Building a river range in certain spots.

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Building a river range in certain spots.

Hi guys,

I have a question about balance vs playing hands in highest vacuum ev.

Example question:
We are in 3bet pot, 175 bb deep and call vs SB 3bet on btn.
We call twice with open ender and turned fd.

On the river villain bets and we have air.

If we shove it needs to work 50% of the time to BE.
How do we decide when to start blufshoving for balance purposes.
Ofcourse if villain folds(assumption) 50% or more, we shove with some blufs.

But what if villain folds with less than 50%, how important is having a bluffing range in a spot that doesnot happen all the time. I mean for 400-1knl.

Thanks

3 Comments

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BigFiszh 12 years ago
When you decide that Villain most likely will fold significantly less than 50%, that means he perceives your value-range to be too small and your bluffing-range too wide.

What does that tell us? That the issue of balance / imbalance had been created on previous streets. On either flop or turn your ranges became heavily unbalanced, meaning that you probably had raised your strong hands at some point, leaving a bunch of draws left in your range. Now, when you come to the river Villain knows that you rarely ever can have a hand strong enough to shove - but tons of draws that missed.

If that wouldn´t be the case - and you can credibly rep a strong value-range, his folding% probably would be higher.

But all that said naturally doesn´t mean that you can´t have a balanced bluffing-range at all. Just take the amount of combos you could shove for value, calculate the odds you´re giving Villain for a call and bluff often enough (with your weakest hands, ideally with blockers to the nuts!) to keep his call break-even.

Example (NL1k), 175bb eff. stacks. 3bet pot:

River: 760 in the pot, board is Td 9c 6s 4s 2d

Villain bets 475, we have 1.385 left.

Say, our valuerange consists of T9s, TT, 99 = 8 combos. Our potential bluffing-range (non-nut-range) is QQ, JJ, AQss, AJss, ATss, A9ss, A5ss, A2ss, KQss, QJss, 98ss.

When we shove, the pot is 2620 and Villain has 910 to call. So we give him odds of (generously rounded) 3:1. That said, our value:bluff-ratio has to be 3:1, so we can bluff 25% of our overall-shoving-range. With 8 value-combos we can "afford" 2.7 bluff-combos. So, I´d suggest to bluff with AQss, AJss, ATss (as those have the maximal blocker-effects vs. overpairs and topsets)
R0b5ter 12 years ago
Nice post. Just 1 question why do you have T9 in your value range but QQ and JJ in your bluffing range?
BigFiszh 12 years ago
"Just 1 question why do you have T9 in your value range but QQ and JJ in your bluffing range?"

Haha, good point - originally I had defined a different board texture, then changed it and didn´t recognize that it doesn´t fit with our range anymore. I corrected it again ... thanks for the hint!!

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