Why bet/fold so much?

[mack848]

I personally feel that I don’t use the bet/fold line enough. At Small Stakes I believe that we should, if anything, find it easier to bet/fold, than we do check/crying call.

The logic that ‘folding the river for one bet is the biggest mistake in hold’em’ is the root of a lot of player’s anxiety. Unless your judgement of the likelihood of holding the second best hand is drastically out, this is simply not the case.


For example.

You have middle pair on the river HU against a weak player who has bet. You judge that you are good about 10% of the time and the pot is 7BB. If your judgement is correct the EV is (0.10 x 7) + (0.90 x –1)= -0.2 : a fold.

But let’s say that your actual chance of winning was twice what you guessed. The EV of calling now is (0.20 x 7) + (0.8 x –1) = 0.6 : a call.

Folding after misjudging your winning chances by 100% is a 0.8BB error; a sizeable one, yes, but hardly ‘the biggest mistake in hold’em’. I think that some players instinctively believe that they have made a 7BB error here.


At Small Stakes I think that a bet/folding mistake is likely to be smaller than a check/crying call mistake, as river bluff raises are so rare. Just think how often you bet/crying call and find they were bluffing – I can’t remember many at 2/4 or 3/6. Our PT stats will also give us a fair indication of whether the opponent is capable of this play.