Value Betting is the way to Beat Poker

Value betting "thin" can sometimes look like a bluff.

Forget running huge bluffs or laying down strong hands, the way to beat poker is to become an expert at value betting. The more money you can extract from your hands, the more money you are going to win in the long run. It really is as simple as that.

There are some players, many of them in fact, who bet a set amount on all streets regardless of their cards and of the board texture. No doubt you will have seen players always raise 3x preflop, bet 2/3 pot on the flop, the  same again on the turn and then again on the river. While sizing your bets like this will make your hand strength difficult to read because you will be betting the same amount when you are ahead or bluffing, betting in this way could mean you are not winning enough from strong hands and are losing more when you have a thin-value hand - more on those later.

Let's say there is $100 in the pot and you are going to be for value because you have the best hand. How much would you bet? Is the villain in the hand going to call a $70 bet? If so, will he call a $75 or maybe a $78 bet? What about a $90 bet? If villain calls a $90 bet only slightly less often than a $70 bet then we should be $90 all day long to maximise our value in the long run because the times he calls makes up for the time he folds.

Imagine we have managed to get to the river on a 9c-6s-5d-Qs-6d board and we have a pair of queens in our hand that has improved to a full house on the river. Unless our opponent has specifically a pair of sixes in his hand we are a lock to win the hand. In this scenario it is very easy to bet, we basically have the nuts, the only problem is to figure out how much money we can extract from villain. Because all but one hands that call us in this spot are worse than our own holding we can try and extract maximum value from our hand, but what if we have got the river of the same board with a hand such as pocket jacks?

In this scenario, there is a chance we will be called by worse hands such as pocket tens, maybe pocket eights, a hand such as ten-nine but there are plenty more hands that have us beaten too. Think of the hands that beat our tens here. There's a possible straight out there for a start, anyone with a six has us crushed too. Any queen defeats us, the list seems quite long

A better hand is always, at the very least, calling our bet on the river but we need to make sure we bet small enough that worse hands than ours will still call. Sometimes this may be a half-pot bet, other times you may bet just a quarter of the pot in an attempt to retain the very worst end of your opponents range.

As a general rule, the thinner your value bet is (i.e. the less weaker hands that can call you there are) the smaller the bet should be. Do not just bet the same amount every time because you will be leaving chips at the table one way or another.

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