Thread: river donk?
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Old 12-02-2005, 02:42 PM
W. Deranged W. Deranged is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Posts: 96
Default Re: river donk?

One of the best things I ever learned from Nate Tha Great:

In general, a very sound way to play a big A in a heads-up pot on a generally non-threatening board is to bet the flop, and then to check-call the turn and check-fold the river.

The idea is this: On the turn, you are very often still ahead. But betting allows an observant opponent to bluff you off the best hand, and sometimes you have outs anyway and so you want to minimize your investment, and in a smallish pot against only one opponent giving free cards isn't much of a concern. So you check, and when you do so your opponent will often bet anything trying to take the pot down, and so often you induce a mistake.

But the river is a different story: assuming you don't improve on the river, when you check again, your opponent is going to showdown a lot of good hands and only rarely bet an inferior hand. Against most non-maniacal opponents, you can usually be pretty confident your big A is not good against their river value bet, and can fold. But the number of times they check behind and let you win a showdown, plus the likelihood of improving, means you really need to at least see a river.
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