News: Self Study: When do we bet small on the turn?

Barry Carter consults his coach to learn why we bet small on the turn in very different scenarios and board textures.

In the self study series Barry Carter shows you how he tried to solve a poker problem then consults a coach or solver to get feedback on his method.

Recently I noticed a leak where I was betting small a lot on the turn. It developed when I felt my opponents would not call a bigger bet, but I found it was getting me into trouble. I was letting hands draw cheaply as well as not getting the maximum from my big hands.

Typically when a player calls a small bet on the flop, their range gets stronger, because they have folded all their complete misses. On the turn against them, we should bet less often, but for a larger size. We bet big with our bluffs and best value, we tend to check back the middle portion of the range.

I knew this and was still making the error, so I thought it would be interesting to explore the spots where it was correct, in GTO terms, to bet small on the flop, and then bet small on the turn. If I understood when I should bet small on the turn, maybe I would stop doing so when it was clearly wrong. I used the GTO Wizard reports feature to identify spots where the turn was bet small at a high frequency.

In each example, it was HJ vs BB, single raised pot. These were typical spots where it happened:

Low-connected boards like 4♥3♥2♥ when a high offsuit card like J♦ comes on the turn
When the board is trips like 8♦8♥8♣ and the turn comes a high card like J♣
When the board is high card heavy like A♣K♥Q♦ and the turn brings a straight card like J♦

In the first two examples the Jack is a blank of sorts, one which is unlikely to change much. In the third example the Jack completes a very obvious broadway straight, changing things considerably.

I could not make sense of this because these three spots seemed very different, so I consulted Dara O'Kearney to get his insight on what they had in common.

When the middle of your range wants to bet

What Dara explained to me was that in all three examples, the middle of our range wants to bet, rather than check back. If you compare these boards to something like A♥7♣2♠Q♣, medium-strength hands like TT would want to check back because it would fold a hand it beats like 99 and only get called by Qx+.

However, in these examples, the middle of our range can still get value from worse hands. On a 4♥3♥2♥J♦ board, for example, a hand like 8♣8♦ is not mega strong but can still get value from 4x, 5x, 66,77 and heart draws. On a board like 8♦8♥8♣J♦ a hand like A♣Q♥ can still get value from worse Aces used as bluff catchers. On a board like A♣K♥Q♦J♦ a hand like A♦9♣ can still get value from K♣8♣ etc.

All three boards look scary, because there are obvious straights/flushes/boats/quads out there, but there are also lots of medium-strength hands that bluff catch those boards.

A large bet on the turn would make the medium-strength hands fold because there are so many strong hands out there, but a small bet will get called by a lot of worse hands in the middle of the opponent's range.

If you want to learn more, Dara and I recorded the session where I asked him about this leak:

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