Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Suppose you get to the river
Suppose you get to the river and you think your opponent’s range is made up of 75 percent made hands that you can’t beat and 25 percent busted draws, which you can beat. If your numbers are accurate, you should probably call if you are getting better than 3-to-1 odds. One benefit to calling and being wrong is that you see your opponent’s hand, helping you to figure out his range next time you meet. You also let your opponents know you may call with a weak hand on the river, which encourages them to play more straightforwardly against you. This makes it much easier to put them on a range, allowing you to play the river better in the future.
How to Value Bet the River
How to Value Bet the River Players often miss value on the river because they either don’t understand hand values or are scared to make a decently large bet when they could be beat. In this chapter I will give guidelines for when to value-bet the river. These are only guidelines; you should make all decisions with your specific opponent in mind. You should usually check when out of position with a weak made hand, such as top pair with a bad kicker or middle pair with a good kicker, because most opponents will only call with a better hand. This is especially true if you bet the flop and turn, as your hand will be slightly over-represented, meaning that if your opponent will call bets on all three streets, you usually have the worse hand. In position, assuming one street was checked, as I suggested earlier, you should usually value-bet these weak made hands if you think your opponent will call with worse. If you think he will only call when you’re beat, which is often the case, you should check.