In today’s post, we are going to look at why it is imperative to have at least a decent percentage of check raises in our arsenal of moves when playing out of position in pots.
Why do we need to have check raises in our range?
Well if we only ever check when we are weak then we become to exploitable and end up playing almost face up allowing our opponents to just bet us out of the pot.
Coupled with this if we are only ever check calling when playing out of position, we are going to allow our opponents to see all 5 community cards if they decide to check back the turn, allowing them to realise equity with hands that may fold to aggression on the flop.
These are going to end up with us losing pots when we have the best hand a great deal of the time and in general in poker we want to pick up the reigns out of position if we are continuing, the reason being we can win the pot right there, build a bigger pot with semi-bluffs for when we get there.
Pick good spots
Have you noticed that someone on the table has a high C-bet frequency? Well, any non paired hand will only flop a pair 32% of the time, so if our opponents C-bet percentage is above this say 80% this means they will, in the long run, be betting with too wide of a range, so we can look to exploit this with Re-steals.
We are going to want to do this less against players with a tighter C-bet range, as some players will only be firing out bets a small percentage of the time with a solid range, so try and pick your spots well for Re-steals.
Consider what our Range looks like to our opponent
We are going to want to attack boards where we have the nut advantage. What does this mean? Every player is going to hit certain boards harder than others from a range point of view…
Say there is an early position raise and the board comes A K 6 well the early position raiser has a big advantage on this board compared to a defender in the blinds as they can have all the good Ace and King high hands as well as all the pocket pairs, however, the player in the blinds will have a very wide range as they are getting a good price on defending the blinds.
Compare this to a Cut off raise and a flop of 4 5 6 the big blind defender is going to have a range advantage here as the blinds can have all kinds of hands like 32s, 37s, 45, 46, 56, 67, 78, 44, 55, 66. Whereas the raiser could have hands like pairs, but less off suit combinations that hit this flop hard. This is what we call the Defender of the blinds having a Nut Advantage, it simply means they are more likely to have the nuts in their hand than the raisers range will.
Pots like this are going to make great hands to push the action and win the pot, even when we have a bluff with some equity, good candidates might be hands with some back door equity where the turn card could give us a reason to barrel and get more folds should we get our flop check raise called. For example:
Cut off: Raises 420
Button: Folds
Small Blind (100): Folds
Big Blind (200): Calls 220
Flop 4♠ 5♣ 7♠
We have K♣ 9♣ and have missed this board, however, we have a big range advantage on this board, so we pick this point to check-raise our opponent who has a high C-bet frequency.
What are the perks of this hand selection?
We are using a hand to check-raise which we don’t have showdown value with, so with other hands that may contain a pair or Ace high we could choose to continue through a check call line, however with just King high and no immediate draw we are going to use this as a check-raise bluff.
This hand has good turn cards that we could continue on if we are called, with a King or Nine being good for our hand as well as any 6 or 8 giving us a straight draw and any club giving us a flush draw.
Pick good sizings to battle against
Good players will C-bet fairly small allowing them to bet with a wider range of hands, we are going to want to pick raises against these types of sizings more than larger sizings because larger sizes are going to more polarised to either a good hand or a poor one. These bets are going to be better to play against with flat calls rather than raises, as we will either be betting out hands we have beat and shutting down bluffs or building a big pot when we are crushed.
Stay Balanced!
As always we aren’t just going to be bluffing, we are going to check-raise for value a lot of the time too, this is what makes this move a great one, we get to build the pot for value when we have hit the board hard, allowing us to protect our hand against our opponents equity at the same time!