Quote Originally Posted by seven-deuce View Post
Firstly, great post Carroters. I think this is totally relevant to the BC and increasing your EV at microstakes. I will be revisiting this thread before I start playing again. Juts to clarify I understand what you're tying to say though I'll use an example.

E.g. In a heads-up pot on the river you're going to have a range. For the sake of simplicity let's assume we're IP and it's checked to us. Naturally, we are going to want to make all our profitable value bets in this scenario. We can also increase, decrease, or remove our bluffing range entirely in this spot based on our reads on villain.

So we have a read villain is going to be calling a tonne. So we want to be value betting more and bluffing less, obviously. We can work out using the alpha value what a perfectly balanced betting/bluffing range looks like in this spot. (Unsure if it's exactly perfect, but it's pretty damn close.)

So imagine we are on the river with the stone-cold nuts vs a villain who is calling a high percentage of his range. (More than the bet/(bet+pot) from his perspective.) Whilst there may be a small amount of EV to be gained by bluffing a very small percentage of the time in this spot, the situation is going to come up so rarely that it's kind of insignificant. I.e We are going to arrive at the river with the rock-bottom hand(s) in our range so infrequently that it's far more important to just make all are profitable value bets and not bluff. This will be exploiting the hell out of his calling tendency. If we start thinking, "shit I should be bluffing some of the time here, I could be exploited by just value betting." This type of thinking could lead to us bluffing too often and reducing our overall profitability vs such a station.

So it is actually more practical and profitable to value bet only and never bluff.

Am I understanding the gist of what you're trying to say Carroters?
Yeah exactly. The longball vs shortball thing is very closely linked; I think I just ran out of ranting steam too much earlier to explain my thoughts on it. I think you're 100% right though. There are a lot of spots where we might want to err on the side of just making a +EV play because we know the situation vs that opponent just ins't presenting itself often enough for us to factor in a longball game plan and expect better longterm EV from doing so.

EG. I decide a river bluff is shortball +EV because villain should be folding enough combos to make the amount we risk work often enough in this one spot. We then decide that if we bluff with a hand this far up in our range then we are bluffing too much longball and are going to be exploited for doing so if this spot keeps occurring. However, this spot we're in is fairly unique and we don't expect to ever really play it again vs villain let alone play it so much that he figures out that our range has this technical weakness and can be exploited by him calling much more. Therefore we go ahead and bluff this hand even though it doesn't fit as a candidate hand into the range we'd like to be bluffing longball. However, we've actually made the correct longball decision because in reality where we get nowhere near to playing this spot very much vs this guy, we just make more money overall by grabbing a rare chance to at least make a +EV bluff in this spot.