In terms of river over-bet bluffing frequency
I wonder how frequent you guys see an over-bet jam on the river as a bluff?
From my own limited experience, I have rarely seen any big over-bet bluff (OTR) in low stakes in my local casino, hence in the hand below, I wonder whether we can overfold?
1/2. Friday night. 8-handed. Hero just transferred to this table for 5 minutes so no ideas about the table dynamic.
UTG+1 limped 2, 4 limpers, until we saw red Kings on the BB. We opened to 20. UTG+1 was the only caller.
V is a white guy between 25-30 years old. Not much useful information.
Flop 522 rainbow. We bet 40% pot, V called.
Turn J, putting a backdoor FD there, we bet 55 into 90, V looked down at his cards again, tank called.
River another J, now we checked on this double paired board. V jammed 325 into the pot of around 200 and put his poker face on refusing to talk.
Hero?
KQ/KT w a FD is 2 combos. Turning a pair into a bluff on a double paired board makes no sense.
KQ/KT is King-high on the river. No pair. 66-88 might as well be no-pair, unless V thinks hero takes this line with 33 and 44. Don't know how great I'd feel checking back 66-88.
It's obvious you've been missing the point, which is that V gets to the river with a lot of terrible hands, and he'll bluff with a lot of them when hero goes raise-bet-bet-check.
It doesn't matter whether what V is doing on the turn makes sense or not, whether he has two overs with a draw or a PP with a draw, or A5 with the nut blocker - all those hands are losing to hero's over-pairs if they check back, so V is going to try to rep a monster here when hero checks, or he's just going to lose.
We don't need to think V is good enough to know QTs is a good bluff candidate, or bad enough to bluff with something that isn't a good bluff candidate. All we need to know is he limp-called from UTG1 pre, flat called the flop, did a card-check / tank-call on the turn, and then jammed when hero checked.
He seems pretty bad, so I'm not giving him credit for doing a fake card-check / fake tank on the turn, to pretend he's on a draw when he's actually boated up.
Maybe the population under-bluffs rivers, especially when they over-bet, but the 1/2 rec-fish population is going to be over-bluffing here, when we check the river.
It doesn't matter whether what V is doing on the turn makes sense or not, whether he has two overs with a draw or a PP with a draw, or A5 with the nut blocker - all those hands are losing to hero's over-pairs if they check back, so V is going to try to rep a monster here when hero checks, or he's just going to lose.
Oooookay, I see what's going on here. You have put so much thought into what villain's range contains, but when it comes to hero's range, you've gotten a little caught up on the hand they happen to hold.
Players are incentivized to bet based on how differentiated their range is, and so how doomed to make mistakes the other player is some percentage of the time. When you bet with a condensed range, the opponent can simply call with all the hands that are ahead of that range and fold all the hands that are behind it and never make a mistake. The opposite is true when your range is polarized, and if you are in a situation where one player either has the nuts or air and the other player has a bluff catcher, the polarized player should bet the maximum amount, even with infinite stacks and an infinitesimal pot.
So, if we know that hero holds an overpair, the opponent could easily perfectly polarize their range to construct this nuts/air vs bluff catcher scenario. They would simply shove every hand that is better than KK and enough hands that are worse than KK to make hero indifferent to calling or folding. So if they have, say, 4 combos combined of 2x/Jx/55, they can shove all of those + about 2.5 combos of any QQ-. In this case, blocker effects and SDV are irrelevant, so QT=88; it is simply a matter of frequencies.
(n fact, all of the above would be true even if you held the 2nd nuts; the frequencies would simply be smaller.
Because from villain's perspective, hero doesn't just hold KK but a range of hands that includes KK, our range is not condensed at all. KQ alone is 16 combos; you have to this point only come up with 3 combos of air that villain can have (though there are more possible). Villain's range contains less hands worse than a pair and less hands better than TT. It does not make sense for them to overbet ship A5o into a range of hands where such a high percentage of the hands so much as considering a fold are already worse than A5.
I mean i understand hero has a range of hands, but also if a 1/2 player raises the bb (reasonably tight), bets flop (could have whole range here), bets turn (Jx and QQ+ and 2x, which combined with preflop probably includes no 2x at all, players dont double barrel bluff or with marginal valus even close to enough) checks river (not gonna check Jx so i think you can basically put him on QQ+)
Its why its such a great spot to overbet.
I mean i understand hero has a range of hands, but also if a 1/2 player raises the bb (reasonably tight), bets flop (could have whole range here), bets turn (Jx and QQ+ and 2x, which combined with preflop probably includes no 2x at all, players dont double barrel bluff or with marginal valus even close to enough) checks river (not gonna check Jx so i think you can basically put him on QQ+)
Its why its such a great spot to overbet.
So I did already low-key concede to you that overbetting can make sense in the bolded below:
QTs is a good bluff candidate, but the reason it's not a good spot for V to overbet in theory is because they don't have a lot of pure bluffs, and they have less Jx+ than H does. It's basically the inverse of the nuts/air vs bluff-catcher clairvoyant toy game where V has a very condensed range with just a few exceptions (like QTss/A4ss), and all it takes for H to show up with the third nuts is to be capable of clicking check one time with a
Honestly, TINOs play so face up in so many spots and cap their ranges so hard that there are going to be a lot of easily identifiable places to overbet that don't make sense in theory. You have to be confident they're a TINO in the first place, but that should be easy to figure out because they basically live at the casino grinding the same games.
Even in theory, I'll be honest that as I typed that post to docvail I was like "hm, this shoving 4 combos of 2x+ and 2.5 combos of bluffs idea doesn't sound half bad." (Obviously in actuality you can't overbet shove a baby boat against any sensible checking range, so you lose the ability to go for thin value with those hands, blah blah blah).
I'm understudied in these spots where it's so relatively easy to have the 3rd nuts, and that's going to have big effects on optimal strategies. My post to docvail was just demonstrating why it's bad to do it with 5x-88 specifically--an assertion I can confidently make without checking a sim.
Just for extra funsies, I'll point out that this SHOULD go the other way around, and you should be leading out with your thin value hands and mixing in more check/raises with your nuts. (Not in this particular spot because taking an aggressive line on all 3 previous streets on a runout that only improved flop bluffs gives us such strong initiative that we should just keep playing very aggressively, but even then we should be NO MORE LIKELY to check thin value than to slowplay.)
You are correct to observe that TINOs (IT'S GOING TO CATCH ON DAMMIT!) tend to have this a**-backwards, which is a tendency we should find every way to exploit.
People being incapable of slowplaying the river has me value betting crazy thin in position too, yes. I mean i personally would be betting small with 2x because the overbet just folds their whole range.
I for one plan to start working TINO into my table talk.
No plans to explain it either. Just gonna toss it ourt, and see if it floats.
It’s like seeing a unicorn
