Four Tips For Playing The Turn

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The turn is often the betting round in a no-limit hand where the first big bets come out. Flop bets are usually small enough that you can call with a speculative holding and a wait-and-see strategy. On the turn, unless people are making undersized bets, playing to wait-and-see is too expensive.

Not only are turn bet sizes fairly big, they actually play even bigger due to a principle called leverage. Calling a turn bet doesn’t get you to showdown. It just gets you to the river where you may have to pay an even larger bet to see the showdown. For instance, if someone bets $150 on the turn out of a $500 stack, he’s implicitly saying to you, “It’s one-fifty now, and on the river it might be another three-fifty.” This possibility makes turn bets play bigger than their nominal size.

In practice, however, many players misplay the turn and river and misunderstand how leverage works. Here are four tips for the turn to help you take advantage of the mistakes people make.

Tip 1. Call the turn in position with marginal hands with a wait-and-see strategy.

In the first paragraph I said that playing wait-and-see on the turn is too expensive. Now I’m saying you should play wait-and-see. What gives?

Wait-and-see on the turn is too expensive because of leverage. You can’t be calling turn bets willy nilly when your opponents will often hit you with very large and very uncomfortable river bets. The trick is that most players don’t play the river well at all. They play the street far too passively, bluffing rarely and betting only very strong hands. This tendency renders their turn leverage nearly moot, because you no longer have much to fear from a river bet. Most of the time your opponents will check the river. If you want to play no-limit hold’em online check out the full tilt referral code. And when they bet, at least when they bet big, you’re looking at a monster and you can fold.

You can take advantage of this passivity by calling turn bets with hands like pairs you want to show down and even flush or straight draws. You should call with pairs when you think there’s a good chance your opponent is betting a draw or a weaker pair. If your opponent checks the river, you check it back. You can call with draws under the same conditions, but the idea would be to put in a large river bluff if you miss your draw and your opponent checks.

If your opponent were more aggressive on the river, these marginal calls wouldn’t pay. Too often you’d simply be forced to fold to a river all-in bet. But passive opponents permit you to play more flexibly and allow you to swipe pots that you, theoretically, shouldn’t be winning.

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