The purpose of bets

An exclusive excerpt from GTO Poker Simplified all about making sure you know why you are betting.

This is an exclusive excerpt from Barry Carter and Dara O'Kearney's new book GTO Poker Simplified.

While aggression pays in poker, amateur players often do not know why they are betting. They couldn’t tell you whether they were bluffing or value betting, they just bet because they didn’t know what else to do.

There are lots of reasons to bet in poker and the following are the types of bets you will see referring to in strategy content.

It’s important to note that often a bet is made for two or three of the following reasons simultaneously, so these classifications are not definitive.

Value

The most common and important type of bet is the value bet. A value bet is made when you believe you beat enough of the hands your opponent calls with to be profitable and it is the way you make money in poker. For a value bet to be profitable, it must win more than 50% of the time when called (in other words it must be ahead of over half the opponent’s calling range).

Bluff

A bluff is when you don’t believe your hand will win at showdown but you think you can win the current pot by forcing your opponent to fold the best hand. For a bluff to be profitable, your opponent must fold a certain percentage of the time depending on your bet size. If you bluff with a pot bet, you are risking pot to win pot so your bet needs to work more than half the time. If you use a half pot size, it only needs to work more than a third of the time. If you bluff for twice the pot, it has to work more than two thirds of the time, and so on.

Semi Bluff

This is when you try to make your opponent fold but you have outs to a straight and/or flush if you are called, giving you the chance to win a bigger pot as a value bet on a later street.

Protection bet

You believe you have the best hand right now but your hand can be easily outdrawn, so you want to get value now while it is good, but are also happy to take the pot down now. Betting a hand like 99 on a 822 flop is a good example of this. You know you are usually ahead but fear over cards on the turn and river, which may cause your opponent to pull ahead, or be less likely to pay off a bet with a worse hand.

Equity denial

You have a medium strength hand that can easily be outdrawn by your opponent’s checking range, so you bet to clear out the equity of the weak part of their range to take the pot down now. If you have a hand like 44 on a 22T board you might bet small here to get all the KQ/KJ/QJ and Ax hands to fold, as well as random stuff like 67 and 78. Unlike the protection bet you are not certain you are ahead here but there are enough weak hands you do not want to give free cards to justify the bet.

Blocker bet

A small, out of position, bet you make to prevent your opponent from either checking back or making a larger bet size you do not want to call. For example, you might bet 1/3rd pot out of position to prevent your opponent making a 2/3rd pot bet if you checked to them. You also make blocker bets with strong hands on scary boards, so for example if you have 22 on a 289TJ board, you have a strong enough hand to get value from one pair, but a hand like that would be scared of a 7 or a Q on this board and would not value bet it if checked to.

Merge bet

A complicated bet with a medium strength hand that will sometimes make better hands fold and simultaneously make weaker hands call. For example, if you have KK on an AJ3 board, a big bet might make A8 fold because it has kicker problems but KJ might call because it beats the bluffs and blocks AK/AJ.

Balance

In GTO world all hands will do this to some extent. You will sometimes make blocker bets with monster hands or bluffs to protect the blocker bet range. You will overbet with bluffs so that your overbet value bets get paid. If your bets are not balanced you become exploitable.

Note that all the above example are the way we as humans think about bets, or classify them, but when you boil it down there are only two real reasons to bet:

1. To get worse hands to call, so you win more when you win the pot
2. To get hands that have a chance to win to fold, so you win the pot more often

It’s important to realise that most bets actually benefit both of these factors, particularly on earlier streets. When you bet the nuts on the flop, you are happy to get called (because you know you have the best hand right now), but you still benefit when you fold out hands you are ahead of but had a small chance of outdrawing you. When you bet and cause a hand that had a 10% chance of outdrawing you to fold, your chances of winning the pot (your pot share) increased from 90 to 100%.

Similarly, bets that are mostly done for protection (like a low pair you bet hoping to fold out overcards) still benefit when a hand with less than 50% chance of outdrawing you calls.

This is an excerpt from GTO Poker Simplified by Barry Carter and Dara O'Kearney, which is out now.