villian is 53/5/.9 through few hands. has shown zero aggression at any point. vs most people i v-bet the river without hesitation. vs this player i wasn't so sure, mainly because i'm not sure i can fold to a river raise.



Poker Stars $2/$4 Limit Hold'em - 5 players
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

Pre Flop: (1.5 SB) Hero is BTN with A K
UTG calls, 1 fold, Hero raises, 1 fold, BB calls, UTG calls

Flop: (6.5 SB) 5 3 9 (3 players)
BB checks, UTG checks, Hero bets, BB calls, UTG raises, Hero calls, BB calls

Turn: (6.25 BB) K (3 players)
BB checks, UTG checks, Hero bets, BB folds, UTG calls

River: (8.25 BB) 9 (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero ..

This looks like a pretty easy bet/fold to me.

A villain gets a .9 AF because he calls too much so exploit his biggest leak and get him to call.

And since he's passive, you can trust his raises enough to fold here if you get c/r'd. I don't understand why you say you don't think you can fold here.

This one seems pretty straightforward to me.

its very hard psychologically for some people to bet/fold the river. they are scared of making a bad fold.

I should b/f especially vs this type of opponent. But one thing I'm working on is getting to sd more often. And that thought is always in the back of my mind. I've worked hard to get my wtsd% up to 34% which is apparently still a bit low in 6 max. It just seems hard to find more correct spots to sd without feeling like I'm doing it just to do it. Maybe it's product of the type of opponents i try to play against. I'm usually not at a full table of lags. But, like Dink said, this SHOULD be straight forward.

Um... why are you trying to get your WTSD higher?

You really shouldn't play in a way designed to change one specific stat.

And for whatever reason you might do this, the way to get to more showdowns is to call a bit lighter in spots where you rate to have the best hand, not pass up value betting because you are scared to fold to a raise, imo.

Zach is right. Don't analyze a hand and decide on a play, then alter from that correct decision based on a stat set you'd like to get to. The whole point of stats is to gauge how often you're doing something correctly, so doing something incorrectly doesn't help. It would be like me trying to raise my VPIP by raising 23 UTG. It just doesn't make sense.



And about bet/folding, it should be one of the most powerful weapons in your arsenal at the lower limits. It's one of my favorite things to do. It combines getting value in spots where our opponents wouldn't and folding in spots that they wouldn't. These are the things that give us our edge. (Not aimed just at Viper, I'm just trying to rid people of the notion that it's bad to fold on the river.)

you don't find yourself getting bluffed of off rivers? like people turning ace high into a bluff with a c/r once the flush comes and stuff?

Oh, I do. Don't get me wrong, I'm a bit of a showdown monkey compared to a lot of you guys. But the nature of my games necessitates a much higher WTSD (I run somewhere between like 39-42 most of the time, which is about average for midstakes these days.) due to playing against good, aggressive or even mediocre, aggressive players.

The thing is, most of my showdown bound tendencies are brought about to combat players who play much closer to optimally. When playing against bad players, you have to worry much less about being exploited and so you can make many more exploitive plays. In this case, that can be done by making a fold that is exploitable vs. a good or aggressive player.

However, if we don't have to worry about being exploitable, and vs. this passive of a player we don't, we can deviate from optimal strategy in order to exploit imbalances in our opponent's play. So in this case, if a player was good enough to show up with a worse king or aggressive enough to show up with a busted draw or turn a small pair into a bluff, it's an easy bet/call, but vs. this type of player he's almost never showing up with those hands, so we can bet and exploit his tendency to call too much and then fold if raised to exploit his imbalanced river raising range. Things like this are exactly where our edge comes from. Given our hand and his range, a value bet is easily correct. Then, after we've bet and he's raised (if he did) we can correctly fold, given our read, in a spot where almost none of our opponents would fold. Making correct plays where opponents would make mistakes is how we win. And if we bet/fold here, we're making not one, but two correct plays on the same street in a spot where a lot of guys couldn't/wouldn't.

Isn't exploitive play fun?


P.S.- Excellent question Anti; I never thought we'd get so much valuable discussion out of this hand.

Good thread.

(Thoughts coming, I think.)

Sadly, we don't get much traffic here. I do agree though, it's a solid thread.