I’ve recently heard some very strong poker players assert that, at least when over-betting the flop, it is less about nut advantage (a polarization advantage), and more about a significant equity advantage across the entirety of your range. These players are unequivocally stronger than I am, and I have no delusions that I understand theory as well as they do, but I can’t see how this could be the case, and feel that having a more polarized range feels to me like it has to be the basis of any line making really large over-bets.
The crux of the issue: it’s generally only the top and bottom of your range that benefit from really large bets. All that the middle of your range can gain with large bets is equity denial, and while that provides a degree of benefit, that is usually smaller than the fact that you’ll mostly be folding out hands already behind you, and getting calls from hands ahead of you, which is a pretty bad result for hands lacking good chances to improve.
I’m probably making a mistake by thinking of this as if we’re already at the turn or river. Is anyone else familiar enough with flop over-betting to explain why I’m wrong, and why you are better off taking these lines when you have a strong equity advantage across your range, rather than when you have a nut advantage?
I’ve also read about the nutted equity distribution idea, and really agree with you here. I have genuinely never seen any competent player overbet the flop and it seems to be an inherently exploitative play (targeted towards stations) if ever doing it with value. I just can’t really imagine a situation where it would ever work long-term against good players in practice: I guess circumstances where it is theoretically the best move apply very rarely.
Hi, I overbet quite frequently as a part of both my MTT and Ring strategies.
At first I was mostly using a polarized range following @Yorunoame’s reasoning: I thought it beneficial to bloat the pot when I have a monster, and for balance, using the same size with draws provides more fold EQ when we are likely behind.
However, over time I have shifted to a more linear overbet range in general. This provides more board coverage for this sizing as part of my overal decision tree, and offers more protection for my bluffs as I can now have QQ/KK/AA or top 2 on a broadway board instead of just “a set, the straight, or nothing”
I would think it’s actually about having an advantage across most of your range, but where a large part of the range does best by checking.
Like if you raise pre-flop, BB calls, board comes AK4r (which is one of the boards we get to use overbet at a fairly high frequency). You have a big advantage range v range, but most of your range gains little by c-betting.
I’m not sure there really is an good answer though, because I believe range betting for small has basically the same EV as implementing an overbet strategy.
Yes, this is a board where the over-bet on the flop strategy often shows up with an in-position raiser vs OOP defender. We can use a solver and see that the in position raiser does indeed have an equity advantage across almost the entire range, but if we translate this into a hueristic with other boards where over-bets for the in position raiser are common, is it really the case that it is the advantage over the whole range that is the basis for the over-bet? I’d actually think you’d be more inclined to over-bet if you only had a significant advantage at top of range, and that having advantage in the middle makes me less want to make an over-bet.
One other relatively unrelated thought: it can be hard to figure out when you have an equity advantage on a play money site, where so many opponents have such unorthodox pre-flop ranges and in general take a lot of unorthodox lines. Obviously there are still opponents where you can narrow down their range still, but the way in which ranges contract is often very different than you’d get from near perfect play versus near perfect play.
If we have a range advantage in a given spot, and our size in that spot is always overbet instead of something smaller, then we capture more value when we get called by worse. Given the premise that we have a range advantage in this spot, we will get called by worse more often than not, when we do get called. So $ $
Oh, I don’t think so, I think it’s just a property of the boards we can overbet, not the reason for doing so. You usually want to be the only player that can have top two pair and have the monopoly and sets (on a rainbow board with no straights), so yeah, it’s having a massive advantage at the top of the range that is the driving factor.
We’re usually not supposed to use overbet on triple broadway boards though, even though we still have a big nut advantage. Whether that’s because villain can now also have straights or because most of our range now benefits from c-betting I’m not sure - it’s probably a combination of both.
Yes, that’s exactly the concept I was asking about, and it’s interesting how he explained that. I think it makes sense to me now, though I imagine I’ll have a hard time in practice adjusting my game to correctly make use of this idea.
The theory here seems to depend on two things: understanding how your full range matches up against your opponent’s full range; and your opponent exploiting your use of smaller bet sizes with the middle of your range in a few too many spots. Both of these seem questionable in a lot of settings, the first because many opponents on a site like this use very odd ranges that are not at all easy to accurately visualize, and the second just because human’s in general might be incapable of responding with the degree of precision requited to exploit this (and even if really strong players can, it may still be well outside of the scope of most of our opponents here).
Even if we don’t face the ostensible middle-of-range pressure discussed in the vid, we will still profit from using the larger size on boards where we have a range advantage
I must admit I’ve never really tried overbetting the flop on Replay. Where I have tried it, people just fold a lot, which can’t be a huge mistake. Betting small on the flop and then over-betting the flop seems to be way more profitable.
I think on Replay you can probably overbet for value a lot more, but bluff a lot less, and I’d likely choose very different boards to theory. I’d probably only overbet value on ace high boards, but might overbet for two streets with any two cards on disconnected K high boards. Some people just aren’t at all aware of your range though, and are just never folding any pair - you’d have to know your opponent, assuming you have only one, which can be quite rare.
Exploitatively, you’d want to overbet all your nut hands (regardless of the flop or ranges). You can’t do that when you have a lot of hands that gain EV by betting small, because that range needs protection from your strongest hands.
If your opponents aren’t paying any attention, that second sentence becomes a lot less relevant. If they are, then we’d need to pick flops where we have a significant range advantage to be able to find enough bluffs.
