Nit of the Day: Drawing Dead and Raising the River

[DavidC]

Let me introduce to you, Nit of the Day, which definitely won't be produced daily, but hopefully will be made no more than once per day. I'll be talking about errors that I see in posters' thinking, which will sometimes have an extremely small -EV impact on their game, due to the rarety of when they'll be wrong about generalizations that they've made. At the same time, seeing things like this drive me nuts, so I'm posting about them. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

If I'm wrong in any of these, or if you have something to contribute which adds to our understanding of the issue, that'd be awesome!

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A few days ago, a new poster posted a hand where they called on the turn on a paired board, trying to hit a flush, and then they called a river bet instead of raising the river when they hit. They did this because they thought that they were drawing dead. Someone told them that if you're not going to raise the river, you should fold your four-flushes on the turn.

This isn't always correct. On the river, you evaluate calling vs raising based on a number of things. On the turn, you evaluate calling with a drawing hand based a number of things. In the case of calling on the turn when you think you may be drawing dead even if you improve, it's possible for a really large pot to give you good enough odds to call when you think you're drawing dead, while on the river you wouldn't have enough value to raise, due to reverse implied odds.

For the purposes of example, I'll say a 1,000,000 bb pot on the turn, with a 99% chance of drawing dead and a 25% chance of hitting your flush. It's worth it to call on the turn, it's worth it to call on the river, and it's not worth it to raise on the river.

I'm kinda curious about how large the pots have to be, and how low the chance of drawing dead has to be, before you could actually make a case for calling on the turn and the river. The reasoning behind calling on the river is the same reasoning behind calling on the turn, though: you're getting good pot-odds for your money. The reason that you don't raise the river is the same reason that you don't raise the turn: you're losing more money with each further bet that goes into the pot.