Extracting Bonus Value On Dry Boards
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Dry boards sometimes offer a golden opportunity to get extra value for your medium strength hands like top pair. Many players are always looking to sniff out a bluff on a dry board, and you can use that fact to your advantage if you have a hand that beats a typical bluff catcher. In particular, you can often get pot-sized bets (or even bigger) paid off on the river by hands like unimproved pocket pairs that would never pay off such a big bet on a board that includes lots of high cards and obvious three-straights and three-flushes.
Here’s a hand I played recently where I used this principle to my advantage:
I open from the cutoff for $7 in a $1-$2 game with J 
T . The button folds, and both blinds call. I have about $200, the small blind has $120, and the big blind has us both covered.
The flop comes 4 
3 3 
. Everyone checks.
The turn is the J . The blinds check to me, and I bet $11 into the $21 pot. The big blind calls.
The river is the 2 . The big blind checks, I bet the full $43 pot, and the big blind calls and shows 6 6 .
I elected to check back the flop because I expected to get called the vast majority of the time. Whenever the flop comes three low cards, particularly with a pair like this one, you can expect loose players to peel the flop with overcards and tight players to show up with overpairs quite often.
Getting called wouldn’t have been terrible, because I would still have position and two opportunities either to pair up or possibly to push my opponent off the pot. Sometimes I would bet in a similar situation. But this time I elected to check it back rather than set up a possible multi-street bluff.
I paired the turn, and it was checked to me again. Now it’s time to extract value if I can.
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Tags: dry boards, extracting value, no-limit-holdem, poker, top-pair, value betting
Great information on bet sizing. Thanks!