[cartman]

Thanks for the excellent response. You are right that folding 5-6 outers is very overrated if there is much chance at all they will bluff the river unimproved. I also agree with your assessment that the typical opponent will virtually never fold immediately to the turn raise with any pair and very rarely with even Ace high or two overcards. That means, since we have showdown value, raising for a free showdown will essentially never make the typical opponent fold a better hand.

Bobbyi and Jeff W make some good arguments that we don't need any chance of folding a better hand to make raising for the free showdown correct, but I don't fully understand what other conditions would have to be present for this to be the case. It would seem to me that without any folding equity, two conditions would have to be present to make this a good idea:

1) There is a pretty reasonable chance that our hand is best
2) He is very likely to check hands that are worse than ours on the river and bet hands that are better

But the problem I have with it is that we are essentially seeing to it that 2 total turn/river bets go in regardless of whether we are ahead or behind. (Of course sometimes we will improve and get to put in a 3rd bet, but we will also sometimes get 3-bet on the turn and fold a hand that would have improved and won the pot, but let's ignore those for a second.) So 2 bets all the time is clearly better than 2 when he likes his hand and 1 when he doesn't. But we have the option to bet if he checks the river! So we can see to it that 2 bets go in if we want assuming that he will call when he checks the river, which may be an incorrect assumption. But the times he check-folds the river with a worse hand will be somewhat offset by the times that he bluffs the river with a worse hand or checks with a better one and we decide not to value bet.

Basically it seems like that without folding equity, we would be better off spending one big bet on the turn and having the option to spend another one on the river if we are checked to rather than spending a sure two on the turn. It seems to me that if our hand is strong enough to want a sure two to go in on the turn then it would be strong enough to want to bet the river unimproved--at least some of the time--which means it isn't a free showdown raise after all.

Where am I going wrong?

Thanks,
Cartman