Bet sizing for value when bad cards come

Let me start with an example.

Playing HU, your opponent opens, you call with JTo. Flop comes J85 two tone. It checks through. Your best guess is that this opponent will check pps that missed, some 5's and bad 8's, and some ace highs. He cbets 60-65% and cbets a most of his air.

Turn comes a 3, doesn't complete flush. You bet close to pot and he calls. River comes a 5.

What bet size do you make here relative to the pot? If you have A5 do you bet any differently?

Curious to hear peoples opinions.

I think this would probably qualify as a way ahead way behind situation and betting close to half pot or maybe even a lil under would probably be best. We could try to extract the maximum value from his calling range and lose less to his stronger value range. I guess the considerations would be how deep we are and how prone he is to bluffing the river to this bet size given that he might know that we are bet/folding a large amount of the time.

Originally Posted by shakesss

I think this would probably qualify as a way ahead way behind situation and betting close to half pot or maybe even a lil under would probably be best. We could try to extract the maximum value from his calling range and lose less to his stronger value range. I guess the considerations would be how deep we are and how prone he is to bluffing the river to this bet size given that he might know that we are bet/folding a large amount of the time.

Every river is a way ahead/way behind situation because you are always either 100% to win or 0% to win so I don't see how that is relevant.

I would bet a similar amount with both A5 and JT here...probably around 3/4 pot. The people I play against tend to call down light in these spots.

Without reads I'd just bet a standard 3/4 pot amount. I think that size will be the most +EV. A smaller bet will prob get called by more hands, but I don't think significantly more to warrant a smaller size.

If he was a non-believer and I had reads on this, I might bet bigger, closer to pot given that everything bricked.

Depending on opponent I'd make it up to 2x pot or possibly even c/r sometimes.

I was thinking about this more and I thought of a toy situation that helped me understand optimal bet sizing more. Let's say we're on the river and we have a hand that beats 55% of our opponents range, but loses to 45% of it. In this situation if our opponent were to call 100% of the time when we bet we could get very little value. This may only be accomplished with a minbet or a very small bet. But it doesn't take much of him folding worse hands or turning worse hands into bluffs for betting to become a valuetowning of yourself.

Therefore, the closer the % of hands in your opponents range that are beating you is to the % of hands that you beat the smaller you must bet to get value.

In this situation it seems moreso that we are beating our opponents hand 85% of the time to 15% he is winning. With these %'s it seems 3/4ths or 4/5ths pot may be appropriate. But I'm suspicious that because the hands that our opponent is beating us with are going to call or raise 100% of the time and the hands we are losing to we estimate will fold a majority of the time, and that some hands we are losing to can turn themselves into bluffs and have good reason to do so, that we actually need to bet closer to half pot here.

More thoughts:

Let's say when we bet our opponent decides to turn some hands into a bluff and does it with an optimal ratio. He raises pot and 66.7% of the time he has a nut hand a 33.3% of the time he is bluffing, therefore we should never call. That means that 7.5% of the time he has a hand worse than us he still wins.

This means that now effectively 77.5% of the time he has a hand that is losing to us and will not bluff and 23.5% of the time he has a hand that will raise and win the pot. This means that he must call us with worse 30.3% of the time with the former hand type to make our valuebet breakeven. In this specific situation because we have so many bluffs in our range with fd and straight draws this seems like enough to warrant a close to pot vbet. But in situations where you have smaller amounts of air in your range on the river it seems it may be worth it to c/f with JTo here.

And if that's true I just fixed a huge leak in my game.

Of course people probably will not bluff much in this way making it a much more attractive vbet but good players might and I'm not sure I have played many players who I would call against in this situation.

are there no overall strategy considerations for your bet size?

Originally Posted by gabe

are there no overall strategy considerations for your bet size?

Yeah I'm curious if people think we should bet A5 or some nut hand the same amount or everything a bigger amount or just good hands bigger. Because if we are that would make our opponent less able to bluff us, although it wouldn't necessarily be better.

i just bet everything and call with everything when he raises