Thoughts on hand reading, plus free booze

Ok. First the serious stuff: apparently the "Pokerstars hospitality suite" at the Rio has free booze for Pokerstars qualifiers. That's a pretty scary thought, considering like 80% of online qualifiers must be twenty-something single men. Red alert: sausage-fest! Still, I'm sure I'll stop by at least once, although I assume I'll get either laughed at, stared at in disbelief, or kicked out if I ask for "CL Smooth, no glass."

Anyway, Doherty and I got into a short discussion of hand #131 from the satellitte I won, and some interesting things came up. Here's the hand:





PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t200 (2 handed)

Matt (t6805)
Trblcaling (t6695)

Preflop: Matt is Button with 6s, 6c.
Matt raises to t400, Trblcaling calls t200.

Flop: (t800) 6h, 2d, 7s (2 players)
Trblcaling checks, Matt checks.

Turn: (t800) 4d (2 players)
Trblcalling bets t600, Matt calls t600.

River: (t2000) 3d (2 players)
Trblcaling checks, Matt bets t1000, BB folds.

Final Pot: t3000.

Now, as I've stated before, I think i pretty much screwed up this hand on every street. But ignore that for now and just focus on my river bet. Doherty asks the perfectly reasonable question via email:

Why did you bet on the river? His bet on the turn could easily have been because he just got an outside straight draw or just got a flush draw, and in both cases the river would have filled him up. Not a sure thing he had that (he obviously didn't), but my thought is that your EV is better if you just check.

Now, in retrospect, I don't think I should have bet the river. But not for the reasons Doherty is proposing. And this is the key point: my opponent's betting pattern, as well as my betting pattern, make it highly unlikely that he has a straight or flush here. Why is that?

Look at the whole hand. I haven't made a single agressive move. The flop was check-check, and I called a bet on the turn. There's no reason on earth for him to believe that if he checks the river, I'm going to bet. In other words: if he has a made hand, he almost certainly bets the river here. Now, it's not airtight - he migh check-call with the straight, fearing the flush - but it's almost impossible for him to be trying for a checkraise here. It's also not as airtight as if the turn went check-check - in that case, we'd know he couldn't check the river with a made hand, as he'd have zero reason to believe i'd bet the river.

This is the type of analysis that I think a lot of players forget to do. It's quite valuable to think back through an entire hand and try and see what the "story" tells you about your opponent's hand. After all, the name of the game in NL is narrowing your opponents hand range. Since it's almost impossible to nail their hand exactly, you have to narrow it down to a subset of holdings and then estimate the percentages for each of them: in this case, i've been able to reduce the possibility that he has the flush to near zero, and the straight to "very unlikely, maybe 10%."

Still, it was dumb for me to bet, i think. Although I almost certainly have the best hand once I can rule out the straight or the flush, it's not clear to me that I'm going to get any worse hands to call, and I'm certainly not going to push out any betters hands offering him 3-to-1 on a call. So basically, I've given him almost a negative freeroll here - 85% of the time he's going to (correctly) fold his one pair or no pair hands, 10% of the time he's going to call me with the straight, and the other 5% he'll either call me with the better set or pay me off with two pair or one pair or the like. Overall, it's a massive -EV play for me to bet there, i think.

All of this also shows us how important position is in a hand like this. If I have to act first here on the river, I'm going to have to check-call anything reasonable, because I won't be able to differentiate a straight/flush and a bluff. A pot-size bet - offering me 2 to 1 - would make it very tough to lay down my second set. So played correctly, he'll value bet me to death with his good hands and check through mostly with the bad ones, but bluffing enough to make my life hell.

It also shows how important it is to make sure that you're telling the right "story" when you try to bluff against observant opponents. If your bet doesn't fit the story, you're a lot more likely to get looked up and have your bluff busted. You see this all the time - people check-calling the flop and turn, and then bluffing their busted draw by gunning out a bet out of position on the river, even though no apparent draw has connected on the river. It's just not nearly as credible as when you check-raise the turn and the fire out.