We have all heard of a C Bet or Continuation Bet, it’s when we have the betting lead Preflop and Continue to bet on the Flop, there are good times to make these plays as the aggressor in a pot will have the best hand a lot of the time and it’s hard for our opponents to connect with flops, so for the times we are against a player that will not play back at us with at least a decent piece of the board we will win the pot right there on the flop with just one bet.
What’s the catch?
Well the problem with C Betting a high frequency is that it leaves our game open to a few pitfalls such as getting check raise bluffed off our equity when we may even have the best hand and if we go bloating some of our more borderline hands we could just be building a pot that we will be losing in, so there comes a different strategy for us to combine into our game…
Delayed C Betting
This is when we will be the aggressor preflop but slow down post flop and check back our hand, seeing the turn card without betting. We can use this to mix up our play and stay unpredictable and hard to read.
There are going to be times when we are just not going to get three streets of value paid from our hand…
This is a good time to pump the brakes from the get-go and just control the size of the pot, for instance:
We are playing at $5/$10 with deep stacks
We are dealt K♠ 2♠ raise the button to $30
SB: folds
BB: (Villian) calls $20
The Flop is K♣ 7♠ 3♥
Villian checks to us…
Now some argue, we have to protect our hand here and get some value from worse holdings that may call us like second or bottom pair… however we would also be sometimes building a pot against hands that crush us like any better King, so in the mindset that we cannot get paid three streets of value with this holding this hand would make a good check back candidate, allowing us to go for value on later streets, or if our opponent picks up the lead on the turn we get the chance to call down some bluffs or weaker hands than our top pair.
Another good time to check back is when we block all possible hands that could give us any action…
This is a good time to try and give our opponents some rope to bluff or catch up, for example:
We are playing at $5/$10 with deep stacks
We are dealt J♣ J♠ in the Cut off and raise to $30
Button: folds
Small Blind: folds
Big Blind (Villian): calls
The Flop is J♥ 7♠ 3♣ and the Villian checks to us…
This board is extremely dry, there is little to nothing for us to protect against and we block two of the Jacks we want our opponent to have in order to give us action, this is a perfect time to slow down and check back and let our opponent catch up and hope some overcards hit for example that may hit their range, we also induce more bluffs by checking back the flop. If the board was wetter, meaning it has a flush or straight draw possibilities, then we can just C Bet these types of boards even with a huge hand like top set, the reason is that there will be plenty of draws that will call at least one bet and we will need to protect our equity against these types of hands.
Now we can balance our range with mixing in semi-bluffs…
We aren’t always going to want to check back flops with a value hand, if we do this we are just as predictable as C Betting too much, so we are going to want to Delayed C Bet some bluffs too, here is an example:
We are playing at $1/$2 with $200 Effective
Villain opens from Mid Position to $4.50
We are dealt J♠ T♠ on the Button and we 3Bet to $13
SB folds
BB folds
Villian calls $13
The Flop is 8♥ 6♠ 3♣($29)
Villian checks
We check back…
Turn 9♣
Villian checks
We bet $14…
This is a good flop for us to check back our hand here, as we will have many better-bluffing hands like 79s, T9s, T7s, 57s if we are getting aggressive versus this wide opener.
Once the turn card comes, however, we have a draw to the nuts but little showdown value, so this is a perfect time with our opponent having checked twice for us to blow them off their equity, we can look to get snap folds from some Ace high, King high and Queen high hands, aswell as putting hands like 44, 55, 77, 6x, 8x, 3x all in tough spots where they will not love to call two streets of action.