Mid/High Stakes Limit Hold'em Poker Forums

This is a general question, and maybe stupid I dont know, but it sure has merit in my mind.

I been browsing 2+2 and there is a post in high stakes, the poster made a straight on the river on a paired board. These guys, the high stakes players on 2+2 are going back and forth debating b/f or b/c.
and then, they argue if its a metagme question or if their opponents live are just bad.
I personally think its a bet fold..lol..but not why I made this post.

I have extrapolated (first time I ever used that word in my life..lol) that if you have a read that a player is a "good" 2+2 online thinking player...DD, or Oink or Danza or all those poster guys...or someone of that caliber.
b/f is in their repetiore, more than the normal poker putz. We should make more bluff raises, especially on the river!
Half , yes 50%!! of these guys are mucking a straight here, and ALL considered it. I am not debating the hand, I am just saying, knowing they can fold a very strong hand on the river like this is of value and EXPLOITABLE.
thoughts?

oh and ..not oink..he never folds....lol

post the hand mick

post the hand mick

The correct play in the hand is not what I am after, its in high stakes on 2+2 if you want to see it.
Its a way to beat DD, Danza, and good thinking players that I am after,
So I am saying,

Because B/F is more prevalent in their thinking process than most lessor players, we can exploit that by bluff raising the river more. And maybe bluff raising more, period.

Mickey you are posting a LHE paradox. If a good player is capable of bet/folding vs. you then you are not capable of bluff raising the river @ a high enough frequency.

Mickey you are posting a LHE paradox. If a good player is capable of bet/folding vs. you then you are not capable of bluff raising the river @ a high enough frequency.

with not capable, or perceived by the "good player" as not capable of....as the key point.

So my play only works once, it then changes the perception.
I have never once bluff raised a river. But I am considering it.
I will find a good player and try it.
The mere fact that I consider this makes me a better player,
as the "good player" now has more he has to factor in, which is good for me.

and the high stakes players arguing this hand, are arguing a read,
which is almost always a matter of opinion.
so good luck to them.
thanks Danza.....be careful when you play me now....I'm thinking about it!

Best place to try a river bluff raise for the first time is when the river brings a 4 flush and you were calling down with something mediocre, especially when playing live.

-DeathDonkey

dont sit at a table with chuck or chris lol. Best advice i can give

You don't have to be afraid bluff-raising the river. You just have to remember that even the "unexploitable" bluff-raising frequency is very low. Also, you need to have a few hands in your range that have a legitime value-raise. The frequency that you can bluff-raise is proportional to this value-raising range and the bigger the pot, the less frequently you can bluff.

All this said, if you do it at certain low frequency, bluff-raising is at least zero EV, regardless of what your opponent does, so I suggest feel free to try it out. You don't lose anything by doing it correctly and you might gain a lot. One of the surprising things about studying unexploitable strategies is that the motivation for bluffing isn't necessarily to steal the pot, but to "protect" your value-bets and value-raises so that these expert players can't start exploiting you! :-)

Ah, and what Chuck said is true: an expert player will have a good idea whether or not he can bet/fold against a particular opponent. But the tricky part, even for the expert player, is to figure out the right frequency. If you can find that, there's nothing the expert can do in response.

What makes this process a bit easier to figure out is to think of your own range in every spot. If you realize that the hand you have is the absolute rock bottom of your range, and you have an idea of your range in whole which has hands that you could have had value-raised, you can safely bluff-raise knowing that your opponent can't exploit this in any way. Note though that you can't start bluffing with every hand that doesn't have a chance of winning the showdown, because then this bluff-raising strategy would be exploitable. (The opponent could then just call the raise with every hand he was value-betting with.)

If you manage to think through a situation like this and you are able to make you strategy somewhat unexploitable in this way (which doesn't mean that you should try to be unexploitable in general, but you know what I mean), you don't have to think that you lose a big bet when the opponent calls your raise. Your bluff-raise or at least the strategy in whole is at least neutral EV and probably more like a significantly positive EV. So it doesn't cost you anything.

Someone might counter-argue that "well what if the opponent is such that he always calls the raise." In this case, the opponent surrenders too much value against the legitimate raises or perhaps he loses value by not value-betting lightly enough in the first place etc and so on and so forth.

I think that if you really did play with mid to high stakes regulars, you would find that river bet/folds are relatively rare. If a river value raise does not make sense to me, I may call with a hand I was bluffing on the river with if my bluff catcher can beat a lot of busted draws. Further, one may call a river raise not because the it is +EV in the hand itself (the so-called "in a vacuum"), but because it may be possible to leverage the information of the exact hand that the villain chose to play that way in future hands.

jaj, you have a beautiful mind.
I wish oink had commented.

I may be overstepping my self here, but I am going to try and sum up.

It takes a very strong player, with a very strong read to lay down a big hand for one bet in a big pot.
But it can be the correct play, B/F that is, even so.

So to be able to bluff raise profitably(not, as jaj points out, that it even needs to be etc..),
we need a strong player capacble of B/F'ing who also has a strong read on us, THAT WE ARE NOT CAPABLE OF BLUFF RAISING in this specific spot, at least at a frequency high enough to be considered(as Danza points out).
furthermore, as most high stakes players realize all this, B/F is ussually not much of a consideration (as MrBug points out). except perhaps in the ussual cat and mouse type poker sometimes played at high levels...he knows I won't/shouldn't..so I will type thing.

so to B/F you need a certain opponent, and to bluff raise(counter) you need a even narrower certain type of opponent.

That being said....
I will be looking for a spot(that DD points out) and opponent type that is CABABLE OF B/F.

My image is great for this, I be the tight, presently underestimated "uncapable" guy.

thanks guys, I cant tell you how much fun it is being around great poker players.
good luck to us all.