I really want to work on my flop raising range and I am trying to think about how I should construct it.  Looking at the hand histories that I have I have noticed that most regulars at SSPLO have a fold to raise of ~45%.  This seems like a really high percentage of the time and I really think that I am not bluff raising the flops enough.

I am hoping that as a community we can talk about some of the board textures and think about which hands that we can turn into bluff raises and which hands have enough equity to peel (IP/OOP).

So I thought that for the first instance we could look at very static boards and then move from there to the more dynamic boards and I figured that the best place to start is with paired boards.  

So have about 3200 hands of regs on paired flops.  42% of these flops are HU and the other 58% are multiway.

HU hands I guess are the easiest to talk about so we can start there.

So the first thing that stands out is the 70% cbet frequency.  I would expect this percentage to be higher on paired boards.  I have taken two players from the sample and used their specific ranges for comparison.  Interesting enough the distribution of the range and the flop action frequencies are very similar which does help lead me to believe that coming up with some good standard lines against regs can really help to increase my bottom line.

The first two images are the miss cbet range distribution for my two villains.  There is a lot of green in these ranges (folds or near air) which is to be expected when villains are checking 30% of the time on these boards.

70% OF TIME VILLAIN CBETS

So since villains are cbetting less then expected we can make the assumption that continue ranges on the flop are stronger.  However looking at the frequency in which they fold to raises (63% of time) I am wondering how much of our range that we can play back with.

SO THIS IS WHERE I THINK THAT THE RANGE CONSTRUCTION GETS INTERESTING.

Villains are b/f often ~65%.  Looking at my stats most of the time it's trips+ at showdown or won with showdown (in some paired board analysis that I have done, trips and QQ+ make up about 35% of a 25% open range of hands on a paired board.  So this is when I start to get a little dizzy thinking about how I want to proceed against a cbet.

On one hand players bet/fold so often that I think that I need to check raise a wide range with a lot of blockers and backdoor possibilities and only folding the weakest part of my range.  I would also assume that I should be x/calling my monster hands since villains fold often (unless they have trip+) and that range will likely be betting again on the turn.  Over pairs to the pair on board seem like they will be great hands to x/r bluff with and perhaps barrel off if we have opponent's bet/calling the flop with AA/KK type hands and giving up on later streets (also have some equity to improve with these hands)

So let think about the four situations:

1) Flop in position facing a check (miss cbet):  As I mentioned off the top of my head we really have an immediate bet here.  V1 and V2 have a lot of green (weak hands) in the check ranges and we should be able to show profit with a bluff with all our hands.  Now since nearly 75% of the range is hands that villain has given up with (and the majority of overpair hands not included in this range) What type of value hands should we be checking back on the flop and trying to extract two streets of value on turn and river 

2) Flop in position facing a cbet: So this is again the tricky spot.  There is a lot of the air in the miss cbet range and that is where we are likely going to make the lions share of our profits on these boards.  However looking at the range and fold to raise frequency we still should have bluff raises on these boards.  On a board like 669ds I think that we should start to use a polarized x/r range consisting of our good trip hands or better along with some weak hands like our HF blockers and over pairs TT-KK, plus x/c hands with some showdown value like weak trips, TP+:NFD (when thinking I feel like NFD has to be a good hand to raise on these boards because we block AA:NFD 

Being out of position I think will not change our raising range much.  I still think that we should have a wide and polarized raising range.  Perhaps we will see where the discussion leads us.  I am interested in thinking about probing ranges on the turn since again a lot of the miss cbet range has given up by the river.

Hope you have enjoyed the bit of work that I have completed and really hope that as a group we can think of ways to maximize our expected value in the long run.  If there is interest and we can have some constructive work done I would like to look at other flop textures in the future.