Dan Harrington continuation bet question.

[pzhon]

In your examples, you are not losing money on the continuation bets. You are losing money between the continuation bets.

Suppose you put in a total of $900 preflop, on the flop, and on the turn. You have $100 left, and are getting 19:1 on a call on the river. You only have to be ahead 1 time for every 19 that you are behind to break even on the river call, but you have lost money on average on the whole hand. If you are ahead 1 time in 20, both calling and folding will leave you with $100 on average, $900 less than you had at the start of the hand. Breaking even on the call doesn't mean you expect to get back the money you spent on the hand earlier.

Continuation bets are more complicated than calls on the river. Sometimes you get called by worse hands; someone may call with Ax-high against your AQ-high, for example. You aren't dead if you get called by a better hand, either, as you often have outs. On the other hand, the alternative to making a continuation bet is better than open-folding.

[intheflatfield]

I like the continuation bet concept, but it seems like this is lately being ridiculed in SS as being predictable and that good players p/u on it, and play back over the top.

I guess I'm conflicted because on one hand playing as a TAG is sometimes predictable, especially against better players, but what is the alternative? To play fishy just to be unpredictable? To give up on a flop after your raise PF and miss? You obviously can't auto mini-bet or pot it every time regardless of the flop. I can understand both sentiments, but sometimes I think we can hurt ourselves by overthinking or giving the average opponent too much credit.

I know the above is uber-general and overly simplistic, but the confilcting advice makes my brain hurt...

The reason continuation bets work alot of the time is that you must make it look like a bet you would make if you hit. If you always bet 1/2 pot on a continuation and 1x the pot if you hit it won't work. If you vary your bet size they won't know if you hit or are on a continuation. If a good player comes over the top of me sometimes I am going to have hit and he will be in trouble and when I don't I just lay it down. That is unless I think I can get him to lay it down with a reraise. You have to know your opponent to risk doing it but when it works it is sweet. Always lay your hand down when an average or a poor player comes over the top of you on a continuation bet.

[Hold'me]

[ QUOTE ]
I like the continuation bet concept, but it seems like this is lately being ridiculed in SS as being predictable and that good players p/u on it, and play back over the top.

I guess I'm conflicted because on one hand playing as a TAG is sometimes predictable, especially against better players, but what is the alternative? To play fishy just to be unpredictable? To give up on a flop after your raise PF and miss? You obviously can't auto mini-bet or pot it every time regardless of the flop. I can understand both sentiments, but sometimes I think we can hurt ourselves by overthinking or giving the average opponent too much credit.

I know the above is uber-general and overly simplistic, but the confilcting advice makes my brain hurt...

[/ QUOTE ]
You have to vary your continuation bets from 40% to 70% of the pot. Heck, sometimes bet the pot on a semi-bluff, if your opponents are observant you have to be prepared to mix it up and not let them get a good read on your betting patterns.

You make an excellent point that none of the respondents seem to have grasped. This same error appears in all poker writing, not just Harrington's. It's based on the idea that you should consider all the money in the pot when calculating pot odds, because "once the money's in the pot it doesn't belong to you any more" so none of it's yours, not even the amount you've already put in. But it must belong to somebody. Who it belongs to is all the players still in the pot. Their average equity is the size of the pot divided by the number of players. Of course in real life they have different equities, based on their cards, skill, and position, but in the absence of such knowledge we can consider them all to have the same equity. So in the examples you give, with $60 in the pot, each player "owns" $30 of it (assuming they have equal chances of winning). So when you bet $30 you only win the other guy's $30 if he folds while you stand to lose both your $30 "equity" plus the $30 you're betting for a sum of $60. You're not putting up $30 to win $60, you're putting up $60 to win $30. So you would need to win two times out of three, not one, to break even, if the only possible outcomes were your opponent folding or your losing immediately. Of course in real life your opponent might just call, so these aren't the only possible outcomes. Still you're right about Harrington, in whose example you're bluffing at the pot and planning to fold a raise. He says all you need is for your opponent to fold one time out of three to break even and anything on top of that is just gravy, but it ain't so.

This holds true no matter how many players there are. Suppose ten people have each put $30 in the pot preflop. If you try to steal the pot with a $150 bet and succeed one time out of three you've won the other players' $270 in that pot but you're out the other two $150 bets plus two $30 preflop bets for a total of $360 and a loss of $90 as in your example. In order to break even by stealing one pot out of three you would have to consider that to win the other players' $270 share of the pot you were putting up your $30 share plus the amount you were betting, in this case $105 to make your investment $135. Now if you won one out of three you would gain the same $270 but only lose two $105 bets and two $30 preflop bets to break even.

[ QUOTE ]
It's based on the idea that you should consider all the money in the pot when calculating pot odds, because "once the money's in the pot it doesn't belong to you any more" so none of it's yours, not even the amount you've already put in. [/b]But it must belong to somebody.[/b]

[/ QUOTE ]

Why is this true? Why can't the money in the pot simply be money in the pot, owned by no one until someone wins the pot?

[ QUOTE ]
Why is this true? Why can't the money in the pot simply be money in the pot, owned by no one until someone wins the pot?

[/ QUOTE ]

Because it can't just be given to the dealer or a spectator or whatever. It belongs to the players who are still in the pot. If there is $300 in the pot and ten players, it is given that no one else has a claim on that $300. Say there was some natural disaster and the hand was interrupted and there was no way of reconstructing the cards. You would probably say it was fair to divide the pot by giving each of the ten players $30. That represents his equity in the pot.

[Wacken]

Poker might not be the right game for you.

Thanks for the helpful comment.

Sunek, in the original post, asked why we were losing $90 when we were supposed to be breaking even. He received a bunch of replies accusing him of not knowing what a continuation bet is.

I tried to explain why we were losing $90. What I left out, and shouldn't have, is that losing $90 could be considered breaking even, if you're absolutely sure you're going to lose the pot if you don't make the continuation bet, in which case you lose $90 either way. In real life this seems overly pessimistic.

Hope to share more of your insights.

[TomCollins]

[ QUOTE ]
Of course in real life they have different equities, based on their cards, skill, and position, but in the absence of such knowledge we can consider them all to have the same equity.

[/ QUOTE ]

Classic, classic. I hope post #3 is as insightful.