The River Bluffraise Problem

[protocol]

This is something that I have been thinking about for a while, and I can't seem to figure it out, so I would like to get some other people's thoughts on it.

I play mainly 10/20 6max, and this is a situation that occurs frequently, often when defending your blind. You are HU on the river, out of position, against a good player. You have a decent, but not great holding(second pair, decent kicker for example). Assume only one bet went in on the turn, and at most 2 on the flop. It is unclear if we are ahead, but if we check and he checks behind, we just missed a value bet. However if we bet and get raised, we will have a tough decision.

The pot is fairly big, and we can see a SD for one bet. Since our opponent is a good player, he knows that we know that folding the river for one bet when HU is generally a bad idea. Thus he will only raise the river with a strong holding, since he knows we are likely to call.

Now since we know that he is only raising the river here with a strong hand, we can start to fold more hands, like second and third pair type hands.

But now the problem is, if he sees us folding more often on the river, he is going to realize that this is an easy way to steal the pot, and start rasing the river with questionable hands again, sometimes pushing us off the winner.

I assume that the best way to solve this problem is to find the optimal ratio of calling and folding when facing a river raise, something which I am having trouble with. Or would we be better off just check/calling the river, which sometimes will induce a bluff, but sometimes will cause us to miss a bet.

When you guys are in this type of situation, how often are you check/calling and how often are you betting? And then how often do you call the raise? I'd appreciate any other thoughts on this too, as my thinking may be flawed here.
Thanks.

[dave44]

This is completely opponent dependent. If your opponent plays the river perfectly and according to game theory it won't matter whether we call or not when he raises. But most opponents will either bluff too much or too little, which will dictate whether you call or not. However gaining reads on something like this can be very difficult. I know Stellarwind has suggested that you call with the higher end of your range of hands you could have in that spot and fold with the lower end of the range. This will sufficiently randomize your action and guarantee you are showing down your better hands.