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Value Betting in Poker
It’s very important to learn to value bet your marginal hands at small stakes. At higher stakes, it is sometimes best to check your marginal hands, and call a bet on the end in hopes that your opponent will bluff at the pot, or to get to a showdown cheaply. At small stakes, people don’t tend to bluff on the river very much, not to say that it doesn’t happen, but it’s much more rare. They DO however tend to call down with very weak hands that you will be missing out on value if you only check your top pair at the end against a single opponent. For example, if you hold a hand like KQ and flop a pair of kings, bet your hand, get called, bet a small amount on the turn, and get called, you should bet the river, even if you haven’t improved. If you are raised on the river after you bet though, you should fold. The reasoning here is simple, nearly no small stakes players will bluff raise on the river. If you checked your KQ hand on the river, intending to call a bet, then you will lose value on your hand when your opponent checks behind with KT, KJ or worse. If you fold to the river raise, then you accomplished the same thing as you would if you checked and called a bet. You won’t of course go to a showdown, but you can rest assured that you made a good fold. Even very aggressive players won’t raise on the end without at least two pair or better. Don’t however take this to an extreme. If you are in the same situation, but you have a hand like KT or KJ, then use much more discretion on the river. If you are in position and your opponent checks to you on the river, then you’ll have to do your best to read what type of player your opponent is and whether your pair of kings is best. If that player is fairly tight, and they’ve called your bets, or bet all the way, then it’s probably best to check behind. Only bet for value on the end with marginal hands that have good potential for your opponents to have worse hands, or the same pair as you with worse kickers. Another example of this would be if you hold AJ and flop a pair of jacks. It’s quite possible that your opponents could have KJ, QJ, JT or even QT, so betting on the end with this type of hand makes sense. Yet if you hold QJ, then you only have possibly one or two hands that will be worse than yours and call. Make sure you are always asking yourself what hands your opponents may hold, and if there are a reasonable amount of hands that you beat, but you still have a marginal hand, then bet on the end.
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