Value Betting in Poker
It’s very important to learn to value
bet your marginal hands at small stakes. At higher stakes, it is sometimes
best to check your marginal hands, and call a bet on the end in hopes that
your opponent will bluff at the pot, or to get to a showdown cheaply. At
small stakes, people don’t tend to bluff on the river very much, not to
say that it doesn’t happen, but it’s much more rare. They DO however tend
to call down with very weak hands that you will be missing out on value
if you only check your top pair at the end against a single opponent.
For example, if you hold a hand like
KQ and flop a pair of kings, bet your hand, get called, bet a small amount
on the turn, and get called, you should bet the river, even if you haven’t
improved. If you are raised on the river after you bet though, you should
fold. The reasoning here is simple, nearly no small stakes players will
bluff raise on the river. If you checked your KQ hand on the river, intending
to call a bet, then you will lose value on your hand when your opponent
checks behind with KT, KJ or worse. If you fold to the river raise, then
you accomplished the same thing as you would if you checked and called
a bet. You won’t of course go to a showdown, but you can rest assured that
you made a good fold. Even very aggressive players won’t raise on the end
without at least two pair or better.
Don’t however take this to an extreme.
If you are in the same situation, but you have a hand like KT or KJ, then
use much more discretion on the river. If you are in position and your
opponent checks to you on the river, then you’ll have to do your best to
read what type of player your opponent is and whether your pair of kings
is best. If that player is fairly tight, and they’ve called your bets,
or bet all the way, then it’s probably best to check behind. Only bet for
value on the end with marginal hands that have good potential for your
opponents to have worse hands, or the same pair as you with worse kickers.
Another example of this would be
if you hold AJ and flop a pair of jacks. It’s quite possible that your
opponents could have KJ, QJ, JT or even QT, so betting on the end with
this type of hand makes sense. Yet if you hold QJ, then you only have possibly
one or two hands that will be worse than yours and call. Make sure you
are always asking yourself what hands your opponents may hold, and if there
are a reasonable amount of hands that you beat, but you still have a marginal
hand, then bet on the end.
Article Source:
Amazines.Com
