Moving Up: Beyond Winrate And Bankroll – Part 2: River Value Betting

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In Part 1 of Moving Up: Beyond Winrate And Bankroll, I claimed that the two factors most cited in discussions of moving up, winrate and bankroll, don’t tell the whole story. If you’re thinking about moving up, you should consider some other factors just as much.

The first factor is your overall comfort level at your current stakes. You should be comfortable with the money, and you should also be comfortable with your opponents. One of the biggest keys to being comfortable against your opponents is having sharp hand reading skills. In fact, you should definitely be able to out-hand read your opponents before you consider moving up. This part (and the next) is about trying to measure your hand reading skills to see if they’re up to snuff.

The Ultimate Hand Reading Test – The River

Hand reading is important in every form of poker. This article will focus on no-limit hold’em because it’s currently the most popular form of poker, but the ideas here apply more universally.

The river is the betting round where hand reading skills translate most directly to winning cash. If you can’t hand read for beans, you can still survive at no-limit if you focus on avoiding the river. You can play short stacked and rely on a tight opening range and some preflop stealing to grind out a profit. Or you can nit it up, refusing to the get money in without a great hand.

But if you want to crush no-limit, you need to read hands, and if you read hands, the river is your best friend. You have more information about your opponent’s hand range on the river than on any round before. Good hand readers can use that information to find great value bets and good bluffing opportunities that lesser players miss.

You can tell a lot about whether you are ready to move up or not by how you play the river compared to your opponents. You should be generating a big edge for yourself on that betting round.

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