balancing my range on the river

Any information on BB?

None, a complete unknown

Then i xback that nasty river

Hi!

Seem as pretty clear valuebet.It doesnt look he has Kx and there are not that many Qx that call turn,at the same time you will have to call a bet from all these hands anyway. But he will have 7x,5x,pockets,Tx way more often than anything else and he will not fold most of these. If raised its sad but you usually have to go with your gut. I tend to ask myself how much am I folding in this spot. If I b/f a lot then you kindda have to call otherwise b/f is fine. I would assume you rarelly bluff and that this hand is pretty close to bottom of your range so its fine to b/f...but... I would never blame for calling here as not really many hands make sense unless Q7,Q5 two pair.... there are also hands like 68 or whatever bluffs from bad unknown person that can be made....after all you are getting almost 1:10...

I would also say that you should not be too shy about valuebetting bad players.Sure river is not perfect but just look at how many hands are there that will still call you...also you are gonna be raised very very rarelly here.

I see what you mean, Dawnfall, but if this is a value bet, wouldn't we be valuebetting about 70% of our range? I think it is a very wide range for a value bet...

Yes it is...and why not? When oponent has so very many worse hands and he is bad at the same time what should deny us from that? Valubetting fish is the main principle of wining FL holdem in general

Cause the OP asked about a balanced range?:)

I understand your problem, JL, however still have to agree with Dawnfall, in this situation thin vbetting/blockbetting is absolutely fine. Also, if you barrel the turn balanced (that includes turning A hi with a 9 or 8 kicker w/o draw into a bluff), you should have enough bluffs (namely 98s, A9, A8) to compensate for the fact that you're betting the river so wide. As you said, that card hit your range quite well, and you had the stronger range all the way, no need to have a huge, or in fact any checking range at all (if I bet 100% of my range here, I'm balanced in terms of vbet-bluff ratio).

Now one could say that betting our entire range on the river is pretty imbalanced, cause the opponent could wait till the riv with his valuehands, and not inclined to peel/fold anything. However this only happens on Q,J rivers, that the opponent cannot see ahead. It's just an unfortunate situation to him. If we wanted to be well-balanced in this spot, we should probably alter our preflop range - but in most situations that won't work out. That's the "beauty" of narrow range situations, that's why SH poker is a big pain in the ass GTO-wise (not to mention FR...). So in my mind it's kind of an atypical situation that comes up once every now and then, and you can't do anything else, just go with it.

The other alternative would be to check some (all?) Tx hands, and respectively check A9 or something from our bluffing range. We'd have to fold A9, and weaker Tx hands, and c/c with the rest. However you can see that this exploitatively is a bit of a nightmare situation for us, cause checking Tx is a negative freeroll in most cases, and c/f-ing a hand you'd exploitatively blockbet is another really big jump. That's why I'd go with betting our entire range, and be a tad bit more exploitable. And although I really really dislike this argument in most cases, in this case it actually might hold true: no one will exploit you for this.

Hope that cleared up most of the questions you had, if you have any other, don't hesitate to ask.

Originally posted by madorjan
Cause the OP asked about a balanced range?:)

I understand your problem, JL, however still have to agree with Dawnfall, in this situation thin vbetting/blockbetting is absolutely fine. Also, if you barrel the turn balanced (that includes turning A hi with a 9 or 8 kicker w/o draw into a bluff), you should have enough bluffs (namely 98s, A9, A8) to compensate for the fact that you're betting the river so wide. As you said, that card hit your range quite well, and you had the stronger range all the way, no need to have a huge, or in fact any checking range at all (if I bet 100% of my range here, I'm balanced in terms of vbet-bluff ratio).

Now one could say that betting our entire range on the river is pretty imbalanced, cause the opponent could wait till the riv with his valuehands, and not inclined to peel/fold anything. However this only happens on Q,J rivers, that the opponent cannot see ahead. It's just an unfortunate situation to him. If we wanted to be well-balanced in this spot, we should probably alter our preflop range - but in most situations that won't work out. That's the "beauty" of narrow range situations, that's why SH poker is a big pain in the ass GTO-wise (not to mention FR...). So in my mind it's kind of an atypical situation that comes up once every now and then, and you can't do anything else, just go with it.

The other alternative would be to check some (all?) Tx hands, and respectively check A9 or something from our bluffing range. We'd have to fold A9, and weaker Tx hands, and c/c with the rest. However you can see that this exploitatively is a bit of a nightmare situation for us, cause checking Tx is a negative freeroll in most cases, and c/f-ing a hand you'd exploitatively blockbet is another really big jump. That's why I'd go with betting our entire range, and be a tad bit more exploitable. And although I really really dislike this argument in most cases, in this case it actually might hold true: no one will exploit you for this.

Hope that cleared up most of the questions you had, if you have any other, don't hesitate to ask.

OK, this was kind of what I thought while playing this hand (much more rusty in my head though :P).

Thank you both for your input

what i think Dawn means by that is that you should not think about balancing your river range.. Just get the f**** value from the guy.

yap:)

<3