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Part 2 discussed river value betting decisions. This part talks about the other side of the coin – river bluffing decisions.

If you’re reading hands well, often you’ll have a good idea of whether your opponent’s hand range is dominated by strong hands or weak ones. As you play, do you actively attack your opponent’s weak hand ranges, and do you do it better than your opponents?

Using The River Card To Bluff

Most no-limit players, bad and good, bluff with some regularity. Bad players tend to bluff using a simple strategy, sometimes as simple as, “If you check the river, I’ll bet every time.” Better players allow their hand reading skills to inform their bluffing.

The first bluffing skill is to use river scare cards to make more successful bluffs. If a river card will have damaged the strength of many of your opponent’s hands, it may be a good time to try a bluff. But a scare card isn’t just any old card that may look scary. For instance, say your opponent checks and calls out of position on the flop and turn. The river brings the third flush card, and your opponent checks again. This is often not a good bluffing card, because of all the hands your opponent would have checked and called with on the flop and turn, a significant percentage of them will have been flush draws.

A true scare card is one that has one or more of the following properties:

1. Is likely to have damaged the hand strength of many of the hands in your opponent’s range.
2. Is likely to have improved many of the hands in the range your opponent could likely put you on.
3. Is relatively unlikely to have improved many of the hands in your opponent’s range.

Here are some basic examples. If your opponent’s range is dominated by one pair hands, perhaps top and middle pairs with some unimproved pocket pairs, then an overcard is likely a scare card because it damages the strength of that hand. An overcard is particularly a scare card if you raised preflop and maybe made a flop continuation bet. That’s because the card not only damages your opponent’s hand range, but it strengths yours because many of your unimproved overcard hands have now improved to top pair.

An overcard would be significantly less scary if, for instance, you flat-called preflop and checked and called after the flop. In that scenario, you would be less likely to hold unimproved overcards, and therefore an overcard would be less likely to improve your hand.

A total brick can also act as a scare card. For instance, if your opponent checks and calls you on a turn board of K T 8 6 and a river 2 comes off, the river card will actually be fairly scary for your opponent’s range. Why? Because much of his range is made up of drawing hands, possibly also including a pair: T9, 77, J T , etc. This river card severely damaged the strength of his range by missing nearly every possible hand he could hold.

This article isn’t meant to be a lesson on bluffing, but rather a diagnostic. Are you thinking about these things when you are contemplating your river bluffs? And are you actually pulling the trigger on these bluffs, or are you just thinking about them? How often do you check the river down only to lose to a small pair? Again, go through the hands in your database. Do you allow your out of position opponents to see a showdown often with small pocket pairs or flopped bottom pair? If so, you may not be bluffing accurately or using your hand reading well enough, and you may not be ready to move up.

Picking Off Bluffs

As I said above, most no-limit players bluff sometimes. Some bluffs are essentially impossible to pick off because your opponent’s range is strong enough compared to the hand you hold that your opponent won’t be bluffing often enough to make it worth your while to try to look him up.

But other bluffs are more clumsy, and you can pick them off using a little hand reading. Do you notice your opponents making clumsy river bluffs? Do you call them or rebluff them? And how do you perform in those situations.

One common situation for catching a bluff is when an opponent bets strongly on the flop, turn, and river, yet the turn and river cards both drastically affected the complexion of the hand. For instance, say the flop came K95 with two diamonds and a club. The turn is the 7 . The river is the 6 . Your opponent pounds all three streets.

It’s hard to imagine what hand your opponent could have that is strong on all three rounds. Obviously on the river any hand without an 8 in it isn’t that strong. Yet an 8 would be a relatively unlikely card in a holding that is strong enough to pound the flop and turn. Whenever your opponent bets in a way that requires him to hold an unlikely or nearly perfect hand for the turn and river cards, he’s often bluffing.

In a recent Stoxpoker video, coach Hunter Bick played a hand like this one and successfully bluff-raised the river when he noticed that his opponent’s play just didn’t add up.

Is your hand reading sharp enough to sniff out clumsy bluffs that don’t leave your opponent with a credibly strong hand range? And, conversely, are your opponents making hero calls against you when you’re bluffing? If you’re getting the better of the bluffing and bluff catching situations in your game, then you might be ready to move up.

Overall, I think a frank assessment of your hand reading skills is more predictive of your potential success moving up than your winrate is. And I think the river is the betting round where good hand reading skills shine the most. So if you are considering moving up, definitely pull up your database and review your river play. Do you see patterns or trends? Does it seem like you are outperforming your opponents? If so, and if your bankroll is in decent shape for the new level, then consider taking your shot.

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.

Thin Value Betting

Are you consistently betting thinner than your opponents? If you play microstakes or small stakes no-limit, you should be. When you’re ready to move up, you should be able to identify numerous situations on the river where your opponents just check their hands down and you would have bet (correctly) for value.

Here’s a common scenario. I see a hand like this one played dozens of times during each session. Someone open raises and a player in the blinds calls. The flop comes J85. The blind checks, the raiser c-bets 3/4 pot, and the blind calls. The turn is a 2. The blind checks, and the raiser checks. The river is a K. The blind checks, and the raiser checks. The blind shows A8, and the raiser wins with QJ.

The player with QJ didn’t read his opponent’s hand very well, and as a result he missed at least one reasonable-sized bet. When a player calls from the blinds, check-calls the flop, checks the turn, and checks the river, a medium or small pair is always a good part of his range. The river king is unlikely to have hit the flop check-calling range much, so QJ figures to be a good hand in this situation. Furthermore, many players will feel compelled to call the river bet due to the fear that all the checking may have induced a bluff.

Do your opponents give you free showdowns like this one often? If you play $2-$4 no-limit or lower online, I can answer that question for you. They do. Do you give free showdowns like that one if you hold QJ? If you do, then consider refining your hand reading skills a little bit before moving up. The higher you go, the fewer free showdowns you’ll receive. If you are sitting at the higher limit giving free showdowns but not receiving them, your results will suffer.

If you’re thinking about moving up, go back through your database and look at the river play of hundreds of your hands. Are you making good value betting decisions? Are you missing value consistently? Are you consistently making better decisions than your opponents are against you? Obviously your play doesn’t have to be perfect before you can move up, but it should at least be significantly better than your average opponent’s play.

River Bet Sizing

This one is exclusively a no-limit skill, but it’s another important hand-reading-based one. My bet sizing varies far more on the river than on any other street. I’ll make 4x pot shoves on the river, and I’ll make 1/4 pot suck bets. My bet sizing choices are informed largely by my estimate of my opponent’s hand range. If I think my opponent has a strong range, but I have an even better hand, I’ll make a huge overbet hoping for a big payoff. If I think my opponent is weak but possibly willing to call something small, I’ll make the small bet. (Obviously, the better my opponent is, the more I have to engage in leveling games with my bet sizing. I’ll play in a way that suggests I’m thinking about the situation one way with unexpected hands.)

In any event, I think that smart bet sizing decisions on the river can contribute well to your winrate, and good bet sizing also goes hand-in-hand with good reading skills. How do you size your river bets? Does it work out for you? Again, go through hands you’ve played and review your bet sizing decisions. Are you making them smartly, or just betting randomly? How about your opponents? Can you decode your opponent’s river bet sizes and use that information to make better decisions? If you consistently size bets better than your opponents do, that’s a clue that you might be ready to move up.

In the next part I’ll talk more about river play and moving up.

These questions are on the minds of most serious players at least some of the time. Conquering your current game and moving on to bigger and better things is the goal of most players.

Most discussion about moving up I see covers two topics: winrate and bankroll. If you’ve achieved such-and-such a winrate over so many hands and you have at least this number of buyins in your bankroll, go for it!

I have a small quarrel with the way people use winrate and bankroll metrics for moving up. While obviously both winrate and bankroll are relevant to your moving up decision, they aren’t the only two relevant factors. Sometimes other factors are important as well, and sometimes I think these other factors can be very important.

My thoughts on this, to some extent, stem from my own experience. When I was learning to play, I played the smallest game regularly offered at my cardroom, $4-$8 limit hold’em. In the beginning I racked up an impressive record of losing month after losing month. And yet, after my sixth straight losing month, I decided it was time to move up to $10-$20 and $15-$30!

I did it, and it worked out great. I won more that first month than I had lost in my previous six, and I never had another losing month for all the time I played live limit hold’em.

Why did I decide it was time to move up when I hadn’t registered even one winning month up to that point? A few factors convinced me that I was ready, and these articles will talk about some of those factors that I think can make or break a move up.

Money Comfort

Before you move up, I think it’s critical that you be very comfortable in the game you’re currently playing. The first key to being comfortable is that the stakes don’t bother you. You can have a horrible day and it won’t really faze you. While you’re playing, you literally never have the thought, “Gee, that’s a lot of money.”

Now I don’t mean that running bad doesn’t bother you. Running bad bothers nearly everyone at least a little bit at some point. I mean that the money doesn’t scare you. When you’re running bad, you’re frustrated because losing is frustrating from a competitive or gaming standpoint, not because it’s a ton of money to you.

I think this is critical because every time you say to yourself, “Wow, that’s a lot of money,” you risk making a bad decision as a result. Furthermore, once you do move up, you’re virtually guaranteed to say, “Wow, that’s a lot of money,” to yourself for a while after you take that first shot. In other words, you’re going to make some bad decisions when you move up because the money is bigger. You can’t remove that factor, but if you move up to a bigger game when you aren’t even comfortable at your current stakes yet, you’re just asking for trouble. The game will feel huge, and you will make poor plays as a result. You won’t pull the trigger on some good bluffs, you will get pushed out of pots too much, you’ll be less willing to flip when you should, and so forth.

Playing Comfort

Being comfortable with the money is obviously important, but that’s not the only aspect of comfort that I think is important. You should be comfortable in a gaming sense also.

When you switch from one game to another, your opponents will change. A typical player in the $1-$3 no-limit game at the Wynn in Las Vegas will play very differently than the typical player in the $1-$2 game on PokerStars. And the typical $5-$10 player on PokerStars will also play very differently than the $1-$2 player.

When you switch games, your opponents will play differently than you are used to, and that will cause discomfort. Your hand ranges will be off. For instance, if you’re used to the $1-$3 game at the Wynn, you might be used to seeing preflop 3-bets once or twice an hour and made only on premium hands. If you jump into a $1-$2 game on PokerStars, you’ll see way more preflop 3-bets. You’ll presumably figure out that people are 3-betting with more hands, but you won’t know right off the bat what their ranges are. You won’t understand the dynamics – do your opponents 3-bet wildly in all circumstances, or do they try to pick their spots? You have to play a game for a while before you can begin to nail down hand ranges again and get comfortable reading hands.

Before you move up, in my opinion, you should be extremely comfortable in your regular game. Your hand reading should be sharp. You should rarely feel lost at sea. If someone starts 3-betting you every other hand, you should know what’s going on. Is this player just picking up hands, is he picking on you, or is he on tilt? Why did he shift gears, and what should you do about it? How will he react to you if you play back at him?

Now, if you play with competent players, you won’t know exactly what they are up to all the time. But you should feel comfortable in the game. You should understand their general approach to the game, and you should have a good feel for how to counter it.

When you move up, you’ll probably feel out of your depth at least sometimes. You’ll get caught by aggression you weren’t expecting. That’s normal; you’re moving up to challenge yourself and conquer this new game. But if you still get that out-of-your-depth feeling at your normal stakes, you likely aren’t quite ready yet to move up.

Comfort Without Winrate

As I said above, I moved up even though my winrate in my normal game was negative. I moved up because I felt extremely comfortable in the $4-$8 game. I was totally comfortable with the money involved, and I never, ever felt out of my depth when I played. I understood my opponents’ strategies and I knew how to counter them. I was playing with a significant edge, and I knew it. I also had saved up enough money at my job that I would be well-bankrolled for the bigger games right off the bat. So I decided it was time to move up.

Poker has so much inherent variance that I am a bit queasy about trying to use winrates to judge skill. Even though I had lost for six straight months at $4-$8, six months on the schedule I had been playing worked out to only about 4,000 hands or so. It’s likely I was indeed a losing player for the first few months, but by the time I moved up I had an edge and had just run a little bad.

In online poker, the edges are much smaller than they were in my $4-$8 game, and winrates mean even less, even over much larger samples. It’s reasonably common for a strong player at $0.50-$1 or $1-$2 no-limit to go on a 50,000 hand or more break-even streak. And therefore it’s just as common for a break-even player at those levels to go on a 50,000 hand or more strongly winning streak. It happens all the time – a weak player has a good run and moves up from a game that’s just slightly over his head to one that’s way, way over his head.

If you’re completely comfortable at your current level, consider moving up. Don’t allow your winrate to comfort you. If you’re saying, “Well, I won 5ptbb/100 over the last 50,000 hands, so I must be doing something right,” you’re not ready to move up. You should feel comfortable and in control almost all the time in your regular game. Your moments of confusion and feelings of being outplayed should come rarely.

You should have control over your opponents. You should be able to manipulate them into situations where they make mistakes. You should read their hand ranges accurately. And you should be able to anticipate how they will react to some situations. In a recent Stoxpoker video, James Davis was tangling with a poor player at $1-$2 on Full Tilt. He c-bet a dry flop, and he said on the commentary, “Here’s what’s going to happen. He’s going to raise, I’m going to 3-bet, he’s going to fold, and I’m going to show.” And it happened just like that. If you’re ready to move up, you should occasionally have these moments of anticipation also. It means you understand your game and likely you have the edge you think you do.

The next parts will cover some more specific examples of playing comfort and how they relate to moving up.

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