In this post, we are going to look at Over-Betting the pot. This can either be for maximum value, or as maximum pressure with a bluff…
Durrr Vs Safai
This hand is blind Vs blind, with the action on a Poker After Dark cash game we pick up the action here…
Bob Safai makes it $2,000 to go with AQo and Tom Dwan calls in position with 86s…
We get an action flop with Safai hitting top pair and Dwan with a flush draw…
Safai comes out swinging with a bet of $5,000 and Dwan calls.
Looking at this action, I would like to see Safai bet here continuing to build the pot out of position with this strong holding will be beneficial, however I’d like to see a smaller sizing, we are only really going to get calls from flush draws and straight draws, which is not a huge part of Tom’s range, we need to give worse hands a better price to call to keep ranges wide on a board like this.
Time to play a Turn Card
Now with just over $15,000 in the middle Safai bets large again, making it $12,000 to play on a blank turn of the ten of spades, Dwan elects to call and let’s look at some reasons why…
He is calling not just to try and hit a club and get a value bet paid to which he has 20% equity, but he is also banking on being able to bluff a few low cards, because Safai is not going to improve his hand with cards like 2, 4, 6 for example, these are all going to be cards that improve the callers range.
This is an important plan to have whilst playing poker, be mindful of your opponents range and think about which cards you can win with and which cards might be good bluffing cards for you to steal the pot.
The River
With around $40,000 now in the middle, Safai decides to check the River. I like this decision from him, we need to try and catch bluffs with our hand now, we only have one pair and we can’t get three streets of value from almost any hand apart from maybe KQ… so I like check calling, however, let’s look at some hands that get there on the River…
Combinations of 46 and A4 both make a straight, however, it would be hard for A4o to call the turn bet, so we would have to narrow that range mainly to A4 of clubs… leaving just the 12 combinations of 46 that could make the straight… There are 78 Combinations of flush draws that missed though! I feel this is going to be a big part of Tom’s range here on the river.
So let’s look at this Bluff to Value Ratio of hands: 66 Combinations of missed flush draw bluffs: 13 Combinations of a Straight.
Around 5:1 weighted towards this being a Bluff!
In a normal bet pot, this would be an easy call given this breakdown of ranges that get to the River, however, Tom has put the heat on here and bet around 3.3X the size of the Pot… Making Safai’s call pretty tough.
I think looking at this hand, we have one of the best hands to call with, if we had a Club in our hand we could make a fold some of the time as then the combinations of bluffs are less especially if we have the Ace of clubs in our hand as this blocks the A4 of Clubs being in Tom’s hand as well as any of the other 12 combinations of suited Ace high hands.
However it’s not as easy as it looks, this is a huge real money bet and Safai just has one pair! So in real-time, he decides to make the laydown, which you can’t really blame him for, it’s just an amazingly gutsy play by Tom Dwan… Any other bet he would have made would have got looked up by Safai, however, the huge pressure of a 3.3X bet made him think again and make the laydown here.
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