We are going to want to play pot control many times against aggressive opponents, but in today’s post, we are going to look at an exploitative strategy to use against passive opponents.
Second Pair on a Wet Board
$1/$2, $200 Deep
BTN: Hero with A♥ T♥ Raises to $6
SB: Folds
BB: Calls$6
Flop: Q♠ T♠ 3♦
BB: Checks
BTN: ?
Against a passive player, we can look to bet this 100% of the time, let’s think about why this is.
An aggressive player is likely to want to pick up the betting lead with any of the draws on this board… so they will check-raise straight and flush draws in order to either win the pot on the flop or build a bigger pot to win on a later street.
So against an aggressive opponent, we will never want to be betting this wet board with this holding, we are looking to get to showdown and we will have way better hands to bet on this flop, like open-ended draws, flush draws, top pairs, two pairs and sets. So betting second pair is just betting too many hands.
However, a passive player will never do this! This is exactly the reason they are passive. They just call with everything.
So they will call with their draws, worse second pairs and even their top pairs. So we will be able to charge all the worst hands and play pot control against any better holdings.
Gutshots on Dry Boards
$1/$2, $200 Deep
BTN: Hero with J♦ T♥ Raises to $6
SB: Folds
BB: Calls$6
Flop: 8♠ 7♣ Q♦
BB: Checks
BTN: ?
This is again another slam dunk bet against a passive opponent, we can improve our hand with cards like a 9 hitting giving us the nut straight, we can also pick up double gutshots on cards like King and Ace hitting the board, we can easily have two overcards to any pair of 7s or 8s that might call one bet on the flop.
All of this paired with the fact we currently only have Jack High on this board makes this an easy bet against a passive opponent.
This is a pretty dry board, only hands like AQ, KQ, 88 and 77 love this flop and there aren’t many combinations of these hands in the Big Blinds flat calling range.
Now against an aggressive opponent that also knows this is a dry board, how will they react to our continuation bet? Well, they will certainly look to check-raise a bunch of different hands they are looking to continue with including any straight draws like 56, 69, T9 and some gutshot combinations that have a backdoor suit too no doubt and that will make it hard for us to continue for more than one more street unless we improve.
But against a passive opponent, we don’t ever have to worry about being bluffed off our equity, we will simply get raised if we are in bad shape and then folding a gutshot wouldn’t be the end of the world at all!
However, we can get called by hands that will just call one bet like weak hands that contain an 8 or 7 or just draws that will call one bet but check fold the turn.
Sum Up
It’s worth noting that against passive players that call often we can look to bet small with our bluffs like these examples but size up when we are betting for value.
These types of players are unlikely to realise how our hand strength changes with these different bet sizes so we will want to be betting small with our bluffs and large for value.
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