In this post we are going to look at some tips for improving your game for playing against C-bets, many players play too tight and some players play too loose against bets on the flop from our opponent, so we have drafted up some advice for how to win more in these spots
Putting our hands into some categories
As always we will use all three options, so we will group some hand types into these three categories so we can get a general idea of how to continue with our hands.
Folds
We will want to find folds with our underpairs and worst overcards that miss the board. For example KJo on 5 7 8 we could fold because we will sometimes have hands like AQs that we would at least call a bet with.
Call
We can call with our hands that are bottom pair or better, so all our one pair hands like A5s on 5 8 J would be a call.
Raise
We will raise with two pair or better
We can raise with our open-ended straight draws.
& Raise with our gutshots that have a backdoor suit.
This way we will be hard to read whether we are raising for value or just with a drawing hand, specifically when we just raise with a gutshot and backdoor flush draw, we can hit many good Barrell cards to bet our opponent off their equity in the pot.
Be Mindful of Range Advantages
This can win us a lot of chips, raising and bluffing on boards that we will have more nutted hands-on compared to our opponents is another good way of merging in bluffs into our game and winning pots we would normally not get to win.
For example and early position, raiser opens and we take a flop from the big blind…
The flop comes down 4♠ 5♣ 6♠
We could work in some check-raises with a few hands here as bluffs and we are going to be protected in having the nut advantage on this board as we can have 32s, 45s, 56s, 46s, 44, 55, 66, 67s, 78s. Whereas our opponent can’t have anywhere near as many combinations of hands that hit the board that hard due to their raising position.
Be Mindful of your opponents betting frequencies
Poker is a game of adjusting to what your opponents are doing at the tables, so if you notice that players are very tight, we will want to be making some tighter folds on flops, so not continuing with all our bottom pairs could be a good adjustment to make for example.
On the other hand, if we are against a maniac player working in some smooth calls with hands we would normally raise with to keep their ranges wide and allow them to still be over bluffing.
Although we want to protect our equity in pots, we don’t want to stop aggressive opponents bluffing either, as this is sometimes the only way we will make more money!
Adjust ranges to different bet sizes
We will want to base our strategy post-flop on how big our opponents are going to be betting…
So against small size bets, we can defend wider than against larger bets.
In scenarios we face larger bets, we will only want to be calling, why?
Because in these spots we are either going to be up against bluffs or we will be crushed, as our opponents will have a polarised range… so not raising our opponents in these spots is an important tactic to implement, this keeps the pot smaller when we are beat and allows our opponent to keep bluffing when we have a hammerlock on the hand.
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