Outtake #2
To Bomb or not to Bomb??
Happy New Year!
In case you haven’t bought the new book yet (or even if you have!), here’s another hand that almost made it in. I ended up cutting it because I found the concepts involved too similar to other hands I already included—but if last year had been 2025, this hand probably would’ve qualified as bookworthy. Here it is.
In a mid-stakes online tournament, the button opens for a min-raise, and I call in the big blind off a 43BB effective stack with 9h7h.
While this hand is a great three-betting candidate from the big blind with deeper stacks, it is purely a flat at the 40BB level. The solver does not three-bet here with suited cards outside of premium suited hands like ATs-AKs, KQs. This is an easy heuristic to remember—at the 30-40BB level, just flat from the BB with (pretty much all) suited, non-premium hands.
The flop comes Qd6h2s.
I check, the button bets 2.2BB, and I raise to 5.5BB. The button calls.
On a board where we’re not going to have a lot of obvious bluff candidates to check-raise, it’s important to find some hands like this one for our raise bucket. We have various backdoor draws and some pair equity if we get called, we have no showdown value currently, and we can easily and happily fold if we get shoved on. Seems like an ideal check-raise candidate. Indeed, the solver check-raises here most of the time, and when it doesn’t it calls (we have too much equity to fold to this sizing).
The turn brings the Qh.
I bet 7.6BB (just under half pot), and the button calls. There is now 31.5BB in the pot, and I have the effective stack of 28BB (the button barely covers me).
The Qh is a fairly obvious barrel card, as I have plenty of queens in my range, and I’ve actually picked up some serious equity with my 9h7h. The solver almost purely barrels the turn with my hand, and it even likes my sizing.
The river brings the 4c.
And this is the point in the hand where many players (including me) can start to feel lost, and where it’s therefore all the more important to take a step back and think about whether we want to keep bluffing.
First and foremost, you have to fight through the knee-jerk reaction of, “oh my God, I’m in a huge pot with nine-high, I really need to bluff now!” We all know, somewhere in our poker brains, that if we bluff with every possible bluffing candidate we’ll be bluffing way too often. Now we need to take the next step and figure out how to determine the best hands to bluff with—or perhaps more importantly, the worst hands to bluff with.
On the turn it can often make sense to bluff with some of the weakest hands in your range, because your opponent usually has a bunch of weak hands still in theirs. But we need to revise that plan slightly on the river.
After our turn bet, our opponent has (presumably) folded out most of their mediocre hands, so on the river it’s less important to bluff with nine-high to ensure that we bluff out ten-high, and more important to think through what hands we’re actually targeting with our bluff, and what hands our opponent could have that will never fold.
In this case, it seems clear that our opponent will not fold TT, JJ, KK, AA, or any queen (QJ, KQ, AQ, QT being the most likely queens for them to have). What hands might they fold? 99, 88, 77, 66, and 55 are possible, and also stuff like missed heart draws.
If you read the above paragraph carefully, then hopefully you noticed a potential problem with our 9h7h. If you don’t see it yet, think about it for a second before you read on.
You got it now, right? We unblock all the potential calls, but block some of the potential folds! We have so much value in our range here that we don’t need much of an excuse to bluff, but this is basically the worst scenario for bluffing imaginable.
The solver purely shoves here with 9s7s and 9d7d, but purely checks with 9h7h. (Weirdly, the solver does shove with 9h8h, because in solver land the button has Q8o but not Q7o, so the 9h8h blocks more of button’s calling range.) In solver land, the button doesn’t fold pairs, so the big blind is pretty much only targeting busted flush draws with its jam.
And to be fair, if humans will overfold on the river with stuff like 33 and 55, then a jam with 9h7h is fine. But as a default strategy, again, it’s an easy heuristic to simply not fire a triple barrel with busted flush draws when you have other bluffing options in your range. Knowing you had a plan for which combinations to bluff with and which to give up should make you feel better those times it checks through and your potential bluff “would’ve worked.”
In the actual hand I panic-fire shoved and lost to KhQs. I’m not convinced my shove was a bad play against humans…but still, I’ve very much incorporated this lesson, and I’m much less likely to bomb away with missed flush draws now, especially if I can clearly see that I’m targeting missed flush draws with my bluff.
Hope you enjoyed this hand, hope you check out the book, and hope your 2025 poker year is off to a great start!