hand has "pull" you should and could overbet. If the hand does not have pull on you, meaning you easily fold when the draw and bet comes at you, then you should give unfavorable odds.

Stu Ungar was famous for his over bets and all the AI poker use over bets....so it definitely has some place in optimal play.

playinggameswithu said:

If the hand has "pull" you should and could overbet. If the hand does not have pull on you, meaning you easily fold when the draw and bet comes at you, then you should give unfavorable odds.

Stu Ungar was famous for his over bets and all the AI poker use over bets....so it definitely has some place in optimal play.

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Overbets work really nice on rivers where we want calls and expect our opponents calling range to be static, meaning that no matter how much we bet whether it be 1/10 pot or full pot or more than pot, they will look us up. So if we are nutted and we think they have a static calling range an overbet will take them to value town. Overbetting to scare away draws isn't optimal, we want to get called by draws we just want to make them pay to see the next card.

Look, I know it may sound like a cliche, but trust your intuition in such cases.

great_young said:

Look, I know it may sound like a cliche, but trust your intuition in such cases.

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I disagree, trust the information you have gathered on the villain. Have they been playing for draws or not? Do they hold out for the river when trying to chase draws or will they fold if you put the pressure on them.


What you want to do is get them to make the tough decision not you. Perhaps over betting the pot is not a good idea early in the game when you are still gathering information on the villain. But once you start seeing their tendencies then you can start over betting to try and take the pot. Watch out though the villain may just see what you are doing and keep setting up traps.


Someone who understands odds calculations better than me may correct me on this, but I think I'm close. They will only make the draw 1 out of 4 times. So I'd say you're not wrong in putting on the pressure. How much you bet is your choice based on your comfort level and willingness to risk. But I'd suggest taking some of the advice of keeping the bets to 1/2 or 2/3 the pot. That way if they hit the draw you still have a stack left to play with for the other three times the villain will miss the draw.

You got a point here, I admit. But what I've observed is, that really good players change their style of play throughout the game. It gets extremely difficult to guess what they have. I'm not saying that gathering info and thinking over the situation is a bad thing, but in this case I'd (mostly) prefer counting on my inner voice.

bmw13 said:

yep you have to protect your hand...just play in the pot when you believe his/her range plays a pair or something even small.

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It's not that we're trying to protect our hands against draws...we want opponents to play their worse hands against us and definitely want them to chase with incorrect odds to call and chase.

So overbets are good when we know opponent either a.) doesn't know/care about odds while on a draw, b.) thinks we're bluffing when they hold a hand.

So if they're chasing a draw and will happily call an overbet...by all means charge them as much as you can. But if they won't call a big bet, you can still bet smaller while giving them incorrect odds to continue. But remember we want them to chase!

The only time I generally won't bet my decent hand on a wet board is when there's players left to act that I'm sure will likely bet, then I can check raise them. As the game has advanced, even basic players will bet their draws to try to build pots and/or throw you off.

quick said:

It's not that we're trying to protect our hands against draws...we want opponents to play their worse hands against us and definitely want them to chase with incorrect odds to call and chase.

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On wet boards we do bet made hands to protect against draws. Protecting against draws doesn't mean we want draws to fold it means we are attempting to force villain to pay a higher price in speculation vs our already realized equity.

Thanks you made "quick" to understand what i tryed to explain.

Having a set, i just was killed by a draw on the river. Betting Flop and Turn, and as always happened River brought one of the 8 outs. Boom out of the tournament. How to protect your hand if there is one calling station that get lucky? Should i drop a set? on the turn or river. Cause if it is hard to fold AA o KK, folding a set is not easy at all.

You want your opponent to make mistakes in poker. If they make mistakes you have the advantage. If you bet too big for them to have the odds to call and they fold, they did not make a mistake.

it did hapend to me twice today first time he went on all in just for the draw and he got it, second time i didn't want to go all in he made the draw, made a bet and i had to pay him, at least second time i wasn't eliminated. So nothing works rely just luck.

Yes, I would overbet like you, but online poker being what it is , you will probably lose if your opponent has a larger stack. For some reason, online poker has a big stack bias among other concerns to consider.

I do not care that my opponent has a 3 percent chance of beating me according to the poker odds. Based on 13 years of online poker, my opponent will win a minimum 33 percent of the time with the hand you describe.